I worked as a public-affairs officer for an academic medical center, as a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines, and as a corporate publications director and speechwriter before earning a doctorate in English/creative writing at Western Michigan University in 2006. My writing has appeared in consumer magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health, and Poets & Writers; in newspapers including The Milwaukee Journal, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and Newsday; and in literary journals including The Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, New Delta Review, River City (now The Pinch), and Gargoyle Magazine. On the whole, I’ve published profiles, interviews, investigative stories, in-depth series, long-form features, essays, health and medical articles, breaking news, columns, and most recently, short stories and poems. I’ve also edited work in most of those forms or genres.
Four realizations over time led me to focus on creative writing and the college teaching of writing, editing, and literature.
First, I rewrote my sentences more than usual, I think, for a reporter or freelance writer. Partly it was because I learned grammar from reading more than any other method, and sometimes my eyes played tricks on me. Dwelling on sentences was probably also a habit of empathy, since I mostly worked as an editor. But I also did so because I hoped to write literary prose eventually, and in literary writing, it is considered productive to turn your sentences over for hours on end.
Similarly, I liked to let sources talk a lot; then I’d transcribe the interview to render on the page exactly how the person sounded. Not just syntax and diction, but also punctuation that made them sound just like they had in conversation. Most reporters more pragmatically say, “Thanks, I have what I need,” and then pop quotes into a narrative. Looking back, I suppose I was practicing at characterization, doing research of sorts on dialogue.
What’s also true is that story formulas bored me once I got the hang of them. I wanted to work with voice and character and other elements of imaginative writing with few if any limitations. Of course, that’s another way of saying I have since assigned myself endless opportunities to face down all sorts of other narrative frustrations.
The fourth realization began to hit in my thirties, and it’s this: all my favorite authors are voice-rich, morally imaginative, and creators of first-person narrators and other characters who, even if fictional, matter socially.
For me, the list actually starts in journalism, with Pete Hamill when he was a New York Post columnist in the late 1960s. Growing up, I was also greatly moved by Richard Wright, Claude Brown, and Piri Thomas. John Updike and Philip Roth are my Big Two, nearly lifelong favorites. Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Gabriel García Márquez, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Stanley Elkin, Cynthia Ozick, Deborah Eisenberg, William Trevor, Flannery O’Connor, John McNally, John Dufresne, and two of my professors at Western Michigan University, Stuart Dybek and Jaimy Gordon, are some of the other prose artists who have mattered to me for a good long while as a writer and a reader.
That’s a selective but honest account of why I formally studied English and creative writing with the concurrent hope of succeeding in academia — and of who, knowingly or not, pushed me.
As for teaching literature, I like to focus readings in three directions:
- theme/meaning
- contexts (biographical, socio-cultural, historical) and
- craft (language and structure)
I believe that looking at context or background for a text helps students even the score with all the other readers out there who bring special life experiences or knowledge to reading it.
I also try to show the value of writing that avoids abstractions, generalizations, and judgments — that appeals instead to our senses. That conjures up people, places, objects, and actions so we feel physically present. The point, of course, is that well-written, character-based literature lets us live other peoples’ lives vicariously, gain experiences beyond constraints imposed by the physical world or our own society, and relate to other times and cultures.
