A STUDENT INTERVIEWS GEORGE VENN
Edited transcript of an unpublished interview by Kandice Kartchner, a student in Dr. Rob Davis’ Technical Writing course at Eastern Oregon University, May, 1996. At my request, Ms. Kartchner wrote her questions, then I wrote these answers for her.
KK: What’s your job title?
GV: Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence
KK: Who’s your employer?
GV: Both are titles from EOU, but I’m also self-employed as a professional writer/editor/lecturer independent of the university, a Thumbkin dancing alone.
KK: How long have you worked here?
GV: At EOU, I've taught full or part time for around twenty six years–minus two leaves-of-absence without pay, minus years of part-time appointments. As an independent writer, I sold my first work in 1970. Last year on leave-without-pay, I earned nothing as a professor, but I earned around $20,000 as a writer. This year, I might earn nothing as a writer, but I'll earn around $20,000 as a professor.
KK: How long have you worked in higher education?
GV: I discriminate between “work” and “labor” here: as an employee of EOU, I have labored for twenty six years. This means a specific social function for which I'm paid. My work as a writer as been going on indefinitely. It's an identity apart from my university role. To make this distinction, Chekhov, a doctor, says medicine was his wife, literature his mistress.
KK: Where did you go to school?
GV: Beginning in 1961, I completed my BA over seven years at The College of Idaho; Central University, Quito, Equador; University of Salamanca, Spain; and City Literary Institute, London. Between 1967-1970, I completed an MFA at the University of Montana, Missoula.
KK: What’s a typical day on the job like?
GV: My life is shaped by years and years of disciplined routine that includes both labor and work. Most days, I write at home for four or five hours in the morning, then teach at the university in the afternoons. Evenings and weekends, I read, mark papers, prepare for the next day, the next week. Between those places and times, I garden, renovate, walk, travel, and play all of those other roles the world gives–father, husband, son, brother, neighbor, friend, correspondent.
KK: What’s an atypical day on the job like?
GV: Leaving town for a conference, reading, meeting day—cars, money, suitcases, books, reservations, plans, schedules—that's one kind of hectic variation; meeting a deadline of some kind—drafts, drafts, revisions, drafts, revisions, postage, UPS, more revisions, drafts, copies, and a wild dash for the mail box—another kind of variation. Those are two kinds of variations on the writer's routine. Breaks in the professor's routine are more predictable—finals week flurry, the day grades are due, the release of breaks between quarters, the summer opening.
KK: What’s the most rewarding thing you’ve done on the job?
GV: As a professor, I'm rewarded when students show me that they've become independent learners themselves, when they've thrown off the fear of what they don't already know, when they've learned to ask the best questions, when they've been able to surprise themselves with a discovery, to hold thoughtful and intelligent dialogue, to honor and respect and protect the silence and beauty at the center of all things, to arrive at and be able to share moments of insight and revelation, to challenge the dangerous superficialities perpetuated around us by convention, stereotype, surface, tradition. As a writer, I am rewarded when I meet my the same expectations I have of my students.
KK: What’s the most frustrating thing about your job?
GV: In both labor and work, “bearing fools gladly,” as Browning says, is frustrating. Dealing with ignorant, superficial people who think in stereotypes, who have no sense of history or culture around them, who never question themselves or their views, who pretend that their ideas never need to be tested with anyone, who make no effort to discover any complexity in anything, who know neither other languages or cultures, who are completely abstracted from the green organic world, who are caught up in their own monologues, who have unwittingly subscribed to the Faustian bargain, the Midas bargain. Empiricists, literalists, technocrats, bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists may be examples.
KK: What are you most proud of and why?
GV: That I've learned to not be fooled by pride—since it always leads to destruction.
KK: What would you like to do over again—given the chance?
GV: Nothing. No regrets. What I've done is my life. That's enough. I'm working on three new manuscripts now.
KK: How well did your school experience prepare you for this job?
GV: School changed for me dramatically over time. In high school, I was an all-conference athlete, student body president, vocalist, National Honor Society member, etc. I had the entire approval of my community and everything I did was rewarded. In college, everything changed. I dropped athletics and began to focus on the arts and humanities. As an undergraduate in Equador, I began to see language and other cultures as a source of freedom and delight. As an undergraduate in Spain, I began to wander from all predictable thinking in English and learned to be like Columbus—whose plans for discovering America were not approved by the university. In graduate school, I recognized that I was very different from my fellow students because of all of these experiences—both at home and abroad. School, in short, set me on the journey of discovery—both within and without. I'm still on that journey.
KK: What was the best part of your education?
GV: The year in Latin America at Central University and the months in Spain and at Salamanca University and at City Literary Institute in London. Breaking out of the hard-boiled eggshell of American and English speaking culture was a major source of freedom for me. See “Letter to Rev. and Mrs. Venn from Equador” in The Prescott St. Reader (1994).
KK: What was the worst part of your education?
GV: The first year of college—where all of my high school successes were shown to be superficial except in giving me confidence that I could learn something new and difficult. In high school, I was never intellectually challenged. I plagiarized my senior English research paper and my writing teacher didn't even know it. I paid for that as a freshman.
KK: What can schools do to better prepare students?
GV: The most difficult work in teaching is treating each student as an individual long enough for the student to, as Chekhov says, “get the slave out of themselves.” Schools tend to think in groups and cultivate a particular kind of parroting. I never responded well when I was treated as one of a group or was expected to become a parrot. When someone took the trouble to treat me personally, I learned everything I needed to know and I learned to take over that learning process myself. Generally, schools need to be more rigorous, more challenging, less supportive of comfort and less interested in distributing middle class pablum. Education is more about learning to invent and live your life than about getting a job and earning money.
Schools also tend to treat culture as some kind of imported commodity which teachers distribute. This creates huge ignorance of the culture around us—to which we remain blind, deaf, and dumb. The horizontal metaphor of cultural commodity distribution conflicts with the vertical metaphor of archeological discovery in place. While the sciences, for example, teach the process of discovery in place, the arts and humanities are still in love with the commodity distribution metaphor. See Marking the Magic Circle for more details.
KK: What have you learned on the job?
GV: As a professor, too much to write here. One thing will have to do: I learned that being a professor requires you to seek out and find the rewards associated with being a student—listed above. A professor has to keep the student in the self alive and well.
As a writer, too much to write here. One thing: bozos are everywhere if you're a person who values integrity not defined by greed. See "At the Foul Line" in Oregon East, 1995, for more details about a writer's life in a democracy.
KK: How did you learn these things?
GV: As a professor, I watched my colleagues die of their own pompous, sophisticated boredom or ambition, then take that boredom or ambition out on their students, their families, or themselves. I watched one professor nearly eat himself to death, another one smoke himself to death, another one bureaucrat herself to death. I watched a professor give up being an artist and become a bureaucrat. I watched a professor tour the United States giving the same speech over and over again for good money. I've seen more than one professor destroy his wife and children. I watched a professor pretend she was committed to teaching writing, but she really knew nothing about what she was doing at all. So, I had lots of examples of decoys around me—people I would never want to be like for any reason—sycophants, charlatans, sophists, dandies, Beavis and Butthead jerks.
As a writer, I found many noble examples and I've tried to learn from them.
KK: What role did/does formal training have?
GV: Formal training for professors is adequate at the graduate level if there’s sufficiently skilled and informed supervision of teaching. As a professor, you're frequently teaching students to somehow engage and understand their traditions. As a writer, you have to consistently violate the tradition in order to extend it, so too much formal training for writers can be a liability. Bertrand Russell said, “If you're thinking responsibly, you're not thinking.” That quote would likely be more congenial to writers than to professor I’ve known.
KK: What advice would you give?
GV: Advice about being a professor: don't do it unless you're committed to the life of discovery, creativity, and knowledge. The life given to distributing knowledge can be extremely dangerous. It can turn you into a pipeline or a loading dock or some other "information extraction" source. Deadly stuff to be defined completely by your labor and nothing more.
Advice about being a writer: Write if you must.
KK: If you made mistakes, what did you learn from them?
GV: One mistake as a professor comes to mind: I assumed that my fellow professors were actually interested in the life of the mind, actually interested in literature, actually interested in adding to, going beyond, and challenging the tradition. I found the opposite to be the case. Most seem to be given to middle class banalities.
One mistake I made as a writer: I trusted administrators of this university to understand the importance of literary activity. "Empire follows Art," as Blake says. I found out that they were mostly tyrannical fools who understood nothing about culture, place, or history. They put radio stations in the library, raided book budgets for thousands of dollars, exported professors to places they could never be professors, violated basic artistic and academic principles without a thought. Introducing the current Division of Extended Programs (DEP), the current university president summed up his views this way: “Well, we'll just have to see how much blood we can get from a turnip.” He was referring to all university faculty with this cliche. That's a leader? What a joke. DEP is more like the Division of Electronic Placebos?, or how about the Division of the Emperor's Pretense? or maybe the Division of Ersatz Puerility? or the Division of Empty Products?
KK: What does someone need to know to succeed at this job?
GV: Too much to explain here: as a professor, literary history in as much depth and variation as you can manage; artistic practice in all forms, media, varieties, and genres; literary experience in as many other cultures and languages as you can get to without going completely broke, etc. As a writer, self-confidence approaching arrogance, humility approaching ignorance, fearlessness approaching the revolutionary, patience of the tortoise, quickness of the hare, curiosity of all cats, passion of Pygmalion, love of language, tenacity of Epimetheus, wilderness of Coyote, and all of the same qualities that a professor needs to know above—including self-respect, self-discipline, self-knowledge, self-control.
KK: Do you need more technical, specialized knowledge, or more common sense and knowledge of human nature?
GV: Both—and everything between. As Henry James says about being a novelist, "Try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost."
KK: What sort of person will succeed at this job?
GV: Everything I've said so far addresses that.
KK: What sort of person will struggle at this job?
GV: Undisciplined. Closed minded. Slave mentality. No language, culture, or history. No aptitude or skills. Etc. I've addressed this already also.
KK: How important are ambition, a thick skin, money?
GV: “The worst are full of passionate intensity. The best lack all conviction,” says Yeats. “Success is counted sweetest/ by those who ne'r succeed./ To comprehend a nectar/ requires sorest need,” says Dickinson. I doubt those who seek power. I don't consider them leaders. They're politicos, not statesmen. I trust those who accept responsibility when it is offered to them. A thick skin is essential for anything–since criticism is always with you and much of it is groundless. Money is the most dangerous of all motives.
KK: How important are a strong work ethic, honesty, and trust?
GV: These matter. Always.
KK: Did you ever feel like quitting and why?
GV: Early in my career, I voluntarily removed myself to teach half-time because teaching full-time was becoming self-destructive. I had no time to write. I had to spend all of my time being an institutional drone. So, I've only taught full-time here for about eight years. All the rest have been half-time. That financial compromise—I earn half of what others earn—has always made it easy for me to continue teaching. I've only considered quitting after listening to a dean or provost blabber for an hour about nothing and expect me to take it seriously. As I writer, I am always working. I'll be writing the day I die.
KK: What types of reading are used in your work?
GV: All kinds of reading are required for me as a professor: literal surface, sub-texts, possible critical interpretations—from mythic to political to historicist to cross cultural. It may be the most important skill in the profession—constructing, discovering meanings in texts, putting texts in context. As a writer, I read in dramatically different ways than others. I am always looking for and watching how other writers do things, so that I can steal what I like make it my own.
KK: What forms of writing do you use in your work?
GV: All professors have to write all the time: memos, notes, letters of reference, reports, papers, essays, books, poems, stories, grants. A literate life requires literary production. There's no way around it. I've probably written more than $300,000 in successful grants in twenty six years. Most recently, I finished an eight-page report on the EOU capstone system—a campus-wide study for the provost. As a writer, I've written plays, essays, poems, short fiction, a novel, articles, reviews and so on. I exclude no serious literary form from my stove where many kettles are simmering away all the time. I now have a manuscript of poems, a manuscript of personal essays, a manuscript of literary essays, and a novel in the works.
KK: In what ways do you use critical thinking in your work?
GV: Huge range of thought processes required for both professions—from following the slightest feeling or intuition into a poem to consciously and aggressively shaping a thirty-page argument. The topics may be known or unknown, predictable and unpredictable, vast and simple. Arguments with others are common and lead to prose. Arguments with myself lead to poems. Narratives are more common for writers but less common for professors. However, narrative scholarship is now becoming more visible. My most recently published essay was a forty-page autobiographical narrative about poetry and place in Western American Literature. They invited me to write the essay as a representative for all writers in the Pacific Northwest. The essay consists of history, literary criticism, autobiography, and poems. A mixed genre piece. The most recent literary award—Andres Berger Prize—I received was for a poem based on a passage I read about emperor penguins in Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative. So, I take to the widest possible range. Come, any thought. Come, any idea, any image, any form. Nothing exclusive here. As a writer, I'm inclusive.
KK: Do thinking, reading, and speaking influence your field, and how much time is devoted to them?
GV: Currently, I devote more time to writing and reading than speaking. I try to listen always for whatever voice is appearing. Simultaneously, I distrust a lot of speaking and detest the univocal, the monologist. The mutually-enhancing process of exchange is dialogue, the equivocal. I believe in substantive dialogue. On the other hand, talk's cheap. Much of it is without consequence. Much of it is evanescent and meaningless banalities.
KK: What was your best experience as a writer/speaker?
GV: No particular experience. Finishing a day of writing, starting a new piece, reworking an old piece—all of these can happen in one day. There's continuous “best experience” for a writer engaged in daily writing. As a speaker, I've done so many keynote addresses now that I'm not excited by the prospect of another one—as I once was. Now, I look on invitations to speak as competing with my time to write. I still accept speaking engagements, but not without some reluctance.
KK: What was your worst experience as a writer/speaker?
GV: None. I try not to evaluate myself in these judgmental extremes. In every text, every meeting, every draft, every person, every conversation, I am learning something new.
KK: How did your education affect your sense of writing and speaking?
GV: My undergraduate education taught me to resist all cultural norms and definitions of what an education should be. I took seven years to complete my BA in English with minors in Spanish, Music, Acting, and Athletics. Three of those years, I lived outside the US in another culture where I studied seriously another language and history, another literature and psychology. While my peers marched through their degrees in four years, I was having my eyes and ears completely redefined and my horizons became international. While I was still an undergraduate, I learned that the American West was a new, unstudied, unknown region of the American empire. One of my professors knew the literature of this territory. I became his serious student, and he was the most serious student of the American regionalist, Harold G. Merriam, whose contribution to the Regionalist Movement in the United States has recently been documented in Revolt in the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in the United States by Robert Dorman. So, I simultaneously became international and regional. Everything I've done since that time has been based on connecting those two approaches—see the largest possible human picture, see the closest and most intimate picture. Connect the universal and the particular. See how one leads to the other, contains the other, reveals the other.
KK: Did your education affect your language skills?
GV: I had three years of Spanish in high school, two years in college, then lived for nearly two years in Hispanic countries— Equador and Spain. Learning English became much easier for me because of the intensive language training I had in Spanish. I started teaching ESL when I lived in Equador and that training by the United States Information Service started me on the road to being an ESL instructor later in Spain, and most recently, in China. I also designed and started the ESL program at EOU. Also, because I was a vocal musician and a music major for years, and because I come from a family of singers, I learned early to sing in five or six different languages. My choral repertoire includes music in Medieval French, Spanish, and German, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, and other languages. Finally, my family's passionate emphasis on memorizing the Bible made a lasting impression on my life as a student of language. By the age of thirteen, I had been required to memorize about half of the New Testament.
KK: What parts of your education failed?
GV: I'm terrible at mathematics.
KK: What have you learned about language practices while on the job?
GV: As a professor, I've learned that language practices are immensely varied, and that most people who use language have no idea of the complexity of the medium they employ. In one sentence, for instance, an English speaker may use loan words from six different languages. As a writer, I've learned that language moves us beyond ourselves in ways no one can predict when we enter the language and start exploring. I didn't have any idea about this process until I began to write and write.
KK: What is the role of education in your work?
GV: My education is continuous—in all ways. So, education keeps me alive, growing, changing, exploring, writing, thinking, wondering, considering, doubting, examining, challenging, dismissing, laughing, listening—like anyone who really wants to be alive, right?
KK: What is the role of personal knowledge in your work?
GV: Personal knowledge for a professor is essential. I've found that the professors who know the least about themselves also know the least about literature, about their students, and about the quest for a good life. Self-knowledge leads to self-reverence and self-control. That's an old Greek model and I think it's still true. I've watched a lot of people destroy themselves and people they love because they were completely ignorant of who they were and who other people are. A tragic prison to be trapped in—no self knowledge. As a writer, I am always trying to transcend the self-knowledge which begins the work itself. I am pressing myself to find out something new—even as I write this for you.
KK: What role do personal qualities have in your work?
GV: “Personal qualities” is a fine generalization. To be specific, I'll address one. I trust my sense of outrage and I don't try to conceal it. That sometimes leads to eloquence, and eloquence frightens some people. Real emotion is sometimes more than the simple-minded can bear to confront, because they are hiding out from emotions all the time. Hemingway calls outrage a "built in crap detector." I've paid the price for being outspoken. It cost me seventeen years of being untenured and it cost me thousands of dollars. Simultaneously, I've seen the benefits of that willingness to speak openly and freely. I was chair for three
years of the committee which stopped the Army Corp of Engineers from building a dam on Catherine Creek. I was chair of a 1,500 family food cooperative for three years. I've testified in favor of wilderness areas which became wilderness. I've criticized tyrants and bigots and developers in the public press and some of them I even managed to influence. I've edited Oregon's first and only set of historical literary anthologies. And so on. So, there is a look at one personal quality and its effects. Some people admire this outspoken quality. They say I have integrity. Other people are offended by it and call me belligerent. In an age when eloquence is being destroyed by political manipulation, and when evading any direct clear simple statement is a common practice, I still keep talking in the way that seems best to me. Let others platitudinize, mock, advertise, and deceive with fakery, evasions, tricks, banalities, and lies. I'm still going to try to get from language one more revelation of what seems true.
GV: Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence
KK: Who’s your employer?
GV: Both are titles from EOU, but I’m also self-employed as a professional writer/editor/lecturer independent of the university, a Thumbkin dancing alone.
KK: How long have you worked here?
GV: At EOU, I've taught full or part time for around twenty six years–minus two leaves-of-absence without pay, minus years of part-time appointments. As an independent writer, I sold my first work in 1970. Last year on leave-without-pay, I earned nothing as a professor, but I earned around $20,000 as a writer. This year, I might earn nothing as a writer, but I'll earn around $20,000 as a professor.
KK: How long have you worked in higher education?
GV: I discriminate between “work” and “labor” here: as an employee of EOU, I have labored for twenty six years. This means a specific social function for which I'm paid. My work as a writer as been going on indefinitely. It's an identity apart from my university role. To make this distinction, Chekhov, a doctor, says medicine was his wife, literature his mistress.
KK: Where did you go to school?
GV: Beginning in 1961, I completed my BA over seven years at The College of Idaho; Central University, Quito, Equador; University of Salamanca, Spain; and City Literary Institute, London. Between 1967-1970, I completed an MFA at the University of Montana, Missoula.
KK: What’s a typical day on the job like?
GV: My life is shaped by years and years of disciplined routine that includes both labor and work. Most days, I write at home for four or five hours in the morning, then teach at the university in the afternoons. Evenings and weekends, I read, mark papers, prepare for the next day, the next week. Between those places and times, I garden, renovate, walk, travel, and play all of those other roles the world gives–father, husband, son, brother, neighbor, friend, correspondent.
KK: What’s an atypical day on the job like?
GV: Leaving town for a conference, reading, meeting day—cars, money, suitcases, books, reservations, plans, schedules—that's one kind of hectic variation; meeting a deadline of some kind—drafts, drafts, revisions, drafts, revisions, postage, UPS, more revisions, drafts, copies, and a wild dash for the mail box—another kind of variation. Those are two kinds of variations on the writer's routine. Breaks in the professor's routine are more predictable—finals week flurry, the day grades are due, the release of breaks between quarters, the summer opening.
KK: What’s the most rewarding thing you’ve done on the job?
GV: As a professor, I'm rewarded when students show me that they've become independent learners themselves, when they've thrown off the fear of what they don't already know, when they've learned to ask the best questions, when they've been able to surprise themselves with a discovery, to hold thoughtful and intelligent dialogue, to honor and respect and protect the silence and beauty at the center of all things, to arrive at and be able to share moments of insight and revelation, to challenge the dangerous superficialities perpetuated around us by convention, stereotype, surface, tradition. As a writer, I am rewarded when I meet my the same expectations I have of my students.
KK: What’s the most frustrating thing about your job?
GV: In both labor and work, “bearing fools gladly,” as Browning says, is frustrating. Dealing with ignorant, superficial people who think in stereotypes, who have no sense of history or culture around them, who never question themselves or their views, who pretend that their ideas never need to be tested with anyone, who make no effort to discover any complexity in anything, who know neither other languages or cultures, who are completely abstracted from the green organic world, who are caught up in their own monologues, who have unwittingly subscribed to the Faustian bargain, the Midas bargain. Empiricists, literalists, technocrats, bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists may be examples.
KK: What are you most proud of and why?
GV: That I've learned to not be fooled by pride—since it always leads to destruction.
KK: What would you like to do over again—given the chance?
GV: Nothing. No regrets. What I've done is my life. That's enough. I'm working on three new manuscripts now.
KK: How well did your school experience prepare you for this job?
GV: School changed for me dramatically over time. In high school, I was an all-conference athlete, student body president, vocalist, National Honor Society member, etc. I had the entire approval of my community and everything I did was rewarded. In college, everything changed. I dropped athletics and began to focus on the arts and humanities. As an undergraduate in Equador, I began to see language and other cultures as a source of freedom and delight. As an undergraduate in Spain, I began to wander from all predictable thinking in English and learned to be like Columbus—whose plans for discovering America were not approved by the university. In graduate school, I recognized that I was very different from my fellow students because of all of these experiences—both at home and abroad. School, in short, set me on the journey of discovery—both within and without. I'm still on that journey.
KK: What was the best part of your education?
GV: The year in Latin America at Central University and the months in Spain and at Salamanca University and at City Literary Institute in London. Breaking out of the hard-boiled eggshell of American and English speaking culture was a major source of freedom for me. See “Letter to Rev. and Mrs. Venn from Equador” in The Prescott St. Reader (1994).
KK: What was the worst part of your education?
GV: The first year of college—where all of my high school successes were shown to be superficial except in giving me confidence that I could learn something new and difficult. In high school, I was never intellectually challenged. I plagiarized my senior English research paper and my writing teacher didn't even know it. I paid for that as a freshman.
KK: What can schools do to better prepare students?
GV: The most difficult work in teaching is treating each student as an individual long enough for the student to, as Chekhov says, “get the slave out of themselves.” Schools tend to think in groups and cultivate a particular kind of parroting. I never responded well when I was treated as one of a group or was expected to become a parrot. When someone took the trouble to treat me personally, I learned everything I needed to know and I learned to take over that learning process myself. Generally, schools need to be more rigorous, more challenging, less supportive of comfort and less interested in distributing middle class pablum. Education is more about learning to invent and live your life than about getting a job and earning money.
Schools also tend to treat culture as some kind of imported commodity which teachers distribute. This creates huge ignorance of the culture around us—to which we remain blind, deaf, and dumb. The horizontal metaphor of cultural commodity distribution conflicts with the vertical metaphor of archeological discovery in place. While the sciences, for example, teach the process of discovery in place, the arts and humanities are still in love with the commodity distribution metaphor. See Marking the Magic Circle for more details.
KK: What have you learned on the job?
GV: As a professor, too much to write here. One thing will have to do: I learned that being a professor requires you to seek out and find the rewards associated with being a student—listed above. A professor has to keep the student in the self alive and well.
As a writer, too much to write here. One thing: bozos are everywhere if you're a person who values integrity not defined by greed. See "At the Foul Line" in Oregon East, 1995, for more details about a writer's life in a democracy.
KK: How did you learn these things?
GV: As a professor, I watched my colleagues die of their own pompous, sophisticated boredom or ambition, then take that boredom or ambition out on their students, their families, or themselves. I watched one professor nearly eat himself to death, another one smoke himself to death, another one bureaucrat herself to death. I watched a professor give up being an artist and become a bureaucrat. I watched a professor tour the United States giving the same speech over and over again for good money. I've seen more than one professor destroy his wife and children. I watched a professor pretend she was committed to teaching writing, but she really knew nothing about what she was doing at all. So, I had lots of examples of decoys around me—people I would never want to be like for any reason—sycophants, charlatans, sophists, dandies, Beavis and Butthead jerks.
As a writer, I found many noble examples and I've tried to learn from them.
KK: What role did/does formal training have?
GV: Formal training for professors is adequate at the graduate level if there’s sufficiently skilled and informed supervision of teaching. As a professor, you're frequently teaching students to somehow engage and understand their traditions. As a writer, you have to consistently violate the tradition in order to extend it, so too much formal training for writers can be a liability. Bertrand Russell said, “If you're thinking responsibly, you're not thinking.” That quote would likely be more congenial to writers than to professor I’ve known.
KK: What advice would you give?
GV: Advice about being a professor: don't do it unless you're committed to the life of discovery, creativity, and knowledge. The life given to distributing knowledge can be extremely dangerous. It can turn you into a pipeline or a loading dock or some other "information extraction" source. Deadly stuff to be defined completely by your labor and nothing more.
Advice about being a writer: Write if you must.
KK: If you made mistakes, what did you learn from them?
GV: One mistake as a professor comes to mind: I assumed that my fellow professors were actually interested in the life of the mind, actually interested in literature, actually interested in adding to, going beyond, and challenging the tradition. I found the opposite to be the case. Most seem to be given to middle class banalities.
One mistake I made as a writer: I trusted administrators of this university to understand the importance of literary activity. "Empire follows Art," as Blake says. I found out that they were mostly tyrannical fools who understood nothing about culture, place, or history. They put radio stations in the library, raided book budgets for thousands of dollars, exported professors to places they could never be professors, violated basic artistic and academic principles without a thought. Introducing the current Division of Extended Programs (DEP), the current university president summed up his views this way: “Well, we'll just have to see how much blood we can get from a turnip.” He was referring to all university faculty with this cliche. That's a leader? What a joke. DEP is more like the Division of Electronic Placebos?, or how about the Division of the Emperor's Pretense? or maybe the Division of Ersatz Puerility? or the Division of Empty Products?
KK: What does someone need to know to succeed at this job?
GV: Too much to explain here: as a professor, literary history in as much depth and variation as you can manage; artistic practice in all forms, media, varieties, and genres; literary experience in as many other cultures and languages as you can get to without going completely broke, etc. As a writer, self-confidence approaching arrogance, humility approaching ignorance, fearlessness approaching the revolutionary, patience of the tortoise, quickness of the hare, curiosity of all cats, passion of Pygmalion, love of language, tenacity of Epimetheus, wilderness of Coyote, and all of the same qualities that a professor needs to know above—including self-respect, self-discipline, self-knowledge, self-control.
KK: Do you need more technical, specialized knowledge, or more common sense and knowledge of human nature?
GV: Both—and everything between. As Henry James says about being a novelist, "Try to be the kind of person on whom nothing is lost."
KK: What sort of person will succeed at this job?
GV: Everything I've said so far addresses that.
KK: What sort of person will struggle at this job?
GV: Undisciplined. Closed minded. Slave mentality. No language, culture, or history. No aptitude or skills. Etc. I've addressed this already also.
KK: How important are ambition, a thick skin, money?
GV: “The worst are full of passionate intensity. The best lack all conviction,” says Yeats. “Success is counted sweetest/ by those who ne'r succeed./ To comprehend a nectar/ requires sorest need,” says Dickinson. I doubt those who seek power. I don't consider them leaders. They're politicos, not statesmen. I trust those who accept responsibility when it is offered to them. A thick skin is essential for anything–since criticism is always with you and much of it is groundless. Money is the most dangerous of all motives.
KK: How important are a strong work ethic, honesty, and trust?
GV: These matter. Always.
KK: Did you ever feel like quitting and why?
GV: Early in my career, I voluntarily removed myself to teach half-time because teaching full-time was becoming self-destructive. I had no time to write. I had to spend all of my time being an institutional drone. So, I've only taught full-time here for about eight years. All the rest have been half-time. That financial compromise—I earn half of what others earn—has always made it easy for me to continue teaching. I've only considered quitting after listening to a dean or provost blabber for an hour about nothing and expect me to take it seriously. As I writer, I am always working. I'll be writing the day I die.
KK: What types of reading are used in your work?
GV: All kinds of reading are required for me as a professor: literal surface, sub-texts, possible critical interpretations—from mythic to political to historicist to cross cultural. It may be the most important skill in the profession—constructing, discovering meanings in texts, putting texts in context. As a writer, I read in dramatically different ways than others. I am always looking for and watching how other writers do things, so that I can steal what I like make it my own.
KK: What forms of writing do you use in your work?
GV: All professors have to write all the time: memos, notes, letters of reference, reports, papers, essays, books, poems, stories, grants. A literate life requires literary production. There's no way around it. I've probably written more than $300,000 in successful grants in twenty six years. Most recently, I finished an eight-page report on the EOU capstone system—a campus-wide study for the provost. As a writer, I've written plays, essays, poems, short fiction, a novel, articles, reviews and so on. I exclude no serious literary form from my stove where many kettles are simmering away all the time. I now have a manuscript of poems, a manuscript of personal essays, a manuscript of literary essays, and a novel in the works.
KK: In what ways do you use critical thinking in your work?
GV: Huge range of thought processes required for both professions—from following the slightest feeling or intuition into a poem to consciously and aggressively shaping a thirty-page argument. The topics may be known or unknown, predictable and unpredictable, vast and simple. Arguments with others are common and lead to prose. Arguments with myself lead to poems. Narratives are more common for writers but less common for professors. However, narrative scholarship is now becoming more visible. My most recently published essay was a forty-page autobiographical narrative about poetry and place in Western American Literature. They invited me to write the essay as a representative for all writers in the Pacific Northwest. The essay consists of history, literary criticism, autobiography, and poems. A mixed genre piece. The most recent literary award—Andres Berger Prize—I received was for a poem based on a passage I read about emperor penguins in Robert Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative. So, I take to the widest possible range. Come, any thought. Come, any idea, any image, any form. Nothing exclusive here. As a writer, I'm inclusive.
KK: Do thinking, reading, and speaking influence your field, and how much time is devoted to them?
GV: Currently, I devote more time to writing and reading than speaking. I try to listen always for whatever voice is appearing. Simultaneously, I distrust a lot of speaking and detest the univocal, the monologist. The mutually-enhancing process of exchange is dialogue, the equivocal. I believe in substantive dialogue. On the other hand, talk's cheap. Much of it is without consequence. Much of it is evanescent and meaningless banalities.
KK: What was your best experience as a writer/speaker?
GV: No particular experience. Finishing a day of writing, starting a new piece, reworking an old piece—all of these can happen in one day. There's continuous “best experience” for a writer engaged in daily writing. As a speaker, I've done so many keynote addresses now that I'm not excited by the prospect of another one—as I once was. Now, I look on invitations to speak as competing with my time to write. I still accept speaking engagements, but not without some reluctance.
KK: What was your worst experience as a writer/speaker?
GV: None. I try not to evaluate myself in these judgmental extremes. In every text, every meeting, every draft, every person, every conversation, I am learning something new.
KK: How did your education affect your sense of writing and speaking?
GV: My undergraduate education taught me to resist all cultural norms and definitions of what an education should be. I took seven years to complete my BA in English with minors in Spanish, Music, Acting, and Athletics. Three of those years, I lived outside the US in another culture where I studied seriously another language and history, another literature and psychology. While my peers marched through their degrees in four years, I was having my eyes and ears completely redefined and my horizons became international. While I was still an undergraduate, I learned that the American West was a new, unstudied, unknown region of the American empire. One of my professors knew the literature of this territory. I became his serious student, and he was the most serious student of the American regionalist, Harold G. Merriam, whose contribution to the Regionalist Movement in the United States has recently been documented in Revolt in the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in the United States by Robert Dorman. So, I simultaneously became international and regional. Everything I've done since that time has been based on connecting those two approaches—see the largest possible human picture, see the closest and most intimate picture. Connect the universal and the particular. See how one leads to the other, contains the other, reveals the other.
KK: Did your education affect your language skills?
GV: I had three years of Spanish in high school, two years in college, then lived for nearly two years in Hispanic countries— Equador and Spain. Learning English became much easier for me because of the intensive language training I had in Spanish. I started teaching ESL when I lived in Equador and that training by the United States Information Service started me on the road to being an ESL instructor later in Spain, and most recently, in China. I also designed and started the ESL program at EOU. Also, because I was a vocal musician and a music major for years, and because I come from a family of singers, I learned early to sing in five or six different languages. My choral repertoire includes music in Medieval French, Spanish, and German, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, and other languages. Finally, my family's passionate emphasis on memorizing the Bible made a lasting impression on my life as a student of language. By the age of thirteen, I had been required to memorize about half of the New Testament.
KK: What parts of your education failed?
GV: I'm terrible at mathematics.
KK: What have you learned about language practices while on the job?
GV: As a professor, I've learned that language practices are immensely varied, and that most people who use language have no idea of the complexity of the medium they employ. In one sentence, for instance, an English speaker may use loan words from six different languages. As a writer, I've learned that language moves us beyond ourselves in ways no one can predict when we enter the language and start exploring. I didn't have any idea about this process until I began to write and write.
KK: What is the role of education in your work?
GV: My education is continuous—in all ways. So, education keeps me alive, growing, changing, exploring, writing, thinking, wondering, considering, doubting, examining, challenging, dismissing, laughing, listening—like anyone who really wants to be alive, right?
KK: What is the role of personal knowledge in your work?
GV: Personal knowledge for a professor is essential. I've found that the professors who know the least about themselves also know the least about literature, about their students, and about the quest for a good life. Self-knowledge leads to self-reverence and self-control. That's an old Greek model and I think it's still true. I've watched a lot of people destroy themselves and people they love because they were completely ignorant of who they were and who other people are. A tragic prison to be trapped in—no self knowledge. As a writer, I am always trying to transcend the self-knowledge which begins the work itself. I am pressing myself to find out something new—even as I write this for you.
KK: What role do personal qualities have in your work?
GV: “Personal qualities” is a fine generalization. To be specific, I'll address one. I trust my sense of outrage and I don't try to conceal it. That sometimes leads to eloquence, and eloquence frightens some people. Real emotion is sometimes more than the simple-minded can bear to confront, because they are hiding out from emotions all the time. Hemingway calls outrage a "built in crap detector." I've paid the price for being outspoken. It cost me seventeen years of being untenured and it cost me thousands of dollars. Simultaneously, I've seen the benefits of that willingness to speak openly and freely. I was chair for three
years of the committee which stopped the Army Corp of Engineers from building a dam on Catherine Creek. I was chair of a 1,500 family food cooperative for three years. I've testified in favor of wilderness areas which became wilderness. I've criticized tyrants and bigots and developers in the public press and some of them I even managed to influence. I've edited Oregon's first and only set of historical literary anthologies. And so on. So, there is a look at one personal quality and its effects. Some people admire this outspoken quality. They say I have integrity. Other people are offended by it and call me belligerent. In an age when eloquence is being destroyed by political manipulation, and when evading any direct clear simple statement is a common practice, I still keep talking in the way that seems best to me. Let others platitudinize, mock, advertise, and deceive with fakery, evasions, tricks, banalities, and lies. I'm still going to try to get from language one more revelation of what seems true.