What are you looking forward to once your term as director of the program ends?
I’m looking forward to returning to my regular duties of teaching, writing, and perhaps simply daydreaming! I’m “retiring” from my administrative duties, but not from my responsibilities as a professor and a writer.
What have been the high points for you as a director and what has been the best lesson you learnt during that term?
The high point of it all is the idea of service you are providing to your students, your colleagues, and the university. The directorship is a position that consists of huge responsibilities, with many people relying on your decisions. As a director, I am especially proud of two initiatives that expand the notion of what a writer is and what a writer does.
Through a special university grant called “The Writer in the World,” I’ve been taking students for cultural and literary interactions to my home country Nepal, for the past two years.
My students and I have conducted workshops at different schools in Kathmandu. We have also held reading sessions and panels in the city. It’s been an educational experience for everyone. We are also expanding our curriculum to include courses that address the role of creative writing in the community and how students can use their learning’s beyond the four walls of a classrooms. We’ve also begun conversations about adding a component of literary translation to the program. The greatest lesson I’ve learnt in the last three years is that, you need to be extremely flexible and patient while dealing with diverse groups of people.
What was a low point?
The lowest point was the murder of my colleague Don Belton in December 2009. I had chaired the committee that had hired him for the position of our fiction writer. Don was a vivacious and a dear friend, someone who’d come to my house for dinner several times. Don was set to go to Hawaii when he was killed by an acquaintance. It took us a long time to get over Don’s death.
How do your worlds as writer and a teacher of writings coincide/interact?
They’re not far apart at all. I consider myself lucky that I’m in a profession where I get to exercise my private love of writing and literature. In fact, I love teaching so much that I can’t imagine being away from it for a long time, just like I can’t be away from my writing. I also find that during my teachings, I sometimes come upon insights that loosen the knots in the writing I’m doing. And then there are moments when I am simply inspired by my students’ writings. Just last week we workshopped a student story that was, in many ways, brilliant. I was overwhelmed to see such a powerful story by an undergraduate student, and I can only imagine where he could take his writings in a few years. Encountering great work among my students carries equal joy to me than moments of success with my own work.
How do you manage your own writing while teaching?
I tend to write very early in the morning at home, before I get caught up by the day’s whirlwind. But in general I don’t need long stretches of isolation to write. I tend to write a great deal, sitting at a busy Starbucks café near my house. Teaching doesn’t interfere with my writing. My director’s job, with the volume of emails it involves, sometimes is not compatible with focused writing, but I knew that when I took up this job.
What do you think makes creative writing workshops work?
Half of my teaching is done in writing workshops, both at the graduate and the undergraduate level. A workshop is a concentrated community of writers, nothing more. A workshop can be a microcosm of the larger audience you’d encounter in the world, so it can provide some good directions for your writing. Writers who have a balanced mental approach to the workshop are the ones who benefit the most. You need to be simultaneously humble and strong about your writing. In other words, not be swayed by everything that’s said in the workshop, yet be open enough that you’re able to extract the essence.
What kind of questions do you think are important in a student workshop?
Increasingly, I tend not to sweat the small stuff in a student’s work that’s being work shopped. The small irritants like editorial lapses, minor points-of-view shifts take care of themselves later, once the larger questions are tackled: What is the urgency in the story? Or does the story articulate a problem and move towards a solution? Is the protagonist, whether likeable or not, someone whose predicament the reader would be interested in? What are the physical and the emotional landscapes of the story? How do they connect and collide?
How do you encourage your students to rewrite, revise and/or submit?
I often talk to my students about my own revisions. Sometimes I take versions of my manuscripts as examples. My critique of student work is based on the premise that they will, they must return to the story for further exploration. I also spend some time in the semester talking about the market. I take my own log of student stories I’d submitted to journals when I was a Ph.D. student in Hawaii, and show them how many times each story has been rejected. The market is tough, and the earlier my students realize it, the harder they’ll work to craft better stories so those can also be published.
How will The Writer in the World program continue once you step down?
I will be applying for grants every year as a faculty member, so I hope the program continues.
Are you working on something new in terms of your own writing?
I am always writing. After Buddha’s Orphans, I thought I’d take a long break from writing but have discovered that I really couldn’t and was back to writing stories within a couple of months. Currently I am working on a novel and a manuscript of stories simultaneously, which is an odd experience as I’ve always been someone who could only work on one project at a time. But it’s been fun. Both projects will probably be completed within the next couple of years, but I’m in no hurry.
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