By Bernie DeGroat
News and Information Services
“Great idea…incredible opportunity…
outstanding experience…wonderful” are a few of the superlatives used by U-M students to describe it.
But perhaps sophomore Aaron Hurst paid the ultimate compliment when he said, “It would be great if it were required because students would gain so much.”
The “it” is an English class, but not your typical, run-of-the-mill, read ’em and write ’em English class. Yes, students in the course do have writing assignments and do read books. But they also have a chance each week to meet and talk with the authors of those books.
The class is “Living Writers,” English 434, taught by Prof. Nicholas Delbanco, director of the Master of Fine Arts Program in English, and it attracts English majors and non-English majors alike.
“The premise of the class is that all too often our students think of writing as something that’s done by the dead, and the books, therefore, are pretty deathly to read,” Delbanco says. “I want to prove to them that there are actual human beings who compose these texts.”
The list of “actual human beings,” 10 in all, reads like a Who’s Who in contemporary fiction: Annie Dillard, Sylvia Watanabe, Alan Cheuse, Elizabeth Cox, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Jim Shepard, Charles Baxter, Percival Everett, Richard Elman and Anton Shammas.
For most students enrolled in English 434, having a chance to regularly meet authors whose books they have read is a unique experience.
“As a reader of novels all my life, it’s an incredible opportunity to be able to ask questions of writers and to hear them talk about their works,” says junior James McLain. “I’m not an English major, but one of the fortunate things about being at U-M is that we’re lucky to have an incredible stream of visiting writers on campus, and the best way of making sure I took advantage of this was by taking this class.”
Ellen Kogan, a junior majoring in political science, agrees.
“I took this class because I wanted to read more books and have the opportunity to meet the authors in class,” she said. “When you read a book, you always interpret it according to what you want it to be. But having the authors come into class, you get a picture of what they actually wanted you to see in the book.”
Kogan, who admits she used to be “intimidated” by English majors because of their ability to seemingly understand a writer’s intent, no longer subscribes to that way of thinking.
“What I’m realizing is that people often think they’re interpreting the ‘right’ thing and then the author comes in to class and dispels that,” she said. “I always thought that everyone else was right in their interpretations, but now I’m not afraid to make my own judgments of a book. There is no ‘proper’ interpretation.”
Talking with the writers in class, students display an unquenchable curiosity about the authors’ creative processes—their ideas, influences, inspirations—in writing their stories.
For Theresa Montagna, a senior majoring in comparative literature and French, meeting the authors not only helps her understand their works better, but also provides insight into their writing approach.
“I was always under the impression that the writer’s word was final,” she says. “Writers can write something with a lot of autobiographical information, based on their life history, yet, I now realize, they’re very open to the idea that the reader does have some authority over his or her text.”
Just as students conceive notions about the plots and characters the authors create, they also conjure up images of what the writers, themselves, are like—much to their amazement.
While the students knew that The Light Possessed, a book that includes text written in a first-person female voice, was penned by male author Alan Cheuse, many were still surprised to see a man walk into class with “a beard and gruff voice.”
Likewise, writer Annie Dillard, perceived by many through her book, The Writing Life, as “quiet and serene,” was much more “animated and outgoing.”
“I was completely surprised with who she was, compared to who I thought she was after reading her book,” Kogan says. “That was exactly what I wanted to see—how different the authors are from what I suspected they would be.”
Sophomore Naghma Husain also says Dillard was not what she expected.
“Sometimes you think of authors as people who only write and don’t do anything else, but when you think of them as having real lives it does make a difference in the way you read their work,” she said.
This is exactly what Delbanco, a novelist himself, had in mind when he designed the course.
“The blood-and-bone presence of an author should render the experience of reading vivid. It is the word made flesh.”
