English Department News

On-Campus Events

Q&A with ReadUP 2019 Author Colum McCann

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It’s not every day that you get a chance to hear a National Book Award-winning author who’s from Ireland speak here on campus. But next week, you’ll get precisely that opportunity as author Colum McCann joins us here on The Bluff at 7 pm, Wednesday, February 20th, in Buckley Center Auditorium for a public lecture and book signing. There will also be a book discussion group facilitated by Fr. Charlie Gordon, CSC, on February 19th from 12 pm-1 pm in the conference room on the second floor of the library.

McCann’s book Let The Great World Spin won the 2009 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in the world. In addition, he’s written a total of six novels and three short story collections, had his work translated into 35 languages, and even received an Oscar nomination for 2005 short film based upon his short story “Everything in this Country Must.” Needless to say, McCann is extraordinarily talented and wildly successful—truly an inspiration for those aspiring authors among us. He currently lives in New York with his wife Allison and his three kids, serving as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the MFA program at Hunter College.

I was privileged to interview McCann prior to his upcoming visit, and if you haven’t already read Let The Great World Spin, I hope his absolutely lovely responses might motivate you to turn the first page in a breathtakingly beautiful read. For more insight into what Let The Great World Spin is about, check out Dr. Larson’s highlights of its compelling themes here.

Can you describe your writing process a bit? How do ideas for stories come to you?

I get obsessed by an idea and then I can’t let it go.  The only way to let it go is to write it out of me.  I am curious about the world, I suppose.  And I like living “out loud.”  Also I like books that throw me into dangerous, unfamiliar territory.  I have to find a way out.  It’s like one of those “Escape the Room” games, which my daughter Isabella sometimes takes me to.  I want to escape the room of my obsession …. to find the key and open the door and, perhaps, if I’m lucky, enable some sunlight.

Can you talk a little about the experience of being an Irish immigrant living in New York? Feel free to take this question in any direction you’d like.

Being Irish in New York is easy.  In general everyone likes the Irish. We don’t cause much of a problem. We like other people. We care about the underdogs. We listen well.  We sing — often badly and loudly. We don’t mind embarrassing ourselves. Essentially, we’re hams.

Describe your hometown and what it is that you miss the most about it (alternatively, if you don’t miss it, why not?).

I am back in Dublin enough that I don’t get a chance to miss it.  Perhaps I miss a slow pint in Toners pub every now and then, but in general I find my Dublin everywhere.

Do you have a favorite film? What is it and why do you like it?

Oh this is ridiculously self-serving, but it’s true.  A friend of mine, Gary McKendry, made a short film of my short story “Everything in this Country Must.” It’s only twenty minutes long, but I love it.  It got nominated for an Oscar 2005. Gary’s a genius.  He caught the pure texture of the story. If you want to have a look at it, click here.

Cats or dogs and why?

Dogs, dogs, dogs.  I have one sitting at my feet this very minute.  I’m about to take her for a walk in the park.  Ah, that’s the life.  Food, sleep under desk, walk in the park, return, sleep, eat, walk in the park at night, sleep again, dream of food.   It’s easier than writing.

Which authors inspire you?

My teaching colleagues Peter Carey and Tea Obreht.  Michael Ondaatje.  John Berger.  James Joyce.  Toni Morrison.  Oregon’s own Barry Lopez whose new book Horizons just took my breath away.  And a million others … it would be impossible them all.  Oh, and all my students.  And all seven billion people I haven’t yet met!

Mr. McCann, you’ve achieved tremendous success as a novelist and author of short stories. Besides the pleasure of your craft, what motivates you to keep writing? What do you hope your legacy will be when future generations encounter your work?

Well, a late friend of mine, Jim Harrison, said in a poem: “Children pry up our rotting bodies with cries of earn, earn, earn.”  Which is only partly tongue-in-cheek because I do have two kids in university and one in high school.  But I suppose I am motivated by the desire to expand the lungs of my own world.  I’m curious about the world and our place in it.  I want to know what we can do to acknowledge the heartbreak of what unfolds around us.  Also, how do we keep going?  And how do we repair?  And how can we better, not just for ourselves but for others too.  It sounds lofty, but it’s simple enough — how do we make this patch of earth a better place?   Books can do that.

Featured Image from McCann’s website.

 

Q&A with Elena Passarello

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By Wes Cruse

Hi, friends! It’s the start of a fresh semester here on the Bluff, and do you know what that means? That’s right, there’s a new slew of accomplished writers lined up to come to campus and share their work and wisdom with us literature-lovers. First up is Elena Passarello who will be with us on Wednesday, January 30th at 7:30pm in the bookstore. 

As an essayist and actor, Passarello has garnered the attention of well-regarded literary minds all over the country; in 2015 she received the Whiting Award, an honor recognizing her as a talented emerging writer. Her most recent essay collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, won the 2018 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and made the best books of 2017 lists in The New York Times, Guardian, and Publisher’s Weekly. She’s also been published in The New York Times, Paris Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018. She currently lives in Corvallis, OR, where she teaches creative writing at Oregon State University.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Passarello, and I think you’ll find (like I did) her responses to my questions insightfully sharp and tantalizing. 

Tell us more about your award-winning work, Animals Strike Curious Poses. What’s it about? Tell me a bit about how it came to be. 

I like to make collections of essays that speak to one another as a cohesive book. Rather than fifteen discrete essays or essays that can only be loosely grouped by a common theme, I work to make the collection as a whole an essay in itself. So that’s the first thing I set out to do. Initially, I thought the essays would all cover famous animals–beasts that, at some point in history, were named and celebrated by humans, like Durer’s Rhino or Koko the sign language gorilla. I imagined a kind of interactive bestiary modeled after the books of beasts found in Medieval Europe. Those books discussed animals with this wonderful mix of fact and conjecture–a mix that I think a lot of nonfiction over the centuries has employed. As I worked through the collection, however, I realized that the essays didn’t depict the animals so much as the humans that named them and the cultures that surrounded their fame. So this book of animal essays is really a book about the human imagination. And the larger essay is the sort of portrait of human consciousness that it paints.

When did you decide that you wanted to make a career out of writing and teaching? What inspired this decision?

My undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in creative writing, but for about six years in between, I worked as an actor and voiceover artist. Working in theater is really fun, but you don’t have a ton of agency if you want to make a living. I left acting to go to grad school in search of a creative pursuit that’s more forgiving (sorry writers, actors have you beat in terms of tough rackets). I see a lot of overlap between designing a performance and hammering out an essay: both involve research, finding a voice, and tailoring a performance to communicate to a willing audience. And teaching for me checks a lot of other theater boxes. Plus, you get to eat a lot more carbs as a writer and teacher than you do as a working actress.

As sort of a part B to question 2: Which authors inspire you as a writer? Who’s been formative in your life as a writer? And for fun, what’s a guilty pleasure read of yours?

I love Anne Carson, Caryl Churchill, Sei Shonagon, Hilton Als, Eliot Weinberger. I read a lot of blogs about skincare when I should be writing or answering emails, which makes me feel guilty, but I do take pleasure in them.

How do you see your acting roles informing your essayistic self or vice versa? 

I feel that energy is all you have in performance. I always saw acting as this wonderful opportunity to explore caged energy. Think about all the “controls” present in a traditional piece of theatre–by show time, the actor is told what to say, where to stand, how to move so that the lights hit her, and what to wear. This is not to say that there is no agency involved in scripted performance; only that, amidst such a tight bunch of controls, the only variable an actor has at her disposal is her energy, her spirit, the amount of live presence and fervor she can pour into that Apollonian cage. It is so fun to find moments of surprise while still working from within the iron bars of theatre’s parameters. Essaying is the opposite for me. There are no real controls, nobody telling you how to dress or what to say. The expression is nothing but variables, put up against the constant reality of the page. In building these tighter worlds from which I am expected to “perform” as a writer, I then try to find opportunities to surprise.

Who’s your favorite actor?

As for favorite actors, I love Nicholas Cage. He is completely uninterested in “realism” as a part of his best performances, and I think contemporary essays should consider pursuing a similar goal. No performance is “real” and no essay is “true.” I’ve modeled more than one of my own pieces after Nic Cage performances.

What advice would you give to aspiring authors or those interested in doing an MFA?

Get to know the programs beyond their ranking or the accomplishments of their faculty. Figure out how you’d like to work with a mentor or a cohort, and then make your application decisions based on programs/faculty that offer specific things, rather than on the notable authors on staff. It really doesn’t matter if a mentor is fancy or famous; it matters if they are good teachers whose style of working can help you further develop your own process.

Outside of reading and writing, what are your hobbies and interests?

Every couple years or so, I get down on myself because other than writing, I have no hobbies or interests (this is exacerbated by the fact that I primarily write about things that interest me, so I’m always pursuing my interests when I work). Then I decide to take up a hobby, like the musical saw or container gardening, but it never lasts. So I basically hang with my cats, take long walks, watch TV and Beyonce videos, and write. Oh, and I eat a lot, too. Can eating count as a hobby/ interest? I find myself interested in eating pretty much daily.

Have you faced challenges being a woman in fields (both writing and teaching at a university) that are predominantly populated by men? If so, how did you respond to those and what did those experiences teach you about yourself? 

One weird thing I’ve noticed is that people discuss nonfiction writing in gendered ways. More than once my writing–which is kind of shouty and bombastic–has been described as “masculine” or as running counter to this more feminine understanding of the lyric/experimental essay as quiet or unassuming. I can’t count how many reviews, editors, etc. have asked me to be “more personal” in my work, and sometimes I suspect that’s a gendered expectation of what women essayists do. It happens outside my own experience, too. When a woman writes a memoir, it’s “confessional” or “emotional”; when a man does, it’s “gripping” or “searing.” I think that’s bunk, but I’m frankly paying more attention to the gender binary as it shows up in my writing, reading, teaching right now. Looking at how we can run workshops or write about the world in ways that don’t evoke a strict either-or, model seems both important and very challenging.

P.S. I’m sure she knows it, but the title of her newest essay collection, Animals Strike Curious Poses, is a line from Prince’s hit “When Doves Cry.” My personal recommendation is that you pick up Passarello’s book and enjoy it while grooving along to this classic 80s anthem. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

Photo courtesy of Wendy Madar

NUCL Submission Deadline Announced

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Finals week is just around the corner, which means English majors are swamped with (more) essays (than usual). And while this might seem daunting, a reminder: anything that you are working on right now – be it an analysis of plants in Shakespeare or psychological realism in Pamela – has the potential to be submitted to this year’s NUCL conference! This year, your opportunity to submit a favorite paper (or two!) extends until January 11th – almost a full week sooner than previous years. So if you’re waist-deep in essays now and think you might see something special emerging, mark your calendars now – January 11th is your last day to submit to NUCL!

As we mentioned in a previous post, NUCL, the UP English Department’s long-running undergraduate conference on literature, is taking place this year at Seattle University on March 23. Students from all around the country submit analytical papers, as well as poetry collections and nonfiction personal essays, for consideration. Here’s the link to apply. 

Best of luck and happy writing!

Q&A with Resident Poet Matthew Minicucci

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Mark your calendars: this Wednesday evening, November 14th, at 7:30 pm in the UP bookstore, Portland poet and Adjunct Instructor Matthew Minicucci will treat us to a selection of his prize-winning poetry. Minicucci is the third and final visiting author of our Fall Reading and Lecture series here on the Bluff, and you won’t want to miss him! His most recent collection, Small Gods, was a finalist for the 2016 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press. Minicucci has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, testaments to the poignancy of his poetry. His work has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Believer, the Gettysburg Review, Oregon Humanities, The Southern Review, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among others.

Can you tell us about how Small Gods, your most recent collection of poetry, came to be?

Small Gods was a collection I was writing at the same time I was working on my first book, Translation. At one time, they were this massive tome of a book, but some sage advice from some wonderful teachers in grad school and right after grad school convinced me to make two manuscripts out of it, which was definitely the right call.
 
The real focus of Small Gods is the intersection between faith and science. For me, a Catholic school kid growing up in Massachusetts, I found that intersection at loss. That when we suffer great loss, in our family, in our personal life, we seek out answers in some very specific places, and two of those places (for me) were faith and science.
 
The hope of the collection is that it can take these concepts that might seem disparate on the surface and bring them closer together. Perhaps in an effort to bring all of us closer together.
 
What do you like most about poetry and about being a poet? How do you think your role as a poet differs from writers of other genres?
 
I think what I like most about being a poet is the embracing of a way of looking at the world outside of narrative. And perhaps this connects to the second part of your question. One of the biggest things a poet can do is show people that narrative is only one way of interacting with subjects and concepts in our daily life. I think it’s the most common way we interact with those things, because so much of our lives is narrative (I woke up, I drank coffee, I graded papers, I went to class, I had dinner, etc.) All of these things imply a linear order to things, when I think there are things outside of that order.
 
Poetry allows us to embrace sound, meter, metaphor, etc. in an effort to understand the world. And I think those methods of interaction are just as effective and important as character and plot.
 
Which authors and poets inspire you?
 
A difficult question, as so many authors inspire me. I feel lucky to be able to reach back to authors from the ancient past, like Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius, or St. Paul. But I’m also lucky to have trained under amazing authors, like Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and Tyehimba Jess: poets whose work not only inspired me, but trained me how to be a poet. And I’m also lucky to be a part of a community of current authors changing the landscape of poetry right now. People like Jericho Brown, and Traci Brimhall, and Illya Kaminsky. There are so many more, of course, like Carl Phillips and Kevin Young and Jane Hirshfield, but I don’t want to ramble on forever.
 
I think it’s often easy to think that poems just come to a poet in a moment of epiphanic revelation, as if the poem we read on the page just appeared in the poet’s mind in an instant. Could you talk about your own process of crafting poems?
 
That’s a really great question. Thanks for asking. I think, like music or acting, a poem is designed to create that very response: the illusion of ease. If we could borrow a word from the Italian Renaissance, we would call this sprezzatura: that concept of something the audience knows is very difficult, but it’s accomplished with such apparent ease.
 
In poetry, all the way back to a Petrarchan sonnet, the audience knows (somewhere deep down) it wasn’t that easy, but appreciates the ease with which the piece comes forward to them, as a reader.
 
For my personal style, I consider myself a sort of “sculptor.” I generally write quite a lot, and I write it (generally) without form. So most of my craft process is a process of cutting away what isn’t the poem (which is its own complicated thought), and finding the proper form for what remains. These two things generally happen simultaneously. Or, at least, they do now, many years after I began writing poems. But it’s still an arduous process where a lot of things are left on the cutting room floor.
 
If you could bring one person back from the dead, who would that be and why?
 
Wow. That’s quite the question. I’m not really sure how to answer. There’s a lot of people I’d like to bring back to sit one afternoon and just talk their ear off. But, my real answer, the answer in my heart, is probably my grandfather, who passed away a few years ago. He was a kind and brilliant man who made furniture and homemade tomato sauces. It would be nice to help with either of those activities just once more.
 
What advice would you give to aspiring poets?
 
First, don’t stop writing. Paul Silva wrote a book called How to Write a Lot which had a quoted study about writers who write “when they feel inspired” and writers who (for the study) have been told not to write at all. The data suggests that those two groups basically write the same amount: nothing. The only way to get better as a writer is to keep writing, and the only way to keep writing is to, well, keep writing, no matter what.
 
Second, be mindful of your literary community and the voices you can turn to for help or to help. Sometimes, it’s the voice of a friend that can unlock what a piece of writing is capable of, and sometimes you’re that voice. Helping friends, loved ones, students, etc. through their pieces can teach you more about your own writing than you ever thought possible.
 
Last, if you want to move forward into publishing in magazines and/or books, recognize that rejection is a massive part of that. A lot of the best MFA programs take 1% of applicants, and the percentage of those writers who will go on to write books is also in the single digits. This is a hard thing. It’s hard to be a writer. You have to be ready for rejection, and you have to be able to rise above it. Does the piece need revision? Work on that. Does it not work? Would it be better to work on the next thing? Do that. Is the magazine the wrong place for it, and it’s a very good piece? That’s a possibility too, and you have to believe in yourself and the work.
 
(Photo courtesy of Mother Foucault’s Bookshop)
 
 

Q&A with Omar El Akkad

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By Wes Cruse

What will America look like in the year 2074? Will the future be bright or bleak? In Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, 2074 is the year the Second American Civil War breaks out. Oil has been outlawed, rising sea levels have submerged the entire peninsula of Florida, and six year old Sarat Chesnut finds herself in the middle of this divided and ruinous world.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, El Akkad has spent most of his writing career as a journalist. For ten years, he worked for the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail covering the War in Afghanistan, and in 2006 he won a National Newspaper Award for his investigative reporting. American War is his first novel and has achieved immense success as a bestseller, shortlisted for the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and for the 2018 Amazon.ca First Novel Award. El Akkad will be joining us on campus this Thursday, November 1st, for a Q&A from 4-5 pm in the Terrace Room and a lecture and reading from 7-8pm in BC Auditorium. You won’t want to miss hearing him!

What prompted you to write American War, your debut novel?

I was thinking a lot about the privilege of forgetting, the privilege of turning away from the suffering of millions of people on the other side of the planet. I decided to write a story that takes the hallmarks of the wars that have defined much of my lifetime – drone killings, refugee camps, “enhanced interrogation” – and recast them as something close to home, something from which it would be much more difficult for people in this part of the world to look away. And I couldn’t think of anything closer to home than a civil war, a war where you’re fighting yourself.

What are your inspirations for your writing?

I grew up reading mostly American authors (around the age of 12, I found copies of a half-dozen Stephen King books at my tiny high school library in the Middle East. It was those books that kickstarted my love of reading). American authors have been among my favorites ever since – chief among them Faulkner, Morrison, Baldwin and a slew of new writers such as Garth Greenwell. More recently, I’ve tried to read more authors from the part of the world in which I grew up. There are a number of Arab writers who, in my mind, are doing some of the most interesting work in literature – writers such as Basma Abdel Aziz, Khalid Khalifa and Ahmed Saadawi. All of these writers inspire me, but the predominant inspiration for my writing is a sense of urgency – I write about the things that I feel the most need to talk about, the things that make me angriest.

Which authors and literary works have been key sources of inspiration for you?

When I was writing American War, the book that inspired me the most is a work of non-fiction called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It’s a book by James Agee (whose novel A Death in the Family is perhaps my favorite work of fiction) that chronicles the lives of Southern sharecroppers during the depression era. Thematically and narratively it has almost nothing in common with American War, but it is the finest example I’ve ever read of detailing the intricacies of a quiet life.

What excites you about your work as a writer?

I derive a kind of joy from exploring questions to which I have no answers. Fiction is one of those creative spaces in which one can wander into the forest of a story with no map, no compass, no hint as to what might be the right direction. I enjoy that uncertainty, and the moments of serendipity that occasionally come with it – moments in which the writer moves outside themselves and finds something new, a different way of seeing the world.

What are some of your hobbies?

Besides reading and writing, I spend much of my free time rock-climbing. I’m also, for reasons I’ve never been able to adequately explain, a huge fan of TV shows about chefs and cooking (though I myself am a terrible, terrible cook).

What advice would you give to aspiring writers and authors?

Read, write and re-write. As much as you possibly can, do all three. The good writing lives beneath the bad writing, and so much of this craft is about peeling away the bad writing, draft after draft after draft. American War took 12 drafts to go from manuscript to finished form. The work of cleaning it up was tedious and sometimes joyless, but it was necessary.

You were a staff reporter for The Globe and Mail for ten years. How do you see telling a story in the mode of a novel as opposed to journalism? Pros and cons?

Journalism is, by definition, about answers – Who, what, where, when, how. Fiction is where I go to explore questions. In this way the two modes of writing are opposite sides of the same coin, and I don’t think I’ll ever abandon one for the other. I still practice journalism, though most of my efforts these days are focused on fiction.

Why did you choose to tell American War from the perspective of a female protagonist?

Of all the characters in the book, Sarat Chestnut is the only one who came to me fully formed. She arrived one day and, once she did, the story became hers. In much of my fiction, especially as I’ve grown older, the central character is a woman, and I suspect this has to do with the fact that virtually all my most complex and fulfilling emotional experiences have come from the women in my life. In the case of American War, which is in many ways a book about radicalization and extremism, I also wanted to explore those topics outside the male prism through which they are almost always portrayed. Whether I had any right to reach outside myself and write from the perspective of a different gender, and whether I managed to do it properly, are different questions. But in almost all my fiction I find myself most emotionally invested in the lives of my female characters.

 

(Photos courtesy of  Michael Lionstar and Powell’s Books)

An Interview with Paul Collins

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By Wes Cruse

In preparation for his upcoming visit to campus, I sat down with author and PSU English Department Chair Paul Collins to discuss his newest book and his thoughts about writing. Collins’ work has been published in The New Yorker, Slate, and The New York Times, and his books that have been translated into a dozen languages. They include Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey Into the Lost History of Autism (Bloomsbury, 2004), and Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard (W.W. Norton, 2018). Come hear him speak and read at the UP Bookstore on Monday, Oct. 8th at 7:30 pm. You won’t want to miss it!

Can you tell me about how your most recent book, Blood & Ivy: The 1849 Murder That Scandalized Harvard, came to be?

That came about in part because the last few books I’ve done have been historical crime books. With this particular case, a few things pulled me to it. One, the obvious: how unlikely it seemed that a murder happened in a medical school full of cadavers. It seems like the setup for a mystery novel, except that it actually happened. It was also historically significant. It was a significant turning point in medical forensics. The other pull to this story was that this was happening during the American Renaissance, the period during the 1840s and 1850s in and around Boston, Harvard, and Concord where there was this amazing blossoming of American literature. All of those authors are kind of intersecting at least indirectly with the principal characters in this case. The case was appealing as an opportunity to evoke that particular era.

What inspired you to begin writing?

Oh, wow. That’s a really good question. It was something that I always did. I started writing stories as a kid. But for me the moment where the light bulb came on was as a teenager. I might’ve been like 13 or 14, and I read Slaughterhouse Five. And I just was floored by it. I just sort of went ‘Wow, you can do that with narrative?!” And then my second reaction was, “I want to do that!” I think that was a lot of it for me. When I first started writing in elementary school, I just wanted to write funny stories. There were various humor essayists and columnists that I was reading as a kid who probably influenced me when I was really young. But in terms of having some adult notion of an art form and thinking “Wow, I want to do that,” that probably happened about the time of late junior high or the beginning of high school.

What excites you about your work?

For me, it’s the discovery process. I love working with the craft, writing a scene and nailing it. But that is a fairly ephemeral feeling, I think, for almost any artist. You know, you finish writing a scene, or composing a piece of music, or whatever, and you’re like “Yeah! I got that one.” Then, the next day you’re back to square one, facing a blank screen again. So it’s really more the process of doing the research that I really enjoy. I love finding new stuff and kind of bringing it back to life. And that’s true of writing articles, too. My favorite pieces are always the ones where it’s like a full-out resurrection of a book, author, or piece of history that just seems to have been forgotten. There are not many articles that really can rise to that standard. Usually you’ll find someone, somewhere who’s written something about it. But every once in a while, there’s a story where you just go “Wow, no one’s written a damn thing about this,” and I love that. I love finding stuff like that.

What are some of your hobbies besides reading and writing?

I love traveling, and I love music. I play the piano and I play the drums. Drums are really my main instrument. I try not to annoy the neighbors too much.

Out of all your works, which is your favorite?

It’s funny because some I feel are good on technical grounds, that the finish on them is really good. But the one that’s closest to my heart is Not Even Wrong, the one about my son. I’ll probably revisit that one someday. It came out in 2004, so I was basically writing it in 2002-2003. It’s a memoir about the first year after my son was diagnosed with autism, intertwined with a history of autism. Obviously, a lot has happened since then, for one. He’s taller than I am now. And also, just a lot in terms of the medical understanding of autism and a lot of information about the history of autism has come out of the last couple decades. So, it’s something I’ll revisit someday. I suspect that when I do, that will become my favorite book. It’s personally meaningful.

What advice would you give to writers?

A few things I guess. The first is the most hackneyed piece of advice of all, but it’s true: read. Read omnivorously and read a lot. There are two other things. One is that if someone is interested in writing books, you have to care about the subject, so don’t write about something because you think someone else will like it. You have to write about it because you like it. If you don’t, you won’t finish it; or if you do, it’ll be a miserable experience. So, you really just have to find the thing that you like or that fascinates you and go on the assumption that at some point someone else out there is going to be fascinated by it, too. It’s almost the only way to sustain a book-length effort.

One other thing I would encourage people to do is to try out different forms of writing. When I started out I was absolutely certain I was going to be writing fiction, that I was going to be writing novels. All the classes I took were in fiction. As it turns out, my almost accidental exposure to writing journalism was crucial. Later on, I decided to try to write a screenplay, and they wound up at the bottom of my desk right away. But, it was an incredibly useful experience because in screenwriting you have to think in scenes, and you have to learn how to write dialogue. It was one of the best things I ever did for my writing. It’s the same for anything like that. A journalist who takes a poetry class, or vice versa, they’re gaining a new set of tools, working a different set of muscles, and it’s going to be useful.

Educated by Detours and Emotion: Dr. Brassard on Coming Full Circle

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Dr. Genevieve Brassard has garnered the title of resident Anglophile in the cozy nook of the English department. During her lectures and office hours students are imbued with her love for 20th century British literature, which seems to run deeper than the roots of her favorite authors. She always takes the time to appreciate the complex and universal range of emotions Woolf, Hardy, and Austen force readers to wade through. She views British authors as teachers for life, not just literature, and instills this virtue of emotional language in her students.

Her not-so-recent keynote speech for Sigma Tau Delta’s induction ceremony charges us students to sit in our present emotions and situations, no matter how far off they are from the so-called normal. Her own circuitous journey serves as an antidote for those who feel they need to have it all figured out before taking the next step.

Like the comforting conversation of your wisest, kindest relative, Dr. Brassard urges us to know ourselves, assuring all types of students that taking the long way will always serve them better in the long run. Today she teaches a version of her favorite undergraduate class– talk about living proof. 

 

 

“Living with the Imposter Syndrome, or, Snapshots of a Life in Books, Places, and People”

-Dr. Genevieve Brassard

            When Caroline invited me to offer remarks to you for this lovely occasion, my first response was “please ask someone else!” Public speaking, even in a relatively intimate setting like this one, is not really my thing, and I thought other colleagues would be more poised and assured candidates to address you. But then I thought, I do have a few stories to tell, and narrative is my preferred literary genre, so perhaps I could come up with anecdotes to illustrate my lifelong passion for books and stories. So, as Dr. Larson described my proposed topic as being ‘raised by books’ (a fairly accurate phrase), and a few days after our very own Sasha’s evocatively titled capstone presentation “Reading into Personhood” on Founders’ Day (I’m kind of stealing/borrowing from the best here!), I offer to you some of the key books and people that raised me in some way.

            As many of you know, I grew up in Quebec City, and the culture that formed my early passions was hybrid in the best sense, with a mix of French singers and films, American TV shows and movies, gossip about the British royal family, and some homegrown artists thrown into the mix as well (Celine Dion, anyone?!). I was exposed to both French and British literary traditions, and an avid consumer and researcher of the histories of both nations (perhaps because Canadian history as taught at the time was pretty boring…), and yet when it came to literature, I quickly went down the British path and have never really kept up with French authors. For that choice I blame Jane Eyre; I read it in French translation at age 11, and it left a deep impression I reconnect with every rereading. At a simple level, as an only child of divorced parents busy with their own lives, I surely related to the poor misunderstood girl (although of course our circumstances were obviously quite different!). On another level, I probably recognized and appreciated her fiery desire to forge her own path and her arguably proto-feminist stance. The book of course also led me to biographies of the Bronte sisters, and later to a pilgrimage to the parsonage in Yorkshire where they crafted their works, and where the setting itself goes a long way toward explaining much of the tensions between wilderness and culture their novels explore. Ultimately, Jane Eyre established my lifelong bond to British writers, and perhaps inevitably, because I did not encounter this and other texts in the original, language was not the main hook for me: the emotional trajectories of the characters were the most significant factor, and continue to be to this day, even though I grew to appreciate language and form as my English skills developed and I began to read my favorites (Austen and Woolf, primarily), in their native tongues.

           When I first attended college in Quebec, I signed up for my first literature class in English. Again, one text in particular blew my mind and not only introduced a new favorite author to discover and cherish, but more significantly how much psychological and cultural work a deceptively simple short story can perform on its readers. The story was “Roman Fever,” by Edith Wharton; I won’t ruin the twist for those of you who may not have read it, but I think I was able for the first time to recognize the artistry and knowledge of human psychology that goes into the craft of fiction through the subtle way Wharton builds conflict between two seemingly sophisticated matrons whose youthful passions and secrets eventually break the smooth surface of their good manners, and of the narrative. Wharton taught me that literature could reveal and expose deep and dark truths about human nature, and I still seek and crave those effects in much of the literature I read and teach.

            A year later, at Concordia University in Montreal (incidentally Dr. Swidzinski’s alma mater…), I took a year-long course on the ‘Victorian Novel and Social Change,’ taught by dynamic and generous professor who not only turn me on to some favorite authors and texts, but also patiently guided me as I learned to write decent essays in a still hesitant English. Reading those thick books was no picnic, but two in particular made their mark, most likely because I labored over essays about them, and as we know, writing about a text attaches you to it forever. From Eliot’s Middlemarch and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, I learned that the novel could be grand in scope yet precise and almost surgical in its close examination of human frailty, and that the aspirations of obscure inhabitants of small English towns not only deserve careful attention and respect, but also could resonate, somehow, with a young woman living a very different existence many years later. What I responded to most in these and other richly imagined fictional worlds was their emotional and intellectual truths, and I still crave the same kind of storytelling ‘kick’ in everything I read to this day.

            Flash forward a few years and many miles west, where I briefly pursued a dream of working in movies by moving to the dream factory itself, Los Angeles. My love of film may have briefly distracted me from my lifelong connection to books, but even there I gravitated toward literary settings. I managed a bookstore where film and TV stars were regular customers, and I also worked at the library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which housed countless newspaper clippings (remember those?!), photos, and film scripts. At the bookstore, a co-worker freshly graduated from Brown and slumming it in retail while working on the Great American Novel, remarked one day in passing that my literary judgments lacked rigor because I didn’t have a college degree. Sadly, his words still rang in my ears a few years later when I returned to school to complete my degree (I will show him!…). At the Academy library, I was surrounded by smart, under-employed people who all aspired to add more impressive titles to their resumes: screenwriter, film critic, director. Through sheer serendipity, another book caught my eye then and had such an effect on me that it precipitated my resolution to go back to school. Reading The Day of the Locust, by Nathaniel West, a sad tale of washed-out has-beens and never-have-beens, those left behind by an industry that celebrates the few and destroys the many, while surrounded by aspiring film artists who would most likely not succeed, snapped me back to reality and the need to shelve unrealistic dreams and move toward a more viable career path.

            I then returned to school as a first generation, non-traditional student, and in those two years I was blessed with a pair of professors who affirmed my desire to continue learning from books in the more formal setting of graduate school, however unlikely that goal seemed at the time. And again, the first step toward graduate research began with a book. Browsing in a used bookstore in LA (and let me say here that yes, LA at the time was filled with great bookstores and yes, browsing actual shelves in a physical store is a wondrous thing that Amazon can’t ever replace), as I was saying, I came across a slim volume. It was a biography of Vera Brittain, a young woman of privilege whose life was transformed by the First World War, a war that not only killed her brother and her fiancé, but also made her into a writer, one of many women who discovered their voice and bore witness to wartime horrors, both at home and at the front, in both physical and psychological forms. Why did I grab that particular book that day, apart from a general curiosity about the topic? I’ll never know, but it became the starting point of my doctoral research, years after that momentous encounter in a used bookstore.

            So now you know how a French-speaking introvert somehow ended up teaching literature in English many miles from home, after a few detours, many life-changing books, and great mentors along the way. Let me close with my attempt at a few bits of wisdom:

            Thank your good fortune, your own hard work, and your parents’ or relatives’ hard work, for being here, today, at this university, pursuing this major that you care about, students of words, plots, and ‘ink people,’ as Jonathan Gottschall puts it in The Storytelling Animal, and try not to take this good fortune for granted, even at the busiest and most tiresome parts of the semester. You never know what small moment or encounter (with a book or a person) will lead you to the next phase in your journey. No matter where you end up, your love of reading will stay with you, and enrich your life in ways you may not yet imagine. And if you do end up in academia, remember that everyone has a story, and most people never feel like they truly belong or deserving, if they are honest. Incidentally, that Brown graduate never wrote the Great American Novel, but after years of plying his trade on second-rate TV shows (thanks for the stalking resource, IMDB!), he is now the award-winning writer/producer of the Handmaid’s Tale adaptation on Hulu and yes, I’m happy for him, I really am. 🙂

An Interview With Sarah Bokich

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By Keaton Gaughan

In anticipation of her up-coming campus reading, I sat down with poet and esteemed UP alum, Sarah Bokich, to learn a bit more about her, her newest chapbook, and life after UP. You can peruse our exchange below. Come hear Sarah read from her newest publication on Thursday, February 8th at 7:30pm in the Campus Bookstore. Hope to see you all there.

KG: Can you tell me a little bit about your recent collection of poems, The Rocking Chair at the End of the World?

SB: While a few of these poems were from an earlier period, the majority I wrote between 2012-2016. I had a lot going on during those years—I experienced a major loss, got married, and gave birth to my daughter. These experiences drastically changed my worldview and I wrote to process it all.

KG: Which works of literature have been particularly formative or moving for you as a poet? In a similar vein, was there a particular source from which you derived your inspiration for this chapbook?

SB: My favorite poet of all time is Philip Levine, who had such a genius for characterizing the subjects of his poems. I also like his use of plain language, with sudden brilliant and memorable lines interspersed. For this particular collection, I also drew a lot on Silvia Plath who so deeply experienced the complexities of motherhood.

KG: Prior to contacting you, I was reading some of the pieces you’ve had published in various publications. I really enjoyed the two-part series, “What Will Happen to the Men.” Both pieces are important and powerful, I was curious to know if there was an event perhaps (or a life full of events, possibly) that acted as the catalyst for such a series?

SB: There is a lot more anger and intensity in the poems I’ve written recently. Some of it comes from getting older and feeling more comfortable with expressing myself and pushing back against a male-dominated culture and workplace, and some of it is in reaction to our current political climate, where an anti-woman sentiment is so prevalent.

KG: Additionally, one of the poems that you graciously allowed us to preview from The Rocking Chair at the End of the World, titled “Trading the Animals” was really interesting. Tell me about writing that piece, your process and specific inspiration if there was any.

SB: This poem was based on a story I heard on NPR. A reporter did a piece about zoos and how they can’t buy and sell animals—they have to trade them. The trade of puffins for a Komodo dragon is a real thing from that story. I ended up taking on the persona of the zookeeper to write the poem.

KG: Being a successful UP graduate, is there any advice you can impart on the creatively inclined or potential future poets at UP?

SB: It is totally possible to integrate creative endeavors into your life after graduation! Poetry isn’t my profession—I’ve been in the tech industry for nearly a decade— but writing is a consistent part of my life that has afforded me some incredible experiences and friendships. Whether you take a workshop, read at a local open mic, or submit to one of our wonderful regional publications, there are a myriad of ways to participate in Portland’s rich literary community. I co-host an open mic at the Attic Institute on Hawthorne the first Friday of every month and would love to see some UP writers there!

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Be sure to catch Sarah Bokich this Thursday, February 8th at 7:30pm in the Campus Bookstore.

Spring 2018 Course Preview

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 by Laura Misch 

Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Well, English majors, winter will soon be upon us, and registration for the spring semester has officially begun. The race is on to sign up for courses, and here’s hoping you get the schedule you want. But what exactly are you signing up for? I corresponded with each of our lovely professors and got the inside scoop on all of the upcoming, upper-division English courses. Here’s what I learned:  

ENG 303 – American Literature I (Beginnings to 1900) 

TR 2:30 Orr 

Welcome to one of the new and improved English surveys! Dr. Orr says students should get ready “to learn about the elemental material that provides a bedrock for understanding American literature and American culture.” The reading list will feature lesser-known writings, such as Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar. However, there will also be plenty of familiar faces, including Wheatley, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Twain, James, Crane, Chestnutt, and Chopin. 

When asked why he loves this course, Dr. Orr responded, “[I love] introducing students to the essential materials that explain who we are as Americans. I don’t think you can understand our culture (and maybe even yourself!) without studying the early material. And there’s sex, violence, and weirdness galore!” 

(Pro-tip: To score brownie points with Dr. Orr, mention Moby-Dick and the amazing chapter in which Melville discusses the whiteness of the whale. He’ll jump for joy.)

 

ENG 311 – Advanced Writing  

TR 12:55 McDonald | TR 2:30 McDonald | MW 2:40 Hannon 

This course utilizes a workshop setting that gives students the opportunity to write in class and share their work within a supportive peer community. Students will find their voices while testing out different writing styles—ranging from narrative essays to flash non-fiction. Reading well-known essayists and other modern works also further supplements the course’s deep exploration into the writing process.  

In ENG 311, Fr. Hannon says, “We explore the ways in which the tools of narrative often utilized in fiction can be used in the shaping and writing of true stories. We also examine how we, as writers, tap into our own experiences, thinking, and imagination in making sense of and drawing meaning from the world we live in.”  

When asked what he likes about the course, Prof. McDonald says he “enjoy[s] talking about writing and seeing students develop over the semester.” 

 

ENG 342 – Studies in Poetry 

MWF 12:30 Swidzinski  

While the course may be called “Studies in Poetry,” Dr. Swidzinski prefers to think of it as an “Introduction to Poetry and Poetics,” for students don’t have to be poetry experts in order to take the class. The reading extends from the Renaissance all the way to the 21st century with a diverse selection of Elizabethan sonnets, Romantic lyrics, modernist and post-modernist experiments, folk songs, rap, pop music, and even computer-generated poetry. Additionally, students will “be reading and thinking about the theories and mechanics of poetry, and how these have evolved over time and across history and cultures.” 

Dr. Swidzinski is excited to teach this course because “every day we’ll ask the same fundamental question—‘What is poetry?’—and every day, depending on what we’re reading, we’ll discover wildly different answers.” He also points out,  “Poems are short! Why spend hours slogging through a novel when you can get to the heart of things with a handful of well-chosen words?”  

 

ENG 352 – Film and Literature  

W 7:10 Larson 

According to Dr. Larson, the course’s full title is “Film and Literature: Adaptation in the Age of the Image.” In a time when “the visual increasingly competes with the verbal,” this course explores the two mediums and the complex relationship between them. Students will examine how “varied genres of written work (screenplay, play, short story, graphic narrative, novel, nonfiction essay) might be translated to the screen.” The literary works include Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. And a few of the films are Citizen Kane, Memento, and Adaptation.  

Dr. Larson hopes “students will come away from a course like this with a better appreciation for our era’s excitingly multiple platforms for storytelling.”  

 

ENG 363 – Environmental Literature  

W 4:10 Weiger  

Students will dive headfirst into exploring the relationship between writing and the natural world. In ENG 363, Dr. Weiger says students look at how “reading and writing [are] important ways of participating in environmental debates” and how “our thinking about race, class, gender, and sexuality affect our understanding of environmental problems.” Reading begins with Gilbert White’s natural history letters and journals, followed by the writing of famous transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, and then shifts to environmental writing from the 20th and 21st century, with pieces by Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Michael Pollan, and Rebecca Solnit.  

But, remember, you’re not a tree! (You’re just reading about them.) Dr. Weiger says, “This course involves a lot of reading and watching (we view some films), but it’s not a passive course. Students create presentations twice over the course of the semester, write their own natural history journals, and write their ways into a contemporary environmental debate. It’s a really interactive course!”  

 

ENG 370 – Studies in Women Writers 

MW 2:40 Brassard  

Students will embrace their inner feminist as well as their inner anglophile, as ENG 370 focuses on female, British writers and uses Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own as a critical lens through which to read the works of other women. Other texts in this discussion-based course include Woolf’s Orlando, Lively’s Moon Tiger, Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Smith’s NW, Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight, Mansfield’s short stories, and Ali Smith’s new book Autumn—arguably the first post-Brexit novel. Students will also examine the theories of feminist literary critics, like Adrienne Rich and Rita Felski.  

Dr. Brassard shares, “I love teaching this course because it often introduces students to authors they have heard about but never read, and also because, as an elective option for the Gender & Women’s Studies Minor, it attracts non-English majors who bring different and welcomed perspectives and questions to a literature classroom.” 

 

ENG 401 – Seminar in British Literature I  

M 4:10 Hersh 

If Geoffrey Chaucer doesn’t rock your world, he will by the end of this course. (Note: See Dr. Hersh’s office door.) This course focuses on just one text—The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English. According to Dr. Hersh, “Chaucer tackles almost every issue imaginable (ok, maybe he doesn’t write about iPad use or Facebook) and we’ll be discussing issues such as gender, religion, politics, sexuality, economics, race, and take a self-reflexive look at the role of literature in the world.” While exploring a single text may seem boring, Dr. Hersh emphasizes that “each tale…is very different,” and he’s “deliciously ambiguous so it’s super fun analyzing his writing.” As a bonus, she adds, “If you like fart jokes, you will like The Canterbury Tales.”  

As someone who has taken a version of this course, all I can say is I hope “whan that Aprille” final exam rolls around, your understanding of Middle English “hath perced to the roote” of your mind! (This excessively corny joke will make sense once you start the class.) 

 

If you have yet to register for Spring 2018, here is a link to the online registration schedule.  

Interview with Leni Zumas

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by Keaton Gaughan 

Leni Zumas, author of the upcoming fiction novel Red Clocks (selected for Publishers Weekly’s “Top 10 Literary Fiction” list), will be visiting campus later this month as part of the University of Portland’s 2017-2018 Readings and Lectures Series. Her reading will be November 15th at 7:30pm in the campus bookstore.  

Zumas teaches in the MFA creative writing program at Portland State University. She is also the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator, and the novel The Listeners, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. In her work, Zumas approaches and examines the female experience on both a deeply personal and a broader, more universal level. Her words, strung together with purpose and precision, flow effortlessly across the page. I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with Leni Zumas. You can read our exchange below. 

KG: To start, I’m interested to hear a bit about your new novel Red Clocks in your own words. Would you mind telling me about the novel? 

LZ: It’s a book that follows the interconnected lives of five women. One is an Arctic explorer in the 19th century; the others live on the Oregon coast, present day. I’m very interested in bonds among women—friendship, competition, romance, caregiving, mentorship, sex, political alliance—and I wanted to dig into the complexity of these bonds. The world of Red Clocks closely resembles our own, except that there’s a new Constitutional amendment that gives full human rights to embryos at the moment of conception, which means abortion is outlawed, as are certain types of fertility treatment.  

KG: Which works of literature have been particularly formative or moving for you as a writer? 

LZ: Virginia Woolf is the writer who has most fiercely and enduringly inspired me. I love her mind and her sentences, especially The Waves, To the Lighthouse, and A Writer’s Diary. Toni Morrison and William Faulkner were big influences. Anne Carson’s long poem “The Glass Essay” gave me structural ideas for my first novel, The Listeners. I’ve learned a lot from Grace Paley’s short stories and from W. G. Sebald’s essay–memoir–novel hybrids, particularly Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn. 

More recently, I’ve been awed by Fred Moten’s poems and essays; the nonfiction book Living a Feminist Life by British–Australian scholar Sara Ahmed; John Keene’s story collection Counternarratives; and the novella Why Is the Child Cooking the Polenta by Romanian–Swiss writer (and circus performer) Aglaja Veteranyi. 

KG: In a similar vein, was there a particular source from which you derived your inspiration for Red Clocks?    

LZ: Oh, lots of sources: my obsessions with polar exploration, witches, and all things nautical; a book on the criminal prosecution of animals; medicinal plants of the Pacific Northwest; and my experience of trying to have a baby on my own. I also researched laws proposed by actual politicians (including Mike Pence and Paul Ryan) to restrict abortion rights, adoption rights, and access to fertility treatments.  

KG: I commend you for taking on such a controversial topic like the abortion argument in times where this fundamental right is under attack. Have you experienced any sort of pushback regarding the arguably controversial topic choice?   

LZ: I wanted to explore the lived consequences and implications of an abortion ban, but I wasn’t aiming to deliver a verdict. What I love about fiction is that you can plunge into messy, complex, ambivalent situations without needing to decree right and wrong. The reader may ponder right and wrong; she may wonder how she’d choose to act in a situation the characters face; but she isn’t being told what to think. Fiction can dwell in uncertainty. As for pushback: not yet! But the book doesn’t come out until January. Maybe I’ll get some in January. Fingers crossed? 

KG: Do you have any advice for aspiring feminist writers? 

LZ: 

  1. Don’t try to be pleasing.  
  2. Don’t try to sound like anyone but yourself.  
  3. Be curious about texts outside the canon, texts in translation, texts of and about the margins. 
  4. Acquaint yourself with the writing of women on whose shoulders you stand, including (to name only a few) Angela Davis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Kathy Acker, Sei Shōnagon, Grace Paley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hélène Cixous, Zora Neale Hurston, Eileen Myles, Phillis Wheatley, Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, Ntosake Shange, [and] Simone de Beauvoir.  
  5. Put more energy into making your work than into selling it.  

Be sure to check out Leni Zumas’ reading in the UP Bookstore on November 15th at 7:30 pm.  

 

*Photo by Sophia Shalmiyev