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David Swanger
David Swanger is a Professor of Education and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz.
He has published poetry, fiction, and prose. His two most recent poetry publications
are This Waking Unafraid and a chapbook entitled Style.
Maggie Paul: Can you describe the joint aspect of your position at UCSC where you
teach Creative Writing and Philosophy of Education ?
David Swanger: These are two missions that I have that overlap, particularly with
aesthetic education. I teach a course called The Evolution of Education -- which deals
with questions like: What is education? What is knowledge? How did the idea of
schooling get started, going back to Plato. When I came here there was an emphasis
on interdisciplinary teaching, but I'm a bit of an anachronism now. I am also
teaching advanced creative writing workshops. I've been teaching at UCSC since 1971.
MP: What prompted your interest in poetry?
DS: I started out as a short story writer when I was living in England. There was
something about living in this bleak, D.H. Lawrencian kind of landscape, where one
could be very lonely and miserable, and I seemed to have a lot of time on my hands.
I began to write short stories, shamelessly imitative of Thomas Wolfe -- but that
didn't seem to the bother the publisher. But then I came back to the United States
and I wasn't quite as unhappy. The bleak period created its own momentum, its own
literary momentum.
MP: How did publication of the new chapbook, Style, come about?
DS: The publisher was interested in my poem, Natural Disaster. Natural Disaster
is a Santa Cruz poem -- it's got a lot of names of the creeks -- Lompico, Pajaro, San
Lorenzo. The chapbook was the chance to put together a collection of my favorites.
MP: Another Santa Cruz poem in the chapbook is Wayne's College of Beauty.
DS: Yes. Wayne's College of Beauty is a very good example of writing about
something about which you do not know anything. I had never been in Wayne's -- it
was wholly imagined. I was advised that I should go in and get some dialogue from
Wayne's, acquaint myself with Wayne's, but I resisted that. There was enough just
in knowing that Wayne's existed to inspire my imagination. It started out as a
satire, and then as I wrote the poem, my better self emerged. Which was to say --
Listen. It would be very easy to write a poem that satirizes Wayne's College of
Beauty -- try to think about something else that could happen in Wayne's -- the
tenderness, the love. That was a poem that surprised me.
MP: How has teaching Creative Writing affected your work?
DS: Teaching has enabled me to gain an appreciation of community among writers.
I who have been a writer in isolation for most of my career, have seen the value of
working with other writers. I wasn't brought up to feel that writing could benefit
from a community. So one of the things that has happened from working with my students
is that if I'm seeing it benefit them, why shouldn't it benefit me? I have a writers group
that I've worked with for the past 5 or 6 years.
David Swanger read at the Louden Nelson Community Center on January 22nd at 7:30 PM.
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