Faye Ringel, Professor of English, Director of Honors Program, United States Coast Guard Academy

Q: How did you decide to work in the field of fellowships and why do you find it rewarding?
A: I was introduced to the field of fellowship advising by Jordon Pecile, my dear friend, colleague, and mentor at the Coast Guard Academy, now Professor Emeritus of English. Though he retired just before NAFA was formed, I’m sure he would have enjoyed participating in this collegial group. For 20 years, he had single-handedly prepared candidates at the Academy for the Rhodes, Marshall, and the Fulbright; he was the first to initiate me into the mysteries of the application process. Actually, I feel nostalgic for those pre-Internet days. It seems as though his job was so much easier in 1986, when the most difficult logistical question for application submission used to be “does the department’s Selectric need a new ribbon?”

Though I find learning four or five different and contradictory computer systems irksome in the extreme, I find everything else rewarding. Who would not love working with brilliant, delightful, highly-motivated cadets? We’re such a small place that I can watch them grow and change and mature. Win or lose the fellowship, I’ve helped change their lives.

Q: If you could invite three people (living or dead) to dinner who would they be and why?
A: I’ve often pondered this question, thinking about who would survive the jetlag and culture shock of time travel. I’ve got one list for the ceilidh, another for the evening of classical music, and another for the smoker at the roadhouse. But since it’s a genteel dinner party, I would invite Eleanor of Aquitaine, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Miguel de Cervantes. Why? My graduate degree in Comparative Literature focused on Medieval and Renaissance literature in the Romance languages and Middle English, and I’ve got a lot of questions for these folks! I firmly believe that all three would not only survive but thrive in a twenty-first century environment. Eleanor may be the most formidable woman in all of Western history, having been Queen of France and England, and her patronage of poetry pretty much invented the idea of romantic love as we know it. Chaucer and Cervantes were the founders of their countries’ literatures, and in their own ways they dealt with the myths and contradictions of chivalry and romance.

Q: Tell us about a community service project that you currently participate in or have participated in that has meaning for you.
A: Once a month, I play the piano for a community soup kitchen as part of an interfaith effort to feed the hungry in my home town. While I’ve volunteered at soup kitchens before, I’ve only been “entertaining” for a little over a year. They’re a great audience. I sing, I lead sing-alongs, I do requests. Since it’s my home town, some of the regulars were my high school classmates, for whom the Sixties never ended. Others range from immigrant mothers with babies to elderly alcoholics. All appreciate the well-cooked meal in the decorated church function hall, with tablecloths and centerpieces. What with the piano-playing and singing, they can pretend for a while that they’re part of a functioning community, not simply “the homeless.”

Q: What are you reading this summer and why?
A: I’ve been re-reading the novels and short stories of Willa Cather, because I just gave a paper at a conference called “Willa Cather: A Writer’s Worlds” held in France June 23–July 1. Though Cather is best known for realistic novels of life on the Nebraska prairies, she was also a Francophile, a life-long enthusiast of French culture—which comes out strongly in her novel about Quebec, Shadows on the Rock. But my paper was about her teenage enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, for romantic adventures and the poetry of the troubadours at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. [Notice a trend here?] Right now I’m reading Endless Things, the conclusion of Ægypt, a quartet of literary fantasy novels by John Crowley, who teaches at Yale University, and who I believe is America’s greatest living writer of the fantastic.

Q: If there’s life after fellowship-advising, what would you like to do and why?
A: I’m looking forward to teaching in Elderhostels, leading ghost tours, and singing whenever possible in Dublin pubs and Paris cabarets.