Neal Karlen, a mentor in Augsburg College’s Master of Arts in Creative Writing program, described the unlikely friendship he developed with music icon Prince in a recent Star Tribune column. Karlen is among an elite group of writers granted in-depth interviews with Prince in the mid-1980s. Over time, discussions between the print writer and the songwriter developed into something akin to friendship, according Karlen.
“I always told Prince I knew he really didn’t consider me a friend, but as one of the few people in Minneapolis who was probably awake, like he always was, in the middle of the night, and was ‘Willing and Able,’ as my favorite song of his is titled, to talk about loneliness and death,” Karlen wrote.
“I even rubbed it in, in the opening of my second Rolling Stone cover story on Prince, published in 1990.
‘The phone rings at 4:48 in the morning,'”
Augsburg College celebrated its new Master of Fine Arts in creative writing with a reading by Stephan Clark from his newly published book Vladimir’s Mustache and Other Stories. Clark is an assistant professor of English and a member of the MFA faculty.
You can’t be sure what senior English majors would do when given the choice between writing a paper or reading James Joyce’s 265,000-word novel Ulysses at the end of one the last classes of their academic career. English majors presumably love reading, but they are also the people who say they’d rather write a paper than take a test.
Professor Tugen Hao heads back to China next week after spending four months at Augsburg as a visiting professor and researcher. During these four months he observed three classes, pursued his own research, and taught Chinese. He found time to travel coast-to-coast, visiting Los Angeles, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C.—and he discovered where to find Chinese food in the Twin Cities. 
Rich Osborn had accomplished a lot by the time he retired in 1999.
The submission deadline for the John Engman Writing Prize is Monday, Dec. 17. The Engman Prize is a student literary competition sponsored by Murphy Square and the Augsburg English Department and is open to all undergraduate students.