Fall 1998
Virginia Tech Magazine
It must be tough being married to a creative writer. You never know when an unflattering glimpse of yourself might turn up in one of your spouse’s stories.
Take Virginia Tech English instructor Lisa Norris (forestry ’79) and associate professor Ed Falco, for example. Norris and Falco are both married to creative writers–each other. Norris once objected to a harsh portrait of a woman doing leg lifts in one of Falco’s stories. Falco, in turn, disliked Norris’ characterization of a man with the annoying habit of shaking a peanut jar.
Fortunately for their marriage, Norris and Falco understand fiction’s tendency to borrow details from real life. “Writing is just like breathing in our house,” says Norris.
Not all members of Virginia Tech’s creative writing community are married to each other. But to hear them talk, you’d swear they were from one big, happy family.
“There’s a real celebration of each other,” says novelist Simone Poirier-Bures, an instructor in Tech’s English department. When a new book is out, a party is usually held to honor its author. As Poirier-Bures says, “We all bloom a little when somebody else blooms.”
Special friendships have also blossomed in Tech’s English department. Poet and novelist Lucinda Roy, alumni distinguished professor of English, says, “I certainly find it important to have Nikki Giovanni here. It’s nice to have another faculty member of color to go to.”
Giovanni, the acclaimed poet, encouraged Roy to submit her poetry to feminist press Eighth Mountain’s poetry contest. Giovanni bet Roy a bottle of wine that she would win. When Roy won, Giovanni demanded, “Where’s my wine?”
But when Roy’s debut novel was published earlier this year, Roy recouped her losses from Giovanni, who wrote a glowing back-cover review and sent Roy two bottles of wine.
Poet Katherine “Bonnie” Soniat and poet Jeff Mann have become poetry trading friends. “A lot of my poems begin as banyan forests,” says Mann, “you have to take up a machette.”
Mann admits, “It’s annoying not to be able to write the perfect poem all by itself,” but he is grateful for Soniat’s feedback. “Plus, her cat’s adorable,” he says. “A big, fluffy, orange Persian with one of those flat faces.”
The pure, friendly affection these writers have for each other goes beyond dutiful professional respect or admiration. Putting their writing aside, they often get together just for fun. Falco, for example, alternately plays tennis with Soniat and popular crime novelist Carl Bean.
Tech’s creative writing courses are extremely popular, although there is no creative writing major, only a minor. At the beginning of each semester, students from across the university–not just English majors–can be seen waiting in the hallways trying to get overrides into creative writing classes that have already been filled to the 21-student limit.
“From the department’s point of view,” says Johann Norstedt, head of the English department, “creative writing is one of our most successful offerings.” But even more important to Norstedt than simply filling classrooms is the program’s ability to help students explore, through the strenuous intellectual activity of creative writing, “the possibilities of the human condition.”
“It seems to me,” says Tech Provost Peggy Meszaros, “that any major university that is serious about developing the mind has a very strong creative writing program.” Furthermore, says Meszaros, “We’re preparing students for life. If we are only preparing people for that entry-level position, we are not doing our job as a university.” The creative writing program’s ability to stimulate creativity, Meszaros concludes, is vital to a university that prides itself on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Tech’s emphasis on creative thinking is also seen in an experimental interdisciplinary program on creativity, led this fall by architecture professor and Associate Provost Ron Daniel for teachers of Tech’s first-year students. “Creativity happens when you get those cross connections,” says Daniel. “It doesn’t just happen in the vertical slice of what we do.”
If creativity and writing are values Tech is developing throughout the university, the creative writing faculty, with their unique approaches to teaching, epitomize these values.
Soniat asks students to draw their feelings in crayon before they write a poem. This fall her advanced poetry students will turn a poem into a design, a song, a painting, or a dance.
In one of her recent advanced poetry courses, Giovanni played “March of Waters,” a Portuguese song by the late Antonio Carlos Jobim (his most famous song is “The Girl from Ipanema”). Students listened actively to the song, then translated it into a poem. “No one knew anything about what he was actually saying,” says Giovanni, but “everybody got the joy.”
Giovanni’s classes also have involved mock trials of fairy tale characters. “We charged Little Red Riding Hoodwith the murder of her grandmother,” says Giovanni. Cinderella endured a sanity hearing in Giovanni’s class. Through the fairy-tale trials, Giovanni’s students began to think in new ways about writing and story telling. (Was Cinderella an abused child who created a grand story out of the details of her wretched life to make herself feel better?)
Norris’ creative writing courses include a service-learning component. Students have the option of performing a community service–spending time with Special Olympics athletes or tutoring at a project in Roanoke, for example–then detailing the experience in a scene and describing how it influenced them as writers. Norris also organizes a panel of Virginia Tech writers with whom her student can consult.
Falco, Giovanni, Roy, and Soniat comprise a first-rate creative writing faculty–by the standards of any college or university. These writers have often had the privilege of seeing their former students have work published in literary journals or gain acceptance into prestigious graduate schools for creative writing. And the faculty members’ own writing careers are going strong.
Falco’s recent short story collection, Acid, won the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction. One of its stories, “The Artist,” appeared in the 1995 edition of The Best American Short Stories. His second novel, A Dream with Demons (1997), published on compact disc, received a positive front-page review in the American Book Review. To Falco’s amazement, the novel has sold 1,000 copies and is being taught at several universities in experimental literature courses.
Falco just completed his latest work, a “multimedia computer narrative project” combining photographs with bits of narration. He’s currently working on Cybertown, a novel set in Blacksburg.
Giovanni won this year’s NAACP Image Award for Literature for her book, Love Poems (1997), which now has 60,000 copies in print. At the awards ceremony, hosted by Jay Leno and televised on the Fox network, Giovanni read from her poem “But Since You Finally Asked” while Savion Glover of the Broadway play “Bring in Da Noise Bring in Da Funk” tapped to it.
In 1996, Giovanni won the Langston Hughes Award, an honor shared in the past by James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. Giovanni’s latest project, Grand Fathers, is an anthology which includes writings by some of her former students. The book is scheduled to be published in February 1999. Giovanni has also turned in the first half of a new book which is influenced by environmental concerns, especially the encroachment of humans upon the world’s natural habitats.
After seeing her first novel, Lady Moses, published this year to much critical acclaim, Lucinda Roy has finished a second novel, Blood Sisters, scheduled for publication in 2000. Does Roy have ideas for a third novel? “I wish I didn’t,” she says. Although she had earned recognition for two successful volumes of poetry, Roy switched to writing fiction, she says, “Because the story wouldn’t be quiet–it just wanted to be written.”
Even while she was spending all her daytime hours writing grants and chairing committees as associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences, Roy would work every night until 2 a.m. writing the story of a bi-racial woman compelled to explore her identity by travelling in Africa.
Soniat’s latest book of poetry, A Shared Life (1993) won the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award. Most recently, Soniat won the William Faulkner Prize from the William Faulkner Society of Pirates Alley, New Orleans. Soniat’s lyric poetry often considers the way people and their environment are intertwined. She traveled to Peru in July to absorb ideas and impressions for her next book under a Virginia Commission of the Arts fellowship. She has planned her next four books of poetry to focus on “those endangered parts of our landscape–the mountains, the rainforest, the water, and the desert.”
Why does such an impressive group of creative writers reside at a university more known for science and technology? “It’s a very supportive environment, as far as creative work,” says Soniat. Creative writing faculty typically teach two upper level creative writing courses each semester; the rest of their time is spent with research and writing. Soniat also cites the beauty of the Blacksburg area, the low cost of living, and a diverse and bright undergraduate population.
Tech’s other English faculty are no slouches either when it comes to creative writing publishing, awards, and honors. Anne Cheney has edited and contributed to Ophelia’s Legs and Other Poems, a collection of poems by Blacksburg writers. Professor Tom Gardner has a book of poetry out and publishes in literary magazines, as does instructor Gyorgyi Voros.
Carl Bean’s crime novel about a child abduction, Dust to Dust, was published this year. His next novel, With Evil Intent, about a medical experiment using children’s internal organs, will be out in December.
Bean is deeply concerned for children in our society, and his brutal novels are meant as a wake-up call about child abuse. He recently received a grant to become the first writer-in-residence at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Bean is currently working on two novels, one on the holocaust and another on a disease that causes children to age prematurely.
Mann recently won the Stonewall Chapbook Competition. As part of the prize, gay and lesbian press Brick House published 1,000 copies of Mann’s poetry in a chapbook named Bliss. Mann considers himself more of a “Southern” writer than anything else and often teaches courses for Tech’s Appalachian studies program. This fall, Mann is teaching Tech’s first English class in gay and lesbian literature, a class filled beyond capacity.
Poirier-Bures’ coming-of-age novel, Candyman, has just been approved for use in 10th grade English classes in the province of Nova Scotia. An abridged version of the novel was recently read on Canadian Broadcasting Company Radio, the equivalent of National Public Radio in the United States.
More recently, Poirier-Bures published That Shining Place (1996), a memoir of her stay in Greece as a young woman in the ’60s. The book, which Poirier-Bures says is about an “older self coming to terms with a younger, wilder self,” won the Evelyn Richardson Award. Poirier-Bures, who has also published 30 short stories and a handful of poems, is currently working on a novel set in Virginia.
Norris has had her Western-flavored short stories published in a number of literary magazines. She is currently circulating a collection of her short stories called Toy Guns, so named because many of the stories deal, she says, with “female hostility.”
The influence of Tech’s creative writing community doesn’t stop at the edge of the Virginia Tech campus. The Blue Ridge Writers Conference, the oldest and largest writers conference in Southwest Virginia, moved to Tech this fall. This year, the English department funded a creative writing outreach program in which Soniat, Mann, and Voros took poetry classes to Pulaski County schools. At the annual “Share Our Strength” hunger-relief benefit (part of a nationwide effort held at Tech on Oct. 29), Tech creative writers read from their works, charging an admission fee that is donated to the Roanoke food bank.
“It’s like there’s an energy source here,” Bean says of Tech’s creative writing community. One thing is for certain: Tech’s strong creative writing program will be around for a long time and may some day expand into an undergraduate major. “It wouldn’t surprise me,” says chairman Norstedt, “if in 20 years there were a creative writing major at Virginia Tech.”
Article also available at: http://www.vtmagazine.vt.edu/fall98/feature2.html
