Faculty Spotlight Periodically, we’ll be featuring interviews with various faculty members in the English Department, based on questions developed and asked by WU Dept of English student(s). This month’s focus is on the newest member of the Department, Creative Writing professor Dr. Dustin M. Hoffman. 1. Name your favorite place to read. Why? I’m an opportunistic reader. I read while walking, eating, rocking my baby to sleep, driving (audio books only!). It often feels right, pairing books with movement, like I’m constantly running to catch up with their energy. I also read every evening in my bedroom, where I can dig in with complete silence. 2. Name your favorite place to write. Why? Here’s a boring answer: I write only in my home office. It’s my room of one’s own, and there’s nothing romantic about it. It’s a work space, and I try to treat it like that. I show up and hammer at those sentences as regularly as possible. 3. Name the three most influential books in your life. Why? This is never an easy question, except for my first book: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The best American novel ever written. Ellison is a master of scene. This book is filled with music and action and nightmares. George Saunders’ 10th of December, though I could say any Saunders book. He’s just the funniest, sharpest, and kindest short story writer working today. And Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Toni taught me to savor the sentence, to love voice, to create mythology. This novel is just a wonder. 4. What’s the hardest aspect of the writing process for you? Why? Drafting. Getting started. It’s a killer. I adore revising. I’d rather make twenty-seven passes over a story I’ve written than write twenty-seven new words. How does one make something out of nothing? There’s little more intimidating. But, like anything, it’s a matter of sitting yourself in the chair and working through it. 5. State one thing you wish you had known in your undergraduate/graduate career. Why? It’s less a piece of knowledge and more a philosophy: Get involved with everything you possibly can. Get into writing groups, tackle every writing assignment as if your life depended on it, become an editor, go to readings and plays and art galleries and dance performances. And with writing, experiment with your style rather than deciding, Well, I’m a Hemingway-Carver realist, or I’m strictly a fantasy writer. Try on different hats, and let your style grow a thousand tentacles. Take every risk as a writer, and never just do the thing you’re good at and comfortable with. 6. What is your go-to activity to de-stress? Why? Running is great, a time where I can just be the music in my headphones and legs and a thumping heart. And dancing with my one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. 7. Name one class that you would love to take at Winthrop University. Why? I’d go for a ceramics course. I used to do this a bit in high school, and I miss making art where you don’t quite have to start with nothing. That hunk of clay is full of comfort. Ceramics seems like it embodies revision. It’s a constant act of reshaping the original glob of inspiration. 8. What is your favorite class to teach? Why? My fiction writing classes are my favorites. I love showing students a bunch of my favorite stories by my favorite authors. I love seeing what they produce when they try something they’ve never done before. I love all the wild stuff that comes up in workshop conversations and goes into stories. I love that in these classes, when I rant about grammar and obsess over gorgeous sentences, my fiction writers get excited, too. 9. Describe the moment in your life that lead you to become a teacher/professor. I was in my MFA at Bowling Green State University. It was winter, already dark at 5:00, but just light enough to see sheets of sideways snow pelting the little city. The director of our fiction program, Wendell Mayo, was talking to me in his office. He wanted me to start coordinating our creative writing reading series, on top of my school work and the teaching I was already doing. I had my first stacks of freshman composition essays at home to grade. I was stupidly hesitating. I remember he had this pamphlet about business seminars or something that had been dropped in his mailbox. He slapped it against his desk and said, “Do you want to be a part of their world, or a part of our world.” What else could I say? It was an all-in moment. And, really, it was an easy answer. I told him, and then he chucked the pamphlet in his trashcan. 10. What’s your favorite word in the English language? Why? My students would probably guess it would have to be a verb. But, for right now, I’m going with “sheetrock.” I love the contrast of smooth and soft sounds and textures. This word brings me back to my ten years of construction and reminds me there was beautiful language even in that harsh world.