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