The evening of November 3 was the occasion for a very special event, a group reading by the Tulane English Department’s Creative Writing faculty. The program, which began in 1975 with the hiring of one tenured faculty member, its present director, Professor Peter Cooley, is now four tenured professors strong—Tom Beller, a specialist in creative fiction and non-fiction, Zach Lazar, a novelist, and Jesmyn Ward, a National Book Award-winning novelist and memoirist—each having achieved tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor last academic year.
On November 3, a packed house in Freeman Auditorium, at the Woldenberg Art Center, was invited into the very different but equally human, imaginative worlds of four Tulane writers, each of whom, over the past year, has also published a new book to critical acclaim.
Creative writing at Tulane has benefited for several years from the vigorous support of the Dean of the School of Liberal Arts, Carole Haber, whose vision for the humanities at Tulane embraces creative writing and sees it as integrated within a curriculum that extends to the study of languages and literature, history, and philosophy. Writing, whether creative or analytical, is fundamental to university life and is profoundly interdisciplinary in its habits and appeal. Carole gets this connection, endorses it, and has made it a part of SLA’s strategic plans for the future. Assisted by our Provost, Michael Bernstein, Dean Haber has been energetic at Tulane in promoting all of the English Department’s writing and scholarly programming—and its writers and scholars.
The November reading was the second in the Ian Gallagher Zelazny Writers Series, inaugurated last year with a superb performance by New Orleans poet Brenda Marie Osbey, who currently teaches at Brown University. This series, devoted to local writers and writing, is endowed by Marian and Olek Zelazny of Princeton, New Jersey in memory of their son, Ian, who was a student of creative writing, literature, and philosophy at Tulane and who loved New Orleans. The English Department has benefited enormously over the past several years from the enthusiasm of the Zelazny family and other donors, both named and anonymous, for great writing and writers. These gifts have underwritten events such as the November group reading and likewise visits by such nationally and internationally celebrated writers as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Jonathan Franzen. The support of great writing at any university is a collaborative effort between administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and donors. The Tulane School of Liberal Arts and its English Department thank the Zelazny’s and all of its donors to Creative Writing and the English Department. You are indeed our colleagues in the humanities!
Writing can be a lonely vocation. But it’s one of our best ways out of loneliness, too, a means both of engaging and transforming the world. Good writing is like the American poet Walt Whitman’s memories of a walk down his Camden, New Jersey street in the poem “Heroes,” an experience that allows him to connect with others and to reconnect with himself. As he catalogues the idiosyncracies of his neighbors and identifies, by means of his poetry, with their everyday joys and sorrows, he understands: “I was the man. I suffered, I was there.”
The Creative Writing Program at Tulane is an open invitation, to Tulane administrators, faculty, students, alumni, and donors to become part of something as profound as and larger than ourselves. On November 3, in gathering for a reading by these four celebrated Tulane writers, we all avidly accepted that invitation.