On Reading at Morgan

In Morgan Library, on the campus of Grace College, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I spent hours among the periodicals, specifically the literary journals. I flipped through the latest issues of Nineteenth Century Literature and Contemporary Literature. I wanted to know how great writing worked. While at first I found insight in the analysis these and others offered, the pursuit became stale. All this analysis. All this effort to wring meaning from the text. I just wanted to know how the story itself worked. How did writing happen? After a couple of trips downstairs to the fiction stacks to look up a novel referenced in a journal, I stayed. 

Many more hours were spent pulling book after book from the shelf. I looked at the last time the book was checked out—you could see this in those days, on a paper card in a paper pocket inside the back cover. Often a decade or more had passed. I read first pages. I learned the authors’ names. I got a taste for what they’d written. I took stacks of books back to my room. And I began to decipher how they did it—this selection and ordering of words into story. I was a Communications major earning a self-directed minor in Story.

On February first and second I’ll be back on the campus of my alma mater for a visit. I will be a visiting writer. I will be guest lecturing in two classes, meeting 1:1 with students, joining the campus writing club—Writer’s Block. The evening of the first, I will be reading from The Confessions of Adam. 

My own novel now stands, as well, in the fiction stacks at Morgan Library.