Q: What is your area of specialty?
A: Creative Writing, primarily Fiction
Q: What was the title of your master’s thesis or dissertation?
A: Here is something hopeful: That thesis (many revisions later) became my first book, which by then was titled, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides.
Q: What is your most recent publication?
A: My most recent publication is the short story, Flock, which is up in a literary exhibit at Neon Door. https://neondoorlit.com/exhibit/flock-327
Q: What is your favorite assignment to assign?
A: In my multi-genre Creative Writing classes we do an image walk. It’s like a scavenger hunt for observable images around campus that fit predetermined criteria, and as we find them, we describe them exhaustively. We defamiliarizing them ala Victor Shklovsky who famously said the writer’s job is to defamiliarize what we think we know and “make the stone stoney again.” Aer our walk, we use our favorite clippings to assemble a poem that rhymes with, or is dissonant with, the quality of images we’re working with. Some of us have been searching for bright images, some sharp, or bumpy, etc. I love how the results come out. Many of us were staring at similar objects, and yet the poems are so different. Yet they are of a piece, since all the images within them share an overarching feature. We also do a community publication project at the end of those classes that delights me, but I can’t describe it, because each new class designs it. It’s always different.
Q: What was the last book you read?
A: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr.
Q: What are your favorite events on campus?
A: Creative Writing hosts a reading series called Word to Say It that brings authors from all over the country and beyond to read from their books and talk with our students. I’m definitely biased, but I love the series and have been inspired by so many writers that have come through. I also enjoy attending plays, concerts, and lectures, the most memorable of which was Cornel West’s talk to inaugurate the Joyner Institute in 2016–that was thrilling.
Q: What is your favorite place to eat on campus?
A: My office. Heh.
Q: What do you enjoy most about CCU?
A: The people. And turtle pond.
