“We can leave the room thinking something different than when we walked in…”

While I rudely walked into the conversation about fifteen minutes late, due to having to move my car to try to save some money, I am glad I decided ‘better late than never.’ The discussion panel event in the fireplace lounge, “Teacher-Scholar: A Conversation with New Faculty in the English Department” was as entertaining as it was informative.  The professors on the discussion panel were Jeff Jackson, Katie Ahern, Laura Dunbar and our professor, Danica Savonick. I wish I could have been there in time for the introductions, especially if they mentioned which classes each of them taught. When I walked in Professor Savonick was talking about how “the classroom can be this transformative space where we can leave the room thinking something differently than when we walked in,” and that was something that really resonated with me as a non-traditional student; a twenty seven year old who hated reading and writing in high school, now loves to read and wants to be a writer. I am now trying to get my third college degree, and when I was in high school I had no desire to go to college whatsoever. There are certain professors that have an ability to really have an impact on their students, and without either of them really knowing it, one semester could change a student’s life. Being passionate about what you are studying is am extremely important part of the college experience, I believe. The professors on the panel today were certainly passionate about their careers. Prof. Savonick briefly discussed her research and the book she is working on about education and methods and ideas on how to improve teaching. Professor Savonick also talked about how she relates poetry to teaching, in that moments of silence are important in poetry, as they are in the classroom to let students process and take their time to speak. Professor Ahern talked about how her background was classically trained in music and music theory and then she switched gears to creative writing and applied her prior knowledge to the classroom in creative ways. She was able to pick up on if the acoustics in a room were too dry or too wet, (referring to certain factors in the room absorbing sound to a certain degree) then it affected student’s ability to use their voice in a certain way, and she was able to take sound into consideration and how it plays a role in the classroom, which I found fascinating. Laura Dunbar gave some insight on the cultural differences and expectations she had coming here to SUNY Cortland from Canada. She talked about how she encourages students to “relax into incoherence, incoherence is disorderly and disorienting,” I think what she meant by that was that you need to really relax and focus on what the point is you are trying to get across and let the words come to you, (but I am not really sure.) Professor Jackson talked about how for him, learning and teaching was like a video game, when you learn something new you get experience points and you level up. As someone who has played a lot of video games and Dungeons and Dragons for twelve years, his idea connected with me a lot as I have always used a similar mind set as motivation to exercise. It was great to know that there are so many different approaches to writing and that there is no right or wrong way to be a writer, you just need to find what works for you.

I had a question that I posed to the panel which was: “What books have had an impact on you as a writer that you would recommend to young writers to improve their skills or draw inspiration from?”  Danica expressed that a book that really helped her as a writer in editing her own work is called “The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself,” written by Susan Bell. She said that this book has helped her in the editing process in creating distance between yourself and your writing, but she is a firm believer that you should read what you like and write about what you like to read. That really connected with me because I want to be a fiction writer, and when I like a story that I just wrote it can be hard for me to proof read it because sometimes I get too excited that it is finally on paper and out of my head. Jeff Jackson said that comic books inspired to write stories about heroes as a kid, but as an adult a book that really stuck with him was “Writing Analytically” by David Rosenwasser. Katie Ahern said she was always drawn to the horror genre so the book “Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film” by Carol J. Clover was a book of note for her, as well as the work of Stephen King. Laura Dunbar offered some interesting insight that you go through a whole PhD program, just to read one book; for her that book was an essay about organizational learning, distributive cognition and universities, unfortunately I couldn’t quite make out for certain the author of the essay (something like Angstrom.) There were so many great questions in the audience and all of the speakers had wonderful responses and very intelligent things to say. Overall, the discussion was fascinating and went beyond my expectations. I am quite grateful to know we have such passionate professors at SUNY Cortland.