Department of English
Ellis Hall 351
Website: http://www.english.ohiou.edu/faculty/pytlik/index.html
Born in Mount Union, in south central Pennsylvania, I spent two years in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer after completing my undergraduate degree at Indiana State Teachers College (PA) and teaching high school English in Pennsylvania for two years. After teaching a variety of English courses, including ESL, at Strayer College in Washington, D.C., and Iowa State University, I attended the University of Southern California and received a doctorate in Rhetoric and Composition in 1982. I have taught at Ohio University since 1983, serving as director of composition, university writing coordinator, and department chair during that time.
Currently, I am the coordinator of linked courses, a program that pairs first-year writing courses with first-year courses across the disciplines. For five years in the 1980s I was director of a Board of Regents-funded Early English Composition Assessment Program, which brought together secondary language arts teachers from several area schools to develop, administer, and evaluate writing proficiency tests. In the process, we were charged with conducting workshops on writing pedagogies.
More recently, I directed an Ohio Humanities Council-funded Summer Institute for Teachers (with a lot of help from Jack Wright), Teaching Appalachian Literature through Film and Music. Both of those experiences with high school English teachers made me aware that Appalachian literature was being ignored in the schools and that language arts teachers wanted to incorporate more Appalachian literature and information about the culture into their classes.
Earlier, my own interest in Appalachian literature had been awakened by my observation that few (if any) faculty included Appalachian works in their courses despite the fact that Appalachians in our classes could (and do) add a great deal to discussions of the literature of their area. Since then, I have focused on Appalachian literature in my first-year and junior composition courses and have included Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain, Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek, and Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Ironmills, as well as the short fiction of Morgan, Sharon McCrumb, Jesse Stuart, Elaine Palencia, and Kiki Delancey.
In addition, in order to provide my students and myself with background for the texts, I have attended national conventions dealing with women in Appalachia and Appalachian women writers. And I have joined the Appalachian Appalachian Learning Community, where faculty from a variety of disciplines discuss their interests and raise questions, one of the most provocative being, Why has Appalachia—its people, its history, its arts—been so neglected at Ohio University?