CLAS Acts March 2021

Monthly newsletter for the tenure-line faculty of the college.

A Note From Dean Drake

On Planning

As hundreds of you already know, CLAS units have been busy envisioning the future through a 2-hour appreciative inquiry workshop we designed for our collective thinking. The rest of the units will complete that work sometime this month. In addition, many of you have offered comments on the draft mission, vision and values that have come out of the university’s Reach Higher 2025 planning process. Thank you for making room in your busy lives for this vital work.

Planning ahead in these ways certainly asks more of us in a time that already asks a great deal of us—and yet, it is imperative that we not delay conversations that allow us to position CLAS most strongly. I’m grateful for your wisdom and expertise as we strategize for a future that upholds the best of liberal education and centers our students. I have heard from some of you that the opportunity to pause and reflect with colleagues for a couple of hours has turned out to be a welcome break. Perhaps March, always a time of transition, unpredictability, and promise, is exactly the right time for us to engage in this preparation for renewal.

We will continue to provide weekly updates about planning in the CLAS Weekly Mailing and at the unit head meetings. We also have a planning webpage that includes the workshop schedule and lists those colleagues who have undertaken the project of listening to you in order to glean the ideas that will inform drafting our vision and priorities. They are also doing some background reading, and you can follow along if you like. Finally, we just provided the unit heads with an FAQ that contains a detailed timeline of the work.  Highlighted in that FAQ document is a virtual meeting of the college in the afternoon of May 4, after grades are due.  Please make a calendar note—we look forward to sharing and celebrating.
 

Thinking of you,

Jen

Taking Flight with Chris Haven

We are all flightless birds but we think that we can fly.

~Chris Haven


To talk with Chris Haven, associate professor of writing, is to get the story behind the story.

For this writer of short fiction and poetry, this is a big year for both.  Nesting Habits of Flightless Birds: Stories came out in October and this month will see the publication of a book of poems.  And while that sounds like frantic activity, Chris explains that about half the book of stories was written before he came to GVSU in 2002 and the rest during his time here.  

Of its 20-year history, Chris points out that while it “represents a long period of writing work, that’s not unusual for fiction writers.  The challenge of a collection is to get it to cohere, to have an arc, to go together.”

About 2 years ago he compiled the work and sent it out.  A year after that, the collection was accepted for publication by Tailwinds Press Enterprises LLC.

“Some that had been written about contemporary times which were by then becoming historical fiction.  It becomes a matter of deciding ‘do I acknowledge the date or not?’  I did a little of both.  In one case, cell phones were a new thing so I set it in that past.”

Reviews call Nesting Habits “moving stories of loss and redemption”, “exquisite and luminous”, and leaving “us stranded in wonder." 

There is a story behind these, too.  “The collection is a mix of the traditional as well as the magical.  My publisher sent it in to Amazon, and the publisher creates the categories, so he’s categorized in Magical Realism” Chris explains that appellation is accurate for about 5 or 6 of the stories.    “When you mix the magical with the traditional, one informs the other.  It gives magic a little sense of tradition and the traditional a little sense of magic.    I think the best books teach the audience how to read them.  The first three stories are meant to do that.”

Experimentation with style motivates Chris so it is no wonder that spills over into his teaching.  Chris has developed two courses on style in which he gets students to read, identify, name, and talk about their effects.  “That found its way into the book,” he notes.  “And on my last sabbatical a few years ago, I was working on a book on style.  I continue to work on that.”  

“Another thing about working with students, creative writers don’t have a lot of collaborative experiences, but one of the books in the collection came from an assignment I gave my students.”

They were assigned to research a story.  

“As artists, writers operate under a particular mythology that everything has to come from their own inspiration.  Writer sitting at the keyboard staring at the screen.  I tell my students that no other art does it that way.  Painters have a model, dancers see how it is done and learn the moves before attempting it themselves.  Writers can find models through research.”

He worked alongside the students and researched his own story, “Moths” which is set in WWI.  “That was my first historically set piece of fiction.  I learned a lot and shared that with my students.” 
 

Chris explained that this story came from his barber.  He had collected moths on the west side of Grand Rapids during the war.  

“I did a reading of the story, and the barber and his wife came.  And a friend who collected with him.  They brought a mounted moth to the reading.  A film student attended the reading and enjoyed the story so much he wanted to adapt it.  Nothing came of it for several years, but when he was in grad school, he and his friend wanted to do a grant-funded film which was supposed to involve live moths, but ended up as CG,” Chris recalls.

It was a neat example of a story arising in the community, incubated in the classroom and then performed so that it got a new life and someone else wanted to make something from it.”   

He has seen the resulting film. “It is almost nothing like my story.  I think of that as a triumph because someone else realized their own creative vision based on something they saw in my work.”  

“We did an assessment on that research assignment and compared it to other classes not given that assignment.  The researched stories were closer to a finished product.  We noted they got beyond process and closer to product.  Focus on teaching the process results in stronger products.”  

One of Chris’ personal goals has been to make it into Best American Short Stories.  “20 stories make the anthology and 100 make the list of distinguished.  That has been the driving goal, and I made it into the 100.  It was at least considered by the editor,” Chris pauses only a half second before adding what for him is clearly an important element of the story, “Caitlin [Horrocks] also has a story listed.  I’ve got really good colleagues across the university and in the Writing Department.”  

While his readers wait for him to crack the top 20 and take wing, they can look forward to Bone Seeker, his book of poems forthcoming this month from NTQ Books.