News, events, and happenings on the Marinette Campus
The Driftwood is our student-centered e-newsletter for the Marinette campus. We’ll bring you tips for navigating life as a masked-and-distanced or online student, as well as suggestions for entertaining yourself while you’re social distancing.
Our theater program’s annual holiday music performance, Christmas by the Bay, is going virtual this year. Our talented children’s and adult theater singers will be performing a selection of holiday carols, available to stream Dec. 17-20. After you register, you’ll receive a link for your day’s performance with a limited window in which to view it. Tickets cost $7.50 per person or $25 for three to five viewers. Or you can buy an unlimited pass for the full weekend for $40. Directed by Brittany Welch.
Tragically, our community’s traditional WinterFest chili cookoff and outhouse race have been cancelled due to COVID. (And yes, the latter is as ridiculous as it sounds.) However, you can still take part in a socially distanced version of our polar bear plunge event!
The Fieldhouse Pool (a.k.a. the River Cities Community Pool) will hold our annual Da Yooper WinterFest Plunge on Jan. 1, 2021. The plunge has traditionally taken place in the icy waters of Green Bay in downtown Menominee. (Last year’s plunge pictured right.) However, this year, you can choose to plunge in the warm water of the Fieldhouse pool, or video yourself plunging into the frigid body of water of your choice.
If you go with the pool option, your team will be assigned a time to stop by and plunge.
If you choose to video your group taking a dip in Green Bay or another near-frozen lake or river, please make sure you don’t linger in the icy water. We don’t want anyone going hypothermic on our account!
Plunge coordinators will broadcast each plunge on Facebook Live. They will also be handing out awards for most money raised by group/individual, best remote plunge, and best costume.
How it works: Gather a team and pledge to raise money from friends and family, which benefits the pool and the DAR Boys and Girls Club of Marinette/Menominee. Register your team online and start fundraising. On Jan. 1, 2021, complete your plunge and turn in your pledge funds in person by check or online.
The UW-Green Bay Phoenix Bookstore will be holding a pop-up bookstore textbook event on the Marinette campus from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 18.
Students will be able to return rented textbooks or sell back your fall textbooks during these hours. This pop-up bookstore will be located in the lobby of the Library building.
You may also ship your rented textbooks back to the bookstore. Check out this website to learn about shipping back textbook rentals. The deadline for returning rented textbooks is Dec. 29.
Please note that you will not be able to purchase textbooks for Spring 2021 through the pop-up bookstore.
The UWGB English department is proud to announce the launch of our main campus literary magazine, Sheepshead Review. Published twice a year, Sheepshead contains creative writing and visual art from students, faculty, and staff from all four UWGB campuses. This year, for the first time, the online version of the journal will also contain digital fiction.
Visit the Sheepshead website to read the Fall 2020 digital edition.
Limited print copies will be available soon. Watch this space for details.
2020 Northern Lights: Available in the LibraryAsk a Marinette campus librarian for your free copy of this year’s Northern Lights Literary and Arts Journal, which features art, photography, poetry, nonfiction, and fiction by Marinette campus students and faculty members, as well as four students and alumni from the main campus.
Interested in submitting to the 2021 Northern Lights? Our submission window will officially open in the spring semester, though you may submit through our website at any time.
To join the editorial staff, sign up for the ENG 224: Practicum in Literary Publishing class for the upcoming spring semester. The students in this class also write and produce The Driftwood e-newsletter in the spring. The class does offer gen. ed. credits.
If you have questions, e-mail Tracy Fernandez Rysavy, Northern Lights advisor, and English literature and creative writing lecturer on the Marinette campus.
The Northern Lights is on Facebook and Instagram! Please follow us to stay connected to the journal.
Are you panicking because you haven’t had a spare minute to register for classes for next semester? Never fear–your academic advisor is still on duty during the winter break and ready to help you!
Make an appointment with your Student Advisor Bethany Welch anytime between now and Dec. 23, again on Dec. 28-31, or after Jan. 4, to register for Spring classes—and, starting Jan. 8th, for summer courses.
Click here to view the Spring course calendar. Change the Term to “Spring 2021” and the campus to “Marinette” to search for available in-person or hybrid classes. To find online classes, change the campus to “All” and the Mode of Instruction to “Virtual Classroom” (for classes that meet live in a virtual classroom) or “Online” (for asynchronous online classes that do not meet for live sessions).
The Summer course catalog is also available, and you can register starting on January 8th for summer classes. There is financial aid available for summer courses.
Use Navigate or e-mail Bethany at welchb@uwgb.edu
to schedule an appointment to register!
Winter Break Hours for Campus BuildingsOur campus facilities will be open for limited hours over the winter break. See below for specific hours for each building:
Main Building:
Library:
Fieldhouse:
Theatre & Fine Arts Building: CLOSED over Winter Break.
Podcast Recommendation: “Neil Gaiman Reads A Christmas Carol”—Has Charles Dickens’ timeless holiday novel A Christmas Carol been on your to-be-read list forever? The New York Public Library can help remedy that! The library recently published an episode of its podcast featuring Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline and American Gods, reading the full text of this beloved story. Any literature nerds out there may be pleased to know that Gaiman (pictured right) reads Dickens’ only surviving “prompt” copy of the book, or an annotated version he used for live readings, which is owned by the library. (WW. Norton offers a print annotated version, which includes notes from the prompt copy, if you’d like one to call your own.)
Game Recommendations: Spirit of the North—For a game that transports you to a winter wonderland, try Spirit of the North, which was released in July of this year. From the game developer’s description: “Spirit of the North is a single-player 3rd-person adventure game inspired by the breathtaking and mysterious landscapes of Iceland. Play as an ordinary red fox whose story becomes entwined with the guardian of the Northern Lights, a female spirit fox.” With lovely music, beautiful Nordic locales, and thought-provoking puzzles, Spirit of the North is a great game to relax with after finals. Available for Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, and on Steam.
Theatre Recommendation: The New York City Ballet presents The Nutcracker
Bummed that you won’t get to see The Nutcracker ballet in person this season? Now’s your chance to see it performed by some of the best dancers in the country, in the comfort of your home. The New York City Ballet will present The Nutcracker, as choreographed by George Balanchine, online through a variety of OnDemand sources. Tickets cost $25, and you have 48 hours to watch after you start streaming. The streamed production runs from Dec. 11 to Jan. 3. Available on AppleTV, Chromecast, Roku, Fire TV, and AndroidTV.
While cable TV juggernaut the Hallmark Channel has long been the undisputed leader in the holiday rom-com field, their films haven’t exactly been known for their diversity. Most followed a similar pattern, featuring a white, heterosexual couple in a snowy locale finding love. But as competition started coming from Netflix and others in recent years, Hallmark has had to up its game. This year brings a more diverse slate of Christmas and holiday romance films than ever before. Here are a few to consider:
Happiest Season: Kristen Stewart (Twilight) and Mackenzie Caldwell (The F Word) star in this rom-com about Abby and Harper, a lesbian couple who go to Harper’s parents’ home for the holidays. However, Harper isn’t out to her conservative family yet, so she asks Abby to stay in the friend zone during their visit. That goes about as well as you’d expect. While the movie is charming, Marinette student Serenity Block notes, “Almost every movie with a gay plot is about coming out or being gay before electricity was harnessed. I would love to see a movie where coming out is not the focal point of the story.” Available now on Hulu.
Operation Christmas Drop: Loosely based on a true story, Operation Christmas Drop features Vampire Diaries actor Kat Graham as Erica, a congressional aide sent to assess whether a US Air Force base in Guam needs to close for budgetary reasons. There, she meets Andrew, an Air Force captain who shows her the true meaning of Christmas through the base’s tradition of airlifting holiday presents to the island country. Now available on Netflix.
The Christmas House: Hell might be freezing over and pigs might have started flying on Dec. 11, when the Hallmark Channel debuted its very first LGBTQ Christmas rom-com, The Christmas House. Brandon and Jake are already a couple when the film starts, but they’ve been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to adopt a child. Will they get the Christmas present they’ve been waiting for this year? Starring One Tree Hill‘s Robert Buckley and Jonathan Bennett, whom you might know as Lindsay Lohan’s love interest in Mean Girls. Now showing on HallmarkChannel.com and on TV Dec. 17, 25, and 31.
The Christmas Set-Up: Not wanting to be left behind, the Lifetime Channel also released its first LGBTQ Christmas rom-com, The Christmas Set-Up, on Dec. 12. New York City lawyer Hugo heads to Milwaukee to spend the holidays with his brother and his mom Kate. Little does he know that Kate is getting her matchmaker on, arranging for him to run into his old friend Patrick, who was his high-school friend—and secret crush. Sparks fly, but then Hugo gets a big promotion that would require him to move to London. Will he take the higher-paying job in the cool international locale, or take a chance on a budding romance? Now showing on MyLifetime.com.
A Sugar & Spice Holiday: Lifetime boasts that this holiday rom-com is the first ever to feature an all-Asian cast. When Suzie, a rising young architect, comes home to small-town Maine for Christmas, she runs into Billy, the grown-up version of the boy who stood her up for the Christmas dance in high school. When her Chinese American parents persuade her to enter the local gingerbread competition in honor of her late grandmother, Suzie ends up on a team with—you guessed it!—Billy. Will Suzie respond to Billy’s flirtation with sugar and spice, or a spatula to the side of the head? Now showing on MyLifetime.com.
Let’s Meet Again on Christmas Eve: College sweethearts Corinne and Rob get job offers upon graduation on opposite sides of the world. Instead of giving the long-distance thing a try, they decide to part ways, with a catch: They’ll meet two years later on Christmas Eve to see if they still feel that spark. Two years later, one shows up and the other does not. Quite a bit of time passes before they finally meet again, when they’re both hired to organize the same Christmas Eve wedding. But their romance is totally over, right? Now available on MyLifetime.com.
Love, Lights, Hanukkah!: As Christina prepares her restaurant for the holiday season, she takes a DNA test on a whim and finds out she’s Jewish. The discovery leads her to new family members and a possible romance with a cute Jewish guy named David. Now available on HallmarkChannel.com. Showing on TV Dec. 16, 19, 25, 31.