THE HUB

I kept trying to write even after our newspaper folded, reading humor columns by Art Buchwald and Erma Bombeck, trying to imitate them. It turned out not to be so easy, but I kept going, trying to figure this whole thing out. I’m still fascinated by how stories are told: how to do it, how to make them better, how to move readers. 

 

I went to SUNY Oswego as an undergraduate. I had great professors when I was here, including Max Zimmer and John O’Brien in fiction, Anderson McCullough in playwriting, Robert Moore in literature. In poetry (which I wasn’t very good at—I kept trying to stuff my sonnets with stories) I had Lewis Turco, who founded the program. They were all influential. 

 

For graduate school I went to Syracuse University, where I had Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff as professors. I learned about writing from everyone, including the other students. One of the strange things about going to graduate school is having people who were once sitting across a workshop table from you on a late fall afternoon suddenly getting reviewed in the New York Times or seeing their books in bookstores, or movies made from their books. Two people who were there right around the time I was were Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City; Story of My Life) and George Saunders, (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; The Tenth of December) who teaches there now.

 

Courses Taught: I’ve taught all levels of fiction writing, playwriting, screenwriting, and creative nonfiction. I’ve also taught literature courses in Modern and American Drama, 20th century American Novel, Detective Fiction, a course in Fall, 2013 called The Meaning of Life. I once put together a literature class called Jung and the Restless, which led me to teaching Children’s Literature for a number of years, taking fairy tales and myths very seriously and seeing how they connect to adult works. A couple of years ago I co-taught a class called The Art and Psychology of Comedy, where students developed stand-up routines and wrote spec scripts for a sitcom. Right now, I teach beginning, intermediate, and advanced fiction writing. I’ve just developed an online course called Writing into Culture, about using popular genres to look at non-western cultures, which I’m going to teach in the fall. The great thing about Oswego is they let you try new courses and new approaches.

 

Favorite Writers: I have so many—that’s one of the privileges of writing—you get to indulge your curiosity. If I were to name a few, it would be Alice Munro, Joan Didion, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Jonathan Lethem. I like popular fiction—its narrative drive, particularly mysteries and thrillers, and so I read Lee Child, Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, George V. Higgins, Stephen King. Last summer, I read all of the George R. R. Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire books. For the Writing into Culture course, I’ve been reading Japanese mysteries. I love movies of all sorts—even bad or inept movies you can learn things from. In the screenwriting course I took apart movies like The Terminator, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jaws, and The Devil Wears Prada, but I changed them up each year.

 

Miscellaneous: I grew up in Eastchester, NY, right outside NYC. I was a black belt karate instructor when I was a kid, and I lifeguarded at a Westchester County public pool throughout college and into graduate school. One of my sons went to Oswego, and is now back to take courses leading to medical school.

 

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