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Fiction writing is maybe the only way you can get someone fully into the head of
someone they might never meet on the street or even in their daily lives.
Fiction writing allows me to express someone's life on paper and have someone
else in Wisconsin pick that book up and say:
"Oh, now I might understand how it feels to grow up in a place like Riverside, California."
"Now I might understand how it feels to be caught in hurricane Katrina."
"Now I might understand what it feels like to be a single mom with a six kids."
So to me, fiction writing, like movies, like poetry, like music, like dance, like
painting, is that art that allows you to fully immerse yourself
in the life of someone
that you would never run into.
I've taught at UCR for 22 years and a lot of people ask me
"Why don't you just stay home and write?" And I love teaching.
I have to best students. I actually have arguments all the time with people from
New York and L.A.
and other places that shall remain unnamed, and I say my students are the best. I think
because we have the only creative writing
undergraduate major in the UC system, I get students from all over the state and all
of the country that want to write fiction and poetry and memoir.
My students, I think, are the best because a lot of them are first generation.
They have stories no one's heard before. I have students who are first-generation
Filipino-American whose parents are from the country and who join a gang in
San Bernardino and write a novel about it.
I have students whose parents were born in Alabama and write about being
first-generation African-Americans living in San Bernardino.
I have students from L.A., from San Francisco. I have students from China,
first-generation students from Vietnam, I've had students from Nigeria who wrote amazing
short stories about Nigeria.
I think the best part of teaching for me is that I learn all the new slang
and I get to hang out with people who are younger than me and so are much more interesting to me
intrinsically than myself.
I also love teaching because I like the structure of writing. I like teaching
someone how to make a paragraph
and then a full-story out of, say, one idea that maybe came to them while they were
driving down the freeway.
One of my favorite students said he came up with his best poetry while riding the bus and
looking out the window and that one line would come to him he had to be patient
enough to make the next lines. I like that idea of teaching and shaping.