Narrative

I came to the University of Minnesota in 2002 to pursue my Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing--while I was here I discovered another passion in teaching. I think that undergraduate, and particularly first-year, composition courses aren't shouldn't just be a tedious requirement, but rather an intellectual haven and greenhouse rolled into one. My classroom should, ideally, be a place to stretch and challenge yourself, and it should be a place where you feel safe to do so. American college students are destined to become world leaders, and I consider it a privilege to share my background as a lover of words with them. I like to think that my experience as a writer and a teacher of creative writing have an influence on my composition courses, and that my students both enjoy and benefit from that influence. In recent years, I've focused a lot of my energy on encouraging students to turn away from what they (often rightly) consider the dry, academic style they've been taught to use in "school papers" and instead embrace readability (as in "will people who have no interest in what you do want to read this?") and energy in every document they write, from personal narratives to document summaries to research papers.