Andrew Wilson Interview

Andrew Wilson earned his Ph.D. in American Literature from Kent State University in 1996. He now works at William Rainey Harper College in Palatine, Illinois. He has published articles on Faulkner, Hemingway, Amiri Baraka, and (most recently) Vietnamese poetry about the U.S.-Vietnam War. He has a single poem published in Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School (U of Iowa Press, 1999).

LW: Can you tell our readers what current projects you are working on?

AW: I am indeed doing some writing from time to time: some poetry, for example. About a year ago, I worked on a fiction project and amassed about 125 pages. Most recently, I finished an article on N. Vietnamese poems about the U.S.-Vietnam War, and this article will appear in a book called Thirty Years After, published by Cambridge Scholars Press, coming out this year.

LW: I know you have scholarly work published on some famous writers. What attracts you to Faulkner, Hemingway, and Amiri Baraka?

AW: Of those three, I prefer (by far and away) Faulkner, who was a major subject of my Kent State dissertation (in 1996), by the way. Faulkner's idea that there is no such thing as the past -- that the past continues into and is woven indelibly into the present -- is one of the things that most attracts me to him. I agree with that (about the non-past nature of the past). Also, I think The Sound and the Fury is the best and most wonderfully strange book ever written by an American. I like Hemingway and Baraka (esp. Hemingway), too. Hemingway's clean style -- esp. in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms -- is a refreshing antithesis to Faulkner . . . though again, I prefer the latter. I also think Hemingway's books present a more sensitive, complicated view of what it means to be an American male than many critics have granted. I'm not a huge fan of Baraka's poetry, but I like his play called Dutchman, and my Baraka article strictly concerns Dutchman, an explosive and very racially charged Civil-Rights-Era play.

LW: Currently, you run the Honors Program at Harper College in Chicago. How would you describe your experience there?

AW: To be honest, there is no way for me briefly to capture the entirety of my Honors experience here, in this short reply. I will say, though, that coordinating the Honors Program is a good gig. It keeps me very busy, and for the most part I get to have daily contact with many of Harper's brightest, most driven students. The program has grown considerably over the past few years, perhaps by about 30 or 40% over the past 12 or 24 months. (We've been working hard at recruitment.) We run about 11 or 12 Honors courses each semester, and I gently bother many of Harper's best instructors to teach these courses, and the students tend to love the courses and the instructors. You can view our Honors courses on our website:www.harpercollege.edu/cluborgs/honors/index.htmlWhen you get to the main page, look for and click on the "courses" link along the top, and presto!We also have an important service and social component: for example, I returned from Kent on Friday evening (Mar. 13), and by Saturday morning I was already back in the car and heading to Harper. There, I picked up about five Honors students, and we came back downtown to spend the day cooking and serving at a North Chicago soup-kitchen-type venue called The Inspiration Cafe. (We visit the cafe twice every semester, on the 2nd Saturday of every other month.) This coming Thursday, we'll visit a place called the Lydia Home, which is (for lack of a better word) an orphanage for exceedingly disadvantaged children in Chicago. There, we'll tutor the students or help them with their homework for a few hours. That, too, is something we do on a regular basis, about twice every term. Sometimes we tutor, and other times we just play baseball with the kids or buy them pizza, etc. Some of the kids at Lydia have lived some fairly harsh lives by the age of eight or so, and it means a lot to them -- and to our Harper Honors folks, too -- that we come to share some time.

LW: Can you talk about your internship at Wick Poetry Center and how it contributed to your career?

AW: I loved my Wick Fellowship. I loved working with Maggie and getting to know her, and I feel that I got to know her extremely well over that time. Of course I enjoyed meeting all the amazing poets -- Alicia Ostriker, for example, and Gwendolyn Brooks and Li-Young Lee (I took his week-long, Wick-sponsored poetry workshop while he was there, and I struck up a friendship with him later, after moving to Chicago, as he lives here as well). As I said rather badly the other day, I think the main or sort of overall thing I "got" from the Wick Fellowship was the reminder that poetry is still alive -- and in fact it's a live and well. The whole program seemed to be devoted to living poets and new poems, and it was a minor revelation to me that there were so many great poets writing great poems even in the present, that poetry hadn't died with Keats, Frost, W. C. Williams, Plath, etc. There were Maggie's own working-class poems, which I loved. There were Li-Young Lee's poems about living on the boundary between America and his parents' China. Etc. All of that is to say, simply, that I still very definitely emphasize living poets and poetry in my English 102 classes, my Intro to Poetry classes, and more, and this is a direct result of my Wick experience.

LW: What is your favorite Wick memory?

AW: Nothing dramatic, really. It just so happened, though, that the AWP Conference was in nearby Pittsburgh during my year as the Wick Fellow, and of course the Wick Program (which was very very small in those days, just Maggie and me and one or two others) made the 90-minute journey to the conference. I still remember that August Wilson and John Edgar Wideman, natives of Pittsburgh, were the featured writers (with keynotes, etc.) at the conference, and Maggie introduced us to many very well-known folks, and it was fun and more fun. (We took a side trip to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.) That might be one of my favorite memories. On the other hand, it's likely that my favorite memory is a quieter and more encompassing sense of the entire year of working with poets, poetry, Maggie, the undergraduate poetry award thing, and (much) more. I had the pleasure of calling a few folks to tell them that they'd won the Chapbook award (my Ohio University friend Joe Bonomo won during my Wick Fellowship, and of course Maggie let me telephone him to let him know), and that was great. I even (honestly!) enjoyed stuffing envelopes and talking to Maggie or whomever all the while. Maggie was very beloved in the English Dept., so sometimes I'd be stuffing envelopes in front of her office, and otherwise tough-minded folks like Dr. Hines and Dr. Marovitz (whom I also loved very much, by the way) would stop by to chat amiably with her, and this afforded me a chance to see personalities in a new light. Naturally, that sort of thing had much to do with Maggie herself, but I also think that the larger Wick Program and its wonderful celebration of the arts had that kind of softening effect on folks.