In order to foster more community among its creative writing students, the English department organizes the Visiting Writers Series, a series in which different authors are invited to give readings of their work and sit in classes with students.
The next visiting writer reading will be by Benjamin Stroud and will take place Wednesday, March 18, at 6pm in the Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries. There will be books written by Stroud available for purchase at the reading.
Chris DeWeese, Assistant Professor of Poetry, believes seeing writers in person helps with the reading of their work.
“It’s great to read a work,” DeWeese said, “but when you get to hear the author read it and when you’re able to meet them, it can really make literature come alive in ways you didn’t understand before. Poetry for me especially, because I’m a poet. I’m always thrilled to see an author reading their work. It can make the rhythms of a poem come alive in a way that you might not have caught while reading it in a book.”
The writers are picked by a committee consisting of faculty from the English department and are chosen based on criteria like proximity and whether or not the author is being taught to WSU students.
“We try to bring a very diverse group of authors that bring a lot of different approaches to writing,” DeWeese said. “A lot of our authors are somewhat local, meaning from Ohio or the Midwest. We also try to see what books faculty are teaching. If there are faculty that have assigned an author’s book to their students, it helps if they have already read their work before they attend a reading.”
DeWeese said that he thinks about performance when deciding on authors to bring into the series.
“I personally try to find writers that have a sense of performance in their work who aren’t afraid to shake up things a little bit in their readings,” DeWeese said. “Last year, we had Scott McClanahan, who would sing and get members of the audience to get up and dance with him. I think that was really exciting for people to see that a reading of a work can be interactive.”
The Visiting Writer Series, according to DeWeese, is helping to “build the name of the university.”
“It helps us to become more visible as a university to do a series like this, where people from Miami University come and see that we’re doing creative writing and we have a thriving community here,” said DeWeese. “My hope is that as we grow the series we will have more and more people from Dayton proper, maybe even high school, coming to readings and realizing that there is a great creative writing scene at WSU. They could realize that they could come here for their creative writing education instead of going to other colleges.”
