Work Stew Podcast

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I recently saw a documentary called Heckler, which started out by focusing on the loudmouths who interrupt stand-up comics but then went on to paint film critics with the same brush. “No kid grows up wanting to be a critic,” said a filmmaker, suggesting that movie reviewers are invariably people who just couldn’t make it in the business themselves.

Not true, I thought. Some people do in fact aspire to be cultural commentators. USA Today film reporter Susan Wloszczyna is one such person: she loves her work, and she’d recommend it to others—with the cautionary note that it’s getting harder and harder to make a living at it.

About Susan Wloszczyna: In her 29 years at USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna has interviewed everyone from Vincent Price and Shirley Temple to Julia Roberts and Will Smith. Her roles at USA Today have included Life section copy desk chief for four years and a film reviewer for 12 years. Wloszczyna is currently a film reporter, focusing on trends and profiles. She previously worked as a feature editor at The Niagara Gazette in Niagara Falls, New York. A Buffalo native, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English at Canisius College and a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University.

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Listen to the interview by clicking the arrow on the audio player below.

In this episode, I talk to researcher Evelyn Ch’ien. I connected with Ch’ien after publishing “Peeking into Academe,” a short post calling for more academics to weigh in at Work Stew. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education called “Why Are Associate Professors So Unhappy?” suggested there was plenty to talk about, and Ch’ien—who got tenure and then decided to walk away from it—boldly answered the challenge.

About Evelyn Ch’ien: Evelyn Ch’ien is a researcher specializing in cultural and literary production in the 20th and 21st centuries. At the University of Minnesota as an associate professor, she won funding to outfit classrooms with 25 portable studios to compose hip hop music and taught courses on hip hop music composition in America and Europe. She has been a professor and invited researcher at the University of Hartford (Hartford, CT), the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN), the Universiteit van Amsterdam (Amsterdam, the Netherlands), Jean Moulin Université Lyon III (Lyon, France), and the Sun Yat Sen University (Guangzhou, China). She is currently a researcher at an institute based at the University of Lyon and she spent 2011-12 as a Fulbright senior research scholar in southern China, researching literature at the beginning of the republican era. Her book, Weird English (Harvard UP 2004),  proposed a new theory about how to analyze immigrant expression.

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