The next time you're walking around campus, working in the library or sprawling out on the Beach, don't be surprised if, out of the corner of your eye, you see Jean McGarry observing you.
McGarry, who has been teaching in the Writing Seminars department since 1987, is the author of several award-winning books, both short fiction and novels.
She is a writer through and through, and it is therefore her job to stick her nose into anyone and everyone's business. The next time she writes a story, it just might be yours.
But for now, the News-Letter decided to turn the tables and learn a little more about McGarry.
News-Letter (N-L): What is your background in writing? Where did you grow up and go to school? ?Jean McGarry (JM): I grew up in Rhode Island, went to all-Catholic schools until I transferred junior year to Harvard.?It was the late 60s, and life changed radically in a flash. ?N-L: What would you say have been some of your most memorable experiences as a professor at Hopkins? ?JM: I have had some amazingly smart students, almost from the first year.? I've learned a lot about the literature I like to teach from my students, as they discover these works for themselves.?
I've even learned things about my own fiction from witty and incisive remarks my students have made. One student pointed out that there are innumerable chain-link fences in Airs of Providence, my first book, but not much else by way of physical description.?? ?
N-L: What made you want to become a writer? ?JM: I had stories to tell.? Once I left home, my life growing up in Providence in the 1950s began to seem like an exotic tale that no one would understand unless I could convey a very strong version of it.?
I had to teach myself a new style to do this because I wanted the narrative voice to mimic the way people sounded when they cut each other off, or cut each other down to size.?? ?
N-L: How has teaching creative writing affected you as a writer? ?JM: Teaching has mostly been a good thing.? Many writers of the past wrote critical essays about literature - I'm thinking especially about Woolf and James.?
Teaching is very time-consuming, but for me, it functions a bit like this kind of essay-writing: a sharpening of aesthetic taste through close literary study.?
It doesn't hurt to be able to articulate something about the making of art, even if a large part of creative activity can't be tracked so easily. ?
N-L: You received your master's degree in writing from Hopkins. What was it like to reverse roles, from student to teacher, in an environment that you are very familiar with? ?JM: I am a very rooted person so it made sense to stay at Hopkins.? In the course of 25 years, the school has changed very much, but I had a good beginning here and I concentrate on that.?
Hopkins is not a hospitable place for practicing artists, but having grown up in a rather harsh environment, I felt right at home here. ?
N-L: You also taught at George Washington University and University of Missouri. How did those environments compare to Hopkins?? ?JM: Probably about the same. The difference here is that it is a very small school. Very science-oriented.
In the humanities, there is no interest in contemporary fiction at all. The Writing Seminars is a very important part of the undergraduate curriculum, but we're not taken very seriously as a program.? ?
N-L: You received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and also from the famous Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. How did it feel, as a young writer, to receive recognition from such prestigious institutions?? JM: I wasn't so young.? Before enrolling as a graduate student at Hopkins, I had been a journalist, gone back to college to get degrees in French and music and even worked as an art therapist.? ?N-L: You certainly have a wide array of interests, but how exactly did you get into the field of Art Therapy? ?JM: I got a wonderful job, during an economic recession, working at Mass General, writing depression questionnaires. I was thinking of becoming a psychologist.
Because I had taken one art history course, I was able to talk my way into giving art therapy classes to teenagers, based on nothing. I just found the patients so endearing and so completely crazy that I couldn't go on doing it.
N-L: As someone who studied writing at Hopkins and is now a professor here, what advice would you give to young writers at Hopkins? ?JM: One of the worst things you could be called in Providence was a "news bag." The other way of putting it was "having a nose for trouble." That meant sticking your nose into other people's business.?
That, in a nutshell, is what writers, young or old, have to do.? They have to like people enough to be "nosey," to watch them closely, to listen, to think about them, to question and to wonder.? That's half the battle.?
The other half is reading enough to learn everything about the form.? What we do in our classes is teach students how to read as writers.?
That seems to speed up the process much the way piano lessons are useful in becoming a musician.
