New Faculty Read the First Night

Roger King, the new faculty in fiction read tonight. He says that his novels tend to alternate between the highly imaginative and the close-to-home. He read from a work-in-progress, about a writer suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, an illness Roger has struggled with for years. He's British, so the accent is an added bonus to his wry narrative.

We got in an animated discussion over dinner about how to write a story in English that is "happening" in another language. Ha Jin, in my opinion, does an amazing job of writing masterfully in English, but capturing idioms, syntax and rhythms in a way that convinces the reader that the characters are "speaking" Chinese. Of course, it helps to be fluent in the other language. But Adria Bernardi, one of the fiction faculty (and a translator of Italian poetry) said that it is often just as dependent on credible story telling and fictional language construction. In other words, if you're good enough, you can make your characters sound like they're speaking Urdu without really speaking it yourself. Hmmm...I'll have to mull this one over.

I'm a little anxious about whether to ask for a specific faculty member to be my supervisor this semseter or to leave it up to the program to choose for me. Is being completley open-handed an act of divine trust? Or should I learn how to exercise my preferences? The level of anxiety is low, however, because...well...all the fiction faculty are very good.