Samuel Linstead-Atkinson
Connector Staff
The English department hosted a poetry and fiction reading as well as a book signing, featuring faculty writers Sandra Lim and Andre Dubus III.
Lim read poems from her collection “The Wilderness” and Dubus read from his book of novellas, “Dirty Love.” The event was dubbed “Writers on Campus” and students and faculty alike gathered in an O’Leary Library auditorium to listen.
Dubus began by reading the title novella of his collection, which was narrated from the point of view of an adolescent girl named Devon. The excerpt went on to describe the girl bussing tables at work, and later absent-mindedly using an online video chat service, “[not knowing] if she was looking for anything.”
Lim selected a poem titled “Amor Fati” to introduce her recent work. The poems she selected to read, such as “Amor Fati” and “Human Interest Story,” Lim said, “circle around the idea of wilderness.”
Once the two writers had read excerpts from their work, they asked for questions and comments from the audience. Dubus asked Lim, “Where does a poem come from? How’s it start?”
“A certain line will come to me,” said Lim. She then related poetry to music in the way that it often starts as a line or a single thought. Dubus added that, for him, it was often “a sliver of an image.” He went on to describe how the novella “Dirty Love” came to him.
“I could sense a young woman on the cusp of… womanhood and an old man living in a house together, without anything creepy going on, and with a lot of love and a lot of pain,” he said.
The conversation then turned to the many young or otherwise aspiring writers among the group. Many directed a question at either Lim or Dubus, inquiring of the influence or inspiration of their work.
A partial list of her influences, Lim said, were poets such as Sappho and T.S. Eliot as well as authors known for their prose, such as Grace Paley and Leonard Michaels. Dubus mentioned influences in a variety of creative fields including not only prose and poetry, but music and art.
“Music is as much an influence for me as reading is.” He listed musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, and writers such as William Faulkner and Alice Munro.
“I think it is important for younger writers, whether they are young in age or young at the craft, to know that the people who [write] are just people,” said Dubus. He also illuminated his own writing process as being tedious and not as fruitful as he would like. “I feel like I’m writing well one day out of about 16,” he said, “but I still show up for those other 15.”
Sandra Lim has published two collections of poetry and is an assistant English professor. Andre Dubus III is the author of six books including his most recent work “Dirty Love” and is also an English professor at UMass Lowell.
