English Department News

Readings & Lectures

“Dr. Lou” Masson Kicks Off Readings and Lectures Series

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Masson bio pic
Wednesday, September 25th, we kick off this year’s English Readings and Lectures Series with a visit from a dear friend of the Department.  Professor Emeritus Louis Masson—“Dr. Lou” as he is fondly known to students and alumni—will read from his new book Across the Quad, a collection of essays springing from his 40-plus years of teaching on the Bluff.  We recently talked with Dr. Lou about his writing, and about his feelings about UP and the study of English since he retired in 2011.  Read on for his answers, and plan to attend what will surely be a terrific reading, next Wednesday, 7:45, in Mago Hunt Recital Hall.

 

What made you start writing?

Reading. I was read to and then read for myself. All writers begin as readers. My friend and often editor, Brian Doyle, and I talk about this sometimes and conclude that writing is a bug or a virus. And once you are really stricken by it, you never really stop writing. Writers write. Good stuff or not so good stuff, they “write on, man,” as we used to say back in the day. At some point, in my case 2nd year of college after falling in love with poetry and short stories I wrote a sonnet that was published in the college’s literary magazine–I was hooked. So who made me write? Chekhov, Updike, Capote, Hopkins, and Frost–my first literary loves.

What are your approaches to writing? What is your typical writing process?

My first steps are always filled with fear and excitement. The blank page or screen always intimidates. I approach it as hard work that leaves me exhausted but in a very pleasant way, like the labor of turning over my garden beds and planting. I have never found it easy. My writing process? No one ever asked me that before. I fear it is a bit like the approach I took to teaching: I found what worked by trial and error and just did it rather than analyze how I was doing it. Not much of an answer.

I suppose a better answer would be that I am a walker, at least an hour a day, and on my walks my mind wanders and it suggests ways that I might think about a writing project my editor suggested or a idea will come willy nilly and I will play with it. Once I have met the idea, I court it for a few weeks, jotting on a piece of paper I always have in my pockets words that stand for an image or episode I want to write about. And finally, I take the plunge and sit before my computer. It usually takes me three sittings over a five-day period to write a one or two thousand word essay. I do not do drafts. I go from sentence to sentence very slowly. And then paragraph to paragraph. I tend to read each addition aloud, and when I get stuck I read aloud from the first paragraph. I find the first sentences the hardest. I would not get through an essay without some pacing, several cups of tea, and, perhaps, a glass of sherry or port.

 How does your most recent work differ from those previously published?

This is a hard one to answer. Like, I said, I don’t like to analyze how I do it, I just want to do it. But I suspect that like most writers early on I found my voice, as they say, and that voice like my speaking voice

ages as I do. And at 70, you don’t quite see the world as you did at 30. But I would like to think that young and old I have found wonder in the every-day world and music in written words.

What do you miss about the University of Portland?

It would be easier to tell you what I don’t miss! I grew up in a small New England town, and when I arrived at the U, it reminded me of living in an almost secluded and ideal village where you felt you knew almost every one–sounds like Cheers. So many interesting and good people–students, staff, teachers–living next to a beautiful river under the gaze of a glorious mountain. I miss the village life.

Why do you think English is worth studying as an undergraduate and/or graduate student?

A few years ago, this would have been a much easier question to answer. But with the cost of college today, the terrible job market, and tragic drift of our country, I found advising, honest advising, difficult.

Something I was glad to leave behind when I retired. I could give you the usual pitch about how it could be the foundation for all sorts of opportunities: teaching, writing, editing, law, marketing, business–I even have a brother who majored in English and is now a professor of theology. But all those opportunities have to be measured against real risks in this very uncertain time. So I advise speaking to more than one of your profs about what the world is really like for an English major these days. If they are honest with you there should be cautions as well as encouragement.

What can your audience next Wednesday expect to hear?

It’s going to be a happening, so I’m not going to spoil the potential for surprises–pleasant I hope. There will be no quizzes afterwards and no door prize. And I will keep my eye on the students who come late and sit in the back row by the exit!!!

-Dr. Lou

 

Aggressively Alive

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‘Tis the season of readings and lectures!  This Monday, April 8th at 7:30 pm in BC 163, poet and critical writer James Longenbach will be visiting UP.  He has written four books of poetry and five books of criticism.  His publications appear in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New Republic.  He also regularly reviews poetry for both The Nation and the New York Times Book Review.  In addition to writing, James Longenbach is also an English professor at the University of Rochester.  Below is an interview with Longenbach that will no doubt inspire you; both to attend his lecture, and to continue writing and studying literature to find fulfillment.

Q: When did your interest in poetry begin?  How did you cultivate it throughout your life?

A: I didn’t really become seriously interested in poetry until I was an undergraduate; before then, I’d been focused on music, I’d played piano, built a harpsichord.  Then I realized there was a way to express yourself that didn’t depend on an audience–you didn’t need always to be heard.  I liked the privacy of poetry, the way you could develop your skill in secrecy.  One of the greatest freedoms American poets have is that people don’t generally pay much attention to poetry; this is a gift that novelists and painters (who must sell their work, making money for the publishers and dealers on whom they must depend) don’t generally have.  Nobody expects a poem to make a buck, thank goodness, so poets have been more immune to clutches of capitalism.  You’re free pretty much to do what you want, or what you must, even if it is unfashionable, even if it doesn’t sell.

Q: What made you start writing critically?

A:  Really, all poets are literary critics, in the same way that all painters study great paintings; you have to be devoted to the history of your medium, you have to love it, in order to figure out how to use it yourself.  Not all poets write down their literary criticism, but I’ve found that I like to do that; I like the rigor of making absolutely lucid prose sentences.  It makes me a better poet; the work of writing sentences organized in lines becomes more vivid if you spent some time trying to write good prose.

Q: What is your typical writing process (for both poetry and critical writing)?

A: I try to write every day, in the morning; most days I don’t.  You read, think, observe, stay open, but, as Wallace Stevens once said, it is not every day that the world arranges itself into a poem–and he meant to imply that that was a good thing, too.  Writing is more fun than not writing, but you want ultimately to have very high standards for what constitutes a poem.  And you want to maintain them without censoring yourself.  It’s a delicate balance, always in need of recalibration.

Q: Do you believe that poetry writing is a discipline that can be taught and honed?

A: Absolutely.  It’s virtually impossible to take a poetry workshop, one that demands that you write, read, and respond to what you read every week, and not become a better writer.  As a teacher of writing, you’re not teaching people how to feel or be, though feeling and being are important; you’re teaching them how to manipulate the medium of the English language into beautiful and forceful patterns.  Every human being experiences devastating emotions; we usually don’t need help with that.  But we do need help with learning how to make linguistic equivalents for those emotions.  Nobody would ever imagine writing a poem if we didn’t also read them, and probably need to read about a hundred good poems for every decent poem we manage to write.

Q: Why is English a discipline worth studying in college and graduate school?

A: English is worth studying because the poems and novels and essays written in English over the last thousand years are beautiful things; to know them, to be able to recall them, to be able to experience them again, more richly, is one way of being aggressively alive.  Beyond that, meticulous attention to language is mind-work of the first order: to learn how to discuss a short, complicated poem in clear, forceful prose sentences involves the cultivation of almost universally applicable skills.  That said, however, I wouldn’t want to deny the perfect uselessness of being an English major–I’d want to embrace it; American culture demands at almost every second that we be useful, and this is great limitation, especially when one is young and discovering the world.

Q: What can students attending your lecture at UP next week expect to hear?

A: I’m going to give a lecture called–this won’t surprise you–“The Medium of the English Language.”  We all can imagine pretty easily that a painter does one thing with oil paint, another thing with water color–the mediums have different limitations, therefore strengths.  My lecture is about our language as a medium–how it determines the kinds of effects that we’ve come to expect from great English sentences.  I’ll be talking about poems by Shakespeare, Jonson, Keats, Yeats, Moore, and Ashbery; also passages of prose by Henry James and James Joyce.

Q: What is your favorite work that you have written?

A: I guess that my favorite thing I’ve ever written is always the thing I’ve written most recently; that would be a long-ish sequence of poems called “The Climate of Reason.”  But I’m still very fond of my most recent book of poems,The Iron Key.  I also like very much my recently-published prose book, The Virtues of Poetry; writing it felt like the writing of a poem or collection of poems–once I found the form, the shape, the book wrote itself.  The argument was secondary to the finding of that shape.

Q: What is one book/poem recommendation you have for students?

A: Just in the last few days I’ve been rereading D.H. Lawrence’s great book of poems, Birds, Beasts, and Flowers.  Lawrence sometimes gets condescended to, as if he were a poet who just threw impassioned thoughts down on the page and moved on; but really he is a meticulous craftsman of the first order.  These poems are just as fresh and weird and alive as anything being written right now.  I’m stunned all over again by them.

Explore the Emotional Side of Literature with Jamaica Kincaid

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This Thursday, April 4th, Jamaica Kincaid will be visiting UP for a reading and lecture.  Kincaid, a native of St. John’s, Antigua, immigrated to America when she was 17 years old.  She is known for such works as At the Bottom of the River, Annie John, The Autobiography of My Mother, My Brother, and the book that Dr. Larson’s Contemporary Literature class is currently exploring, Lucy.  Kincaid is touring for her latest book—See Now Then—her first novel in ten years.  She writes novels that focus on emotions and character development rather than strict chronological plot development, as well as works that deal with real-world issues such as post-colonialism and family relationships.

When interviewed by Jonathan Galassi, Kincaid admitted many things about her writing process and style.  For instance, Kincaid confesses that she finds it impossible to write a book “beyond 200 pages,” and wishes she could “write one of those books with so many pages that no one ever finishes the reading of them, but alas, I seem unable to do this.”  She also admits that her old writing habit—composing sentences in her head, memorizing them, and only then writing them down on paper—remains her current writing process, but that as she grows older, this process becomes less ideal.

While Kincaid is very willing to discuss her downfalls as an author, she is also willing to take the credit Galassi gives her when he states that See Now Then “is one of the most powerful works of fiction I’ve read in ages,” for the regular events in the story become “profoundly mythologized.”  Kincaid acknowledges that she does “tend to want to make a myth of everything,” because myths are made up of “people and events who are not only up and about in their own time but up and about over time, up to the time we are encountering them.”  Based on this want and need, Kincaid summarizes writing as “total absorption with the self, not my own self, but a self that I don’t really know, a self that is essential if I am to write.”  Thus, by being absorbed with the self, but by universalizing this self, or “mythologizing” it, Kincaid’s stories become just as present now as they were when they were written—or at least that is Kincaid’s hope.

In order to discover Jamaica Kincaid’s works for yourself, come hear her speak this Thursday, April 4th.  Kincaid will be attending a Q&A session at 1:20pm in Franz 125, as well as reading segments of her new novel at 7:30pm in BC Aud.  Don’t miss out on this amazing opportunity!

Read the full interview between Jonathan Galassi and Jamaica Kincaid here, and be sure to check out her interview with TIME here.

The Power of Fiction

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When I interviewed Dr. Lois Leveen two weeks ago, I found out that she considers herself an “accidental novelist.”  Coming from a woman whose first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, is already being sold in major bookstores, as well listed as a Target “Club Pick,” I found this an odd self-given title.   However, Leveen explained that while she took creative writing classes in high school, attending Harvard University as an undergraduate often left her feeling “intimidated by other students,” particularly in the area of creative writing.  Thus, she stuck to expository writing and to this day considers herself a strong writer of scholarly articles.  It wasn’t until writing her English Ph.D. dissertation on the role domestic space plays in the social constructions of race and gender that she came across the historical figure Mary Bowser—a freed slave who became a Union spy by entering back into slavery in the Civil War—that she first considered writing a novel.  Leveen sees her transformation into a fiction writer as a “sharp left turn,” for it involved incorporating scenes, dialogue, and action into her writing, rather than “just internal monologue.”

To Leveen the hardest aspect of fiction writing is the same that troubles writers of all disciplines: how to make “what’s in your head” interesting and compelling to “someone outside of your head.”  Furthermore, Leveen was particularly concerned with developing and showing a historical appreciation for her main character, for it was important that she highlight both the fortune of freedom, as well as the struggle presented when slaves had to leave all they had ever known in order to gain it.  Leveen jumps this hurdle by first depicting Mary in her slave life, thus building her into her community.  Only then does Leveen “break [her] heart, the reader’s heart, and the character’s heart,” by illustrating how Mary’s freedom rips her away from her family.

As far as her process, Leveen writes every day, even when she is on vacation.  In order to help discipline herself, Leveen turns off her internet when she writes, for she admits that “you can pretend you are researching when you’re just screwing around on the internet.”  Furthermore, Leveen has certain rituals when writing.  For example, she says that writing is easiest when she sits in a specific chair, has her cats on her lap, and keeps her trusty paperback thesaurus close by.

While Leveen admits the difficulties of fiction writing, she is also quick to name the ways she prefers it to scholarly writing.  The biggest upside, she says, is “more readers.”  But for Leveen, the purpose of fiction isn’t merely to entertain. By having the character Mary read Civil War-era books by other famous African American authors, for example, the novel teaches its readers about African American and women’s history.  This, Leveen says, is “the power of fiction.”

When I asked Leveen about her past and why English is a discipline worth studying, she responded, “Words as persuasion are always going to be part of our lives.”  Therefore, knowing how to be critical of words and use them well is a powerful skill to have.  Furthermore, Leveen believes that “humanities is what makes us human,” for by emotionally and intellectually engaging with literature we are also engaging with others.  Leveen also warned that later in life the majority of our literary explorations will be on our own, and college is a rare and wonderful opportunity to explore texts and poems with other people in an intellectual environment.

As for what students can expect to hear from Lois Leveen’s lecture this month, she said that aside from discussing and reading from her first novel, she also wants to stress that often the academic study of literature is rarified and cut off from the outside world, and she wishes to work with us to connect our studies with other individuals beyond our classmates.  In addition, Leveen let it slip that she attended graduate school at UCLA with our very own Dr. Hiro and Dr. Larson and may perhaps reveal some little known facts about our professors at her upcoming talk!

When asked to suggest a book UP students might enjoy, Leveen instead recommended a specific genre to those interested in fiction writing: poetry.  Leveen finds that many fiction works today lack rhythm and do not pay enough attention to “the sound of language.”  Poetry, which focuses on these two things, can help fiction writers to get a sense of how to use language more lyrically.

To learn more about Lois Leveen and hear excerpts from her new novel please attend her lecture on Thursday, March 21st at 4:00 pm in Shiley 319, and/or her  reading at 7:30 pm in BC 163.

Literary Events Around Portland: March

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Here are this months Literary Events Around Portland.  Make sure and attend some!

Events at Powells City of Books (Burnside Location):

Sunday, March 3rd @ 7:30pm- Jess Walter (We Live in Water)

Tuesday, March 12th @ 7:30pm- Marisa Silver (Mary Coin)

Wednesday, March 13th @ 7:30pm- Sam Lipsyte (The Fun Parts)

Tuesday, March 19th @ 7:30pm- Taiye Selasi (Ghana Must Go)

Thursday, March 21st @ 7:30pm- Joshua Mohr (Fight Song), Patrick DeWitt (The Sisters Brothers), James Bernard Frost (A Very Minor Phrophet)

Sunday, March 24th @ 7:30pm- David Shields (How Literature Saved My Life)

Monday, March 25th @ 7:30pm- Christa Parravani (Her: A Memoir)

Tuesday, March 26th @ 7:30pm- Natalie Goldberg (The True Secret of Writing: Connecting Life with Language)

 

Events at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall:

Tuesday, March 12th @ 7:30 pm- Sherman Alexia

 

For other information about Portland area readings in Spring 2013 please visit either 

http://www.powells.com/calendar/

 

or

 

http://www.literary-arts.org/pal-home/

Literary Events Around Portland: February

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Here are this months Literary Events Around Portland.  Make sure and attend some!

Events at Powells City of Books (Burnside Location):

Tuesday, February 12th @ 7:30pm- Mary Szybist (Incarnadine)

Friday, February 15th @ 7:30pm- Chad Kultgen (The Average American Male; The Average American Marriage)

Wednesday, February 20th @ 7:30pm- Roger Hobbs (Ghostman)

Friday, February 22nd @ 7:30pm- Paul Levy (Dispelling Wetiko: Breaking the Curse of Evil)

Wednesday, February 27th @ 7pm- Ted Kerasote (Pukka’s Promise)

Events at the Bagdad Theater

Wednesday, February 20th @ 7pm- Secretary Madeleine Albright (Prague Winter)

Tickets available for purchase

 

For other information about Portland area readings in Spring 2013 please visit either 

http://www.powells.com/calendar/

 

or

 

http://www.literary-arts.org/pal-home/

Literary Events Around Portland: January

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Here are this months Literary Events Around Portland.  Make sure and attend some!

Events at Powells City of Books (Burnside Location):

Monday, January 21st @ 7:30pm- Trevor Aaronson (The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism)

Tuesday, January 22nd @ 7:30pm- Nicole Georges (Calling Dr. Laura)

Sunday, January 27th @7:30pm- Oliver Burkeman (The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking)

 

For other information about Portland area readings in Spring 2013 please visit either 

http://www.powells.com/calendar/

 

or

 

http://www.literary-arts.org/pal-home/

A Marathon–English Style!

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When Homer originally wrote The Iliad, his words were presented in front of large audiences, intently listening to the heroic and captivating stories as they were read out loud by orators.  Anyone who has read the Iliad knows that such a reading would take hours, or even perhaps an entire day.  Despite the time commitment of reading through this text out loud, the Portland Art Museum and a group called The Readers of Homer are recreating the traditional presentation of Homer’s work; in their own literary version of 26.2 miles, they are holding a marathon reading of The Illiad.

The reading will take place on December 2nd, beginning at 10am and concluding at 8pm.  Four hundred readers will gather to present Homer’s epic tale in the oral tradition.  There are spaces available for readers and non-readers alike; however, space is limited.  If you are interested in attending and/or reading please click here to register and to find more information. Tickets for college students are only $5 (a $10 discount!) and many slots are still open for attendance and participation.

As this is just two short weeks before finals, the English Department Faculty understands that many students are quite busy and may not be able to attend.  Thus, the Department is considering hosting our own marathon reading right here at UP!  If you are interested, think this sounds like a swell idea, or simply want to know more about what a marathon reading entails please comment below with any questions and/or suggestions!  If the Department and Blog can generate enough interest in a marathon reading, hosting our own can become a reality.  Please give us your feedback!

Reading and Lecture Series: Wayne Miller

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This upcoming Monday, November 12, at 7:30 p.m. poet Wayne Miller will be reading his award winning poems in Buckley Center 163.  Miller is the author of three poetry collections: The City, Our City (Milkweed, 2011)—which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and the Rilke Prize—The Book of Props (2009), and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues, 2006). He also translated Moikom Zeqo’s I Don’t Believe in Ghosts (BOA, 2007) and co-edited both New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life & Work of a 20th Century Master (Pleiades Unsung Masters, 2011). The recipient of six Poetry Society of America Awards, the Bess Hokin Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Wayne lives in Kansas City and teaches at the University of Central Missouri, where he edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (& Reviews). In 2013 he will be the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar of Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.  Below are a few of his poems to entice you to attend the reading on Monday.  See you there!

 
[Read more…] about Reading and Lecture Series: Wayne Miller

Literary Events Around Portland: November

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Here are this months Literary Events Around Portland.  Make sure and attend some!

*Rainy Day Reading Sale at Powells City of Books

            Buy two titles and get the third title free (limited time only)

Events at Powells City of Books (Burnside Location):

Wednesday, November 7th @ 7:30pm- Whitney Otto (Eight Girls Taking Pictures)

Thursday, November 8th @ 7:30pm- Michelle Tea (Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road)

Friday, November 9th @ 7:30pm- Peter Ames Carlin (Bruce)

Saturday, November 10th @ 2:00pm- Will Tacy (The Onion Book of Known Knowledge)

Monday, November 12th @ 7:30pm- Ellen Forney (Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me)

Tuesday, November 13th @ 7:30pm- Mark Bowden (The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin Laden)

Thursday, November 15th @ 7:30pm- Dr. Alex B. Berezow and Hank Campbell (Science Left Behind: The Rise of the Anit-Scientific)

Sunday, November 18th @ 7:30pm- Joe Biel (Beyond the Music)

Tuesday, November 17th @ 7:30pm- Andrew Solomon (Far from the Tree)

Thursday, November 29th @ 7:30pm- Ellee Thalheimer and Lucy Burningham (Hop in the Saddle: A Guide to Portland’s Craft Beer Scene, by Bike)

Events at the Bagdad Theatre (Tickets Required):

Tuesday, November 20th @ 7pm- Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors)

Events at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall

Friday, November 16th @ 7:30pm- Barbara Kingsolver

 

For other information about Portland area readings in Fall 2012 please visit either 

http://www.powells.com/calendar/

 

or

 

http://www.literary-arts.org/pal-home/