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Brenner discusses her writing, teaching

Wendy Brenner OC`87 was a creative writing major and recently won the Flannery O'Connor award for her collection Large Animals in Everyday Life . She came to Oberlin this past weekend to give a reading. Arts editor Laren Rusin talked with her Monday morning.

LR: How is coming back to Oberlin?
WB: Strange.

LR: Has it changed at all?
WB: No. Well, physically, I can't speak for broad trends and how people act and all that, but I hadn't been back since '88, I graduated in '87 and came through again in '88, and the only thing I didn't recognize was Stevenson, across from East. I lived in East for all three years I was here, I transferred after my freshman year, and the weird thing is I can't remember what used to be there. It was very strange walking around because, like I would look at something once, like my first night here, but it slowly came back to me.

I don't know, you know. I didn't get to see much in the way of student activity because everyone is in the middle of finals, it's very different from University of Florida, which is where I've been. I went there for my Masters of Fine Arts and then I've been staying there and teaching. You know, I take that for granted and coming back here it's a very different looking and acting student body. A lot more blond people [in Florida]. That sounds like a cliché but I mean everybody's blond and everyone's real into physical fitness and people wear a lot of gold jewelry. I mean just little things. I'm not trying to say anything bad about them but I mean it's like I come here and it's like people from this part of the country who are Oberlin students are like the small freakish artsy community at U. Florida.

LR: How do you like teaching?
WB: I love teaching. Um, I really do. I haven't gotten to teach creative writing for a while; I've had to teach like freshman comp. and Intro. to Lit. and well, some creative writing by correspondence through this division of continuing education. So in the fall I'll finally be teaching fiction in person again so I'm really excited about that.

LR: How do you teach creative writing?
WB: I feel that I draw heavily from things I learned here. Some things I learned in workshops in grad. school but really heavily from the way they run workshop here. I do give a lot of little one-page exercises, I mean it's not just a free-for-all write stories and then give each other feedback on it. There's a whole series of exercises and I like to let students' exercises generate other exercises.

For instance one time I had students trying to write a one-page thing about an obsession, anyone being obsessed about anything. So there were some weird funny ones. One guy wrote about being obsessed - well actually those were good but they weren't as "obsess-y" as I wanted them to be. It was hard to get that longing that I wanted to see in the work. So the next one was to write a page-long sentence. On anything. Just a one-page-long sentence. And actually those tended to be more obsessive than the obsession ones cause if you're writing a page-long sentence by definition you begin to get fanatic.
One guy wrote about being obsessed with a G.I. Joe that he wanted for Christmas. It was like him as a kid, you know, this is what I want for Christmas, this is why I want the G.I. Joe and this is what I'm gonna do with him once I get him. And it went on and on and on all about this specific battle, who would be fighting with the other things he had and who was on which side and it was so. . . funny and so good and it had so many weird implications that I asked everyone to write about a toy or object that they always wanted but never got as a kid. And who knows, there were some really great lines in those.
One girl wanted a real dollhouse and ended up getting a Fischer Price dollhouse and so she had this line about, she was just talking about how horrible it was and how the furniture was painted on the walls and the sofa had two holes in it because they're the round people. With two holes like a double toilet, she said. And then she said the dog was bigger than the dad, which I thought was a great line. So I made up a list of lines for people and then the next assignment was to write off of someone's line, like you could take "the dog is bigger than the dad" and make it be the first line of something. So I don't know whether that taught them how to write. The rest is a sort of more traditional creative writing workshop. I had a lot of fun, they seemed to be having a good time and I was having the time of my life reading [the work].

LR: So you haven't been to any creative writing classes since you've been back?
WB: Right, because of the schedule at the end of the semester that was canceled. I understand that you have fewer students [in the workshop] and they used to have the group leader system, which was like teaching assistants. When you were a senior for five hours of credit you would lead a group of eight 101/102 students. And you'd actually be leading the workshop and commenting on their work. You would still need Stuart [Friebert] or Diane [Vreuls] or another advisor. And still have the Monday big meeting in King and then there'd be the little groups. And that was a great thing, I thought. It was a great thing to know, you know, to imagine when you were a sophomore "one day I'm going to be a group leader" and Stuart and Diane would put you through these very stringent interviews to get to be a group leader.

Then in graduate school when you get to be a teaching assistant what they did was - they were very, very careful with how they want people to approach students. We weren't allowed to say "my students." They'd get really: "they're not your students. You're a student yourself." But it was wonderful. I really feel, especially since I've seen other creative writing programs, since I've been in grad school and having been part of a graduate community so I know a whole bunch of people who've been in creative writing programs all over the country, this is really extraordinary the way that [Oberlin] - it's very generous, it's not very competitive. They really discourage you from being egotistical or whatever. I mean even the way you talk about fiction in a workshop, or poetry, they're trying to teach you ways to talk about it that will be productive, not just teaching you how to do it and make it so good that you can sell it and no one else can sell theirs, which is kind of what you'll get in a lot of grad school programs. I didn't feel much like an Obie. I didn't feel like I fit into the big Oberlin community. I wasn't active here in anything except creative writing.

LR: You read the story "I am the Bear" yesterday. When did you write that?
WB: I wrote that in February 1994.

LR: How did that happen? You know, the process? Do you have a normal way you go about writing? Sorry, I know that's a terribly clichéd thing to say.
WB: No, it's fine. I'm not sure I have a "normally" yet. I do keep a journal, not a diary, notebooks actually filled with scraps of paper and ideas, things I'll see on TV or somewhere else in real life, or newspaper clippings, weird dialogue or the way people say things. That story I got from when I saw the supermodel Vendela on TV promoting the winter Olympics in Lillenhammer and she was with one of the Coca-Cola polar bear mascots, and she was talking to the bear and kissing him and stuff. She seemed so into it I wondered if she could've even made a distinction between knowing and not knowing. I mean obviously she knew it was not a bear but just the way, it was a little strange. And then I was thinking that guy, I assumed it was a guy, which I thought was just strange afterwards but I'm thinking that poor guy in the costume is probably someone who wants to do Shakespeare and makes six dollars right now doing this job and if he tried to walk up and talk to Vendela she would never give him the time of day.

The images I tend to collect and the things I collect are the projections of things that you don't even know are your concerns. But at the time [the story was written] I was feeling very cheated and frustrated and sort of outraged. I didn't really notice that [I felt that way] except why else would I notice that [commercial] at that particular time and that's how I got the idea for that [story].

LR: Now that you're teaching is that going to take away from your writing time?
WB: I highly doubt it. When I taught creative writing, I only got to teach it on and off at U. of Florida which is great. As a grad student you're lucky if you get a teaching assistantship at all especially in creative writing and not just freshman comp. but when I did teach this one upper-level fiction course by the end of that course I was more excited about writing than I had been in a couple of years. I'm sure that's not going to last, I mean if I teach for five years straight I'm sure I'm gong to need some vacations.

It's a real privilege to get to work with undergraduates because there are discoveries and things happening in their works where they're not so cynical. Grad students are generally as a whole a pretty cynical, terrified bunch of people, whereas undergrads have some more freedom. No matter how much you think you know as an undergrad you're always discovering things in your writing you don't even realize. As a teacher it's a real privilege to see that happen. It reminds you what the excitement is in writing.

LR: Do you want to continue writing short stories or -
WB: I'm trying to write a novel. As long as I'm writing I feel like I'm doing my job. I would like to write longer just because novels are allegedly easier to sell right now but if I end up writing another collection that'll be fine too. What I worry about is that I tend to be obsessive about tying things up and weaving things together and it worries me that if I get enough things going to sustain a novel I won't sleep for a year or something. Usually when I'm finishing a story I get into this state where you maybe don't sleep for a few days or maybe a week and I'm worried about how I'll sustain the energy mentally to write a novel. But I'd be more worried if I somehow didn't do it.


Oberlin

Copyright © 1996, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 124, Number 24; May 10, 1996

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