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Joan Connor
Joan Connor (Fiction, Creative Non-Fiction) is a full professor and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. She has published hundreds of stories and essays in an array of journals. Her first two collections of short stories, Here on Old Route 7 and We Who Live Apart, were published by the University of Missouri Press. Her third collection of short stories, History Lessons (University of Massachusetts Press) won the AWP award for short fiction. Her collection of essays The World Before Mirrors (University of Nebraska Press) won the River Teeth award. Joan is the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council fellowship, the John Gilgun award, the Ohio Writer award in fiction and nonfiction, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Colony. Selected Publications: History Lessons (University of Massachusetts Press, December 2003) We Who Live Apart (University of Missouri Press, October 2000) Here On Old Route 7 (University of Missouri Press, September 1997) Teaching Philosophy: As a nonfiction and fiction writer, I enjoy working with students in both genres. I see my role as a facilitator to help students improve their creative work, to develop reading lists, and to bloom as readers and writers. I have no aesthetic biases and am willing to work with any student who would like to work with me. I write both realistic and irrealistic fiction, so I am comfortable overseeing an array of styles and genres. I am rigorous but not authoritarian. I give students my best reading of their work, but they are welcome to argue with that reading. My own reading in fiction and nonfiction is broad. I have worked as an editor as well as a journalist. I am comfortable working with students who concentrate on publishing, pedagogy, theory, and outreach internships. Students who want a practicum are welcome to speak to me about the possibility of staying in my home for part of a term and co-teaching with me at Ohio University where I work with graduate and undergraduate students. Students interested in writing comedy are also welcome. I have taught seminars in public performance, on the rhetoric of POV and narratology, on theories of the fairy and folk tale, on Postmodernism, on Minimalism, on critical writing, on the primacy of setting, on evil in literature, on the erotics of literature, on feminist theory, on the novella, and on deconstructing love. My teaching philosophy is actually a practicum. It is populist in impulse and rigorous but care-taking in practice. I work hard, and my students do, too. I line-edit all student work, critical and creative, and I vision edit as well, responding in a letter. I encourage my students to enclose personal letters with their submissions, and I respond to them, and I also encourage my students to direct me as to their needs. I suggest additions to reading lists, but I do not mandate them. I respond by mail, email, and phone as student need dictates. I am open to an array of approaches to the critical work from reader response, to bellelettrism to argumentation. My best trait as a mentor? My ability to suspend my personal aesthetic and consider any work on its own terms and the extent to which it fulfills them. My sense that we are all in this together as practitioners who need to understand that this is arduous work and requires laughter. Flexibility with deadlines and compassion, but never at the sacrifice of an expectation of my student's commitment to the work. Finally, my student/teacher model is determined by the student's need and skill level. To demystify—there is one way to become a better writer: read and write. I try to foster that. ^top
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