Spring 2004        Department of Communication        Purdue University
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The department's graduate students enjoyed an end-of-the-year holiday party and a Chinese New Year celebration. They helped host a recruiting weekend for prospective graduate students, and they published their work in respective journals. For more information and photos, please visit the CGSA Web site.

Marathon Man
By Charlie Catalano, Ph.D.

26.2 MilesMarathon

No, that's not the distance from West Lafayette, Ind., to Boston, Mass. It's the distance from Hopkinton, Mass., to Boston, which I will run during the 108th Boston Marathon.

This race is considered one of the most prestigious and historic in the world. In fact, 20,000 people, some of whom are among the world's fastest long distance runners, will participate in the event.

UPDATE! UPDATE!
Charlie finished first among the Lafayette area runners and 16th among runners registered from Indiana in the April 2004 Boston Marathon. His net time of 3:25:25 ranked him 1,737 out of the 20,344 who started the race.

Although I've completed eight marathons, one ultra-marathon, one triathlon, and one biathlon, I didn't qualify for the Boston Marathon until October of last year when I finished the Chicago Marathon in 3 hours, 9 minutes and 7 seconds. To qualify for the Boston Marathon as a 33-year-old, I had to complete a certified marathon in less than 3 hours and 10 minutes. Fortunately, I did that with 53 seconds to spare in Chicago, which is a lot of time in a marathon!

Two of my favorite mottos are "keep moving" and "keep smiling," which the picture of me completing the Chicago Marathon demonstrates. It's common for runners to emblazon mottos on their shirts for spectators to cheer as they run by. I'll wear this shirt again next month.

I enjoy pushing myself physically and mentally, which is one of the reasons I participate in marathons and one of the reasons I'm pursuing my doctorate degree. Fortunately, many of the lessons I've learned through running, such as the importance of pacing myself and developing my stamina, also help me as a graduate student. Now that I've qualified for the Boston Marathon, my next goal is to run a marathon in less than 3 hours. Perhaps I'll do that this year!

Congratulations

Kristen LucasCGSA President Kristen Lucas, a second-year Ph.D. student in Organizational Communication, received the 2004 Cooper Award for outstanding Ph.D. graduate teaching assistants from the Central States Communication Association.

Beth Buenger, Ph.D. student in Health Communication, won the NCA/ICA Thesis Award from the Health Communication Division

The Wounded Storyteller
By Sarah Hagedorn, Ph.D.

After experiencing the events of Sept. 11, 2001, from the base of the World Trade Center, my father wrote something similar to what Frank (1995) calls a chaos narrative. Frank says, "In these stories the modernist bulwark of remedy, progress, and professionalism cracks to reveal vulnerability, futility, and impotence….Chaos stories are also hard to hear because they are too threatening. The anxiety these stories provoke inhibits hearing"(pp. 97-98).

What follows is an excerpt from my father’s narrative about that day:

"As I was running in this crowd, I looked behind me and saw an incredible cloud of billowing smoke that was at least thirty floors high coming at us at a speed of 35-40 miles an hour. You could see debris being carried along in the cloud.

Running east I got to the middle of the block when a separate smoke cloud came around the corner ahead of us and started coming back west toward us. At this point I knew I was trapped. Within seconds the clouds had enveloped us to the point you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

Feeling my way along a wall I got to a building entrance. People were banging on the windows, wailing 'let us in' and 'I can't breath.' Stupidly, I decided that if I sit down I'd be able to breathe cleaner air. After a few moments, I realized this was a mistake. With every breath I took, I was swallowing large amounts of particulate [sic] matter. I wondered how long I could breathe this stuff before my lungs would collapse.

I decided my best chance for living through this was to get back up and start moving further away from the WTC. Even though I couldn't see, I continued to feel my way along the wall. I got to a street corner and heard people milling with one woman in particular screaming out the name of a friend she’d obviously been separated from."

If you would like to read more about chaos narratives, my father's 9/11 narrative, or about the process of writing to understand and heal, I encourage you to pick up April's issue of Qualitative Inquiry and read my article in its entirety.

I initially wrote this article in an attempt to give voice to my father's pain after that terrible day and to put that day's events into perspective. I never imagined, though, that so much good could come out of such a tragedy.

Not only have I learned a great deal about the healing power of writing and storytelling, I've gotten my first publication and my relationship with my father has become stronger and more meaningful than it has ever been.

I offer up this small portion of my father’s chaos narrative to the readers of this newsletter so they can talk about it, learn from it, and feel differently as a result of it. We all should listen to each other's narratives of crisis and need. We may each have our own one day.

The Communicator is the official alumni publication of the Department of Communication at Purdue University. It is published twice yearly by students in COM252 under the supervision of adviser Jane Gibson Natt.