Interview with Dr. Mary Galbraith

The NCSCL is honored to present an interview with Dr. Mary Galbraith, lecturer in children's literature here at San Diego State University. The interview was conducted on October 9th, 2019 by Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen.

Dr. Galbraith with Graduate Assistant Ashley Nguyen

Can you share with us your educational background?

Let's see, starting with undergraduate – I started out at UC Irvine the first year that it opened, which was 1965, and then I transferred to Berkeley for my junior/senior year after spending my junior year abroad: six months in Greece – Athens and Delphi.

What was your major at the time?

English. It’s the one area where you can do whatever you want, and there isn’t one methodology that is the correct one. Whatever you’re interested in, literature will take you there.

After that, did you pursue a master’s degree?

No, I left school after that. That's 1969.  If you know your history, late ‘60s at Berkeley? You know, tanks on campus; helicopters flying over dropping tear gas. I had a child in 1971 and went on to other things and eventually came back to school in 1981. There was a big gap: ‘69 to ‘81. When I first came back to Berkeley, I got a credential in teaching English as a second language and then I went to China for two years. While I was there, I realized that I really wanted to be learning rather than teaching. I applied to a number of graduate schools and the one that gave me the best deal was SUNY Buffalo. I never paid a penny in tuition the whole seven years I was there. I was paid as a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Graduate Group. That was a great opportunity – studying for a doctorate in English, but in the process taking classes in philosophy, psychology, computer science, child language acquisition, all over campus. It was just a wonderful experience because I was pursuing a particular topic and all of these different disciplines had theories that were relevant. I would just follow the topic wherever it went. 

So it sounds like at the time, there wasn’t a children’s literature specialization?

No, there wasn't – I did take a graduate class in children's literature with Ann Haskell – good class – but there was no children's literature specialization. However, my dissertation was on childhood subjectivity and how it is represented in Victorian novels. My orals topic was the representation of childhood subjectivity in literature, which made for a pretty interesting reading list.  

Was that the time you entered the children’s literature field?

            They weren't hiring people for children's literature in those days. You got a job through Victorian literature or some other more traditional category. I got my doctorate in 1989 and had twins in 1991, so there was another mothering hiatus. When I applied to teach at San Diego State in 1996 (as a "cold call"), I asked if they needed anyone to teach children’s literature. It turned out they needed someone to teach Children's Literature that very semester– spring of 1996. Someone had unexpectedly withdrawn from teaching the class; “three weeks from now, we want you to teach English 501.” I was like whoa. Wrote a syllabus. Got to work.

Which texts did you teach that first semester?

I remember doing The Yearling which nobody teaches anymore but it’s a great book about a boy and a deer in Florida in the backwoods.  

How have you seen the field evolve?

SDSU had a large tenured faculty in children's literature back in the 80s and 90s--probably more than any university in the country at that time: Peter Neumeyer, Lois Kuznets, Jerry Griswold, Alida Allison, Jerry Farber, and Carole Scott, who were pioneers in the Children's Literature Association. June Cummins arrived in the late 90s and also became active in the development of the field. Children's literature as a whole evolved nationally and internationally into an accepted discipline, and it has broadened considerably; SDSU is a pioneer in this regard. Our current faculty have a Young Adult focus, especially queer studies, which is one emergent arena in the field.

Do you think the whole field is now trending towards Young Adult?

No, I don't think so. It just so happens that we have a group here that really focuses on that and that's great. The field as a whole has just exploded. I don't think people are apologizing for teaching children's literature the way they used to. In the past, you would have to explain yourself as to why you were "lowering" yourself.  “Oh, why are you teaching children's literature?”-- condescending like that.

How did you respond to comments like that?

Oh, I laugh ruefully, because anything to do with children is devalued, so I’m used to it.  If you’re a mother, you’re used to being asked, “What are you doing?” “Oh, I'm only working 24 hours a day on no sleep” (laughs). “But what else do you do?” That's why theorizing childhood studies is my preoccupation--while other scholars are looking at literature through other lenses, I primarily look at the way childhood is devalued and not seen for the huge thing that it is.

Can you tell us about how you’ve presented at conferences?

Early on, I was going to Children’s Literature Association conferences every year. I was in the center of some controversies – introducing the idea of childhood studies, for example – and fighting for a more radical view of childhood. I haven't had the resources to go every year, so at some point along the way I started going instead to the International Research Society for Children's Literature (IRSCL), which is every other year. Next year, I'm hoping to go to the Society for Novel Studies Conference, because I also work in theory of the novel, and I want to get together with the small circle of people in the world that are talking about a particular topic that fascinates me-- that would be the topic I will be talking about on October 30.

Does that take you all around the world?

Not quite all around the world – in the Western Hemisphere, mostly. The last Society for Novel Studies Conference was in Ithaca, New York. The next one's in Oxford, so hopefully I'll be going there – I’m just submitting my abstract. And the next IRSCL Congress is in Santiago, Chile, which is certainly exciting!

That leads to another question I had about publications.

At the moment, I’ve got two things under consideration. One is a chapter on the topic that I'm talking about [at SDSU on October 30th]. It's a theory of narrative that is an alternative to classical narratology, which sees a narrator as built into every work of fiction. The alternative theory is much more – I think – open to the possibilities of language in the novel; I think the older model limits our ideas of what novels do – and I think it's just conceptually wrong. As I will in my talk, I use "The Little Match Girl" as an example of what I'm talking about. It’s important to see the consequences of reading the story with one model as opposed to a different model. One model sees the narrator as above the work: the authoritative voice in the work. The other model, first of all, doesn't see that there's necessarily a narrator at all, and it abandons the idea of a unitary speaking voice. And even if where is a speaking voice, it needn't be a privileged position. Mikhail Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky’s main characters are of a higher consciousnes than his narrators. I always liked that. For me the child SELF character is privileged. Even if­­­­­­­­ there's a narrator "behind" a child character, the child character's embodied presence weighs more than adult voice – at least to the extent that the character has the "touch of the real."

That’s fascinating; I’m really excited to hear your talk now!

I hope I can do it justice! My involvement with the topic of deixis goes back to my undergraduate work in the 1980s, when I was part of a Graduate Group in Cognitive Science in Buffalo. Deixis is how language creates a here/now/self.  We're here, we're now, and we know who we are in this discussion [points to live situation in her office]. Well, fiction creates a different here/now self that you enter into as you read. You're able to track this--and perform this-- as a reader effortlessly because you're a good reader. The process is amazingly complex, and small children are able to do it.

The Graduate Group in Buffalo started in the computer science department; they were actually trying to write an algorithm, kind of like a GPS, for teaching a computer where we are and who we are and what's going on in a work of fiction. That's complicated, right? It's more complicated probably than telling you how to get downtown. But there was a geographer in the group who was working on the early GPS. He was talking about how people orient themselves in time and space and how different cultures and genders give directions. Presumably all this has been fed into the GPS so that when they tell you to turn left at the next corner, you know, they're following that sort of algorithm that he and other people were studying. Anyway, geography and computer science were part of the project. And of course, they need a very specific operationalization. You couldn't just say “I have a feeling this is happening.” Most of us in the humanities are not very operationally oriented. It was a good discipline to have to come up with specific cues for how language works in fiction.

I had a great relationship with a scholar in computer science, Jan Wiebe, who would press me about my "feeling" interpretations. She would say, “Well, how would I tell the computer to pick up that cue?” That's was a good challenge: “How do you do that?” So we worked out things like paragraph breaks. You often see a change of self, of person, in a paragraph break. So when it goes to a new paragraph break, you do a possible reset to see whether a new person is occupying the self. This particular cue was quite revealing for reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway--a novel that is a veritable soup of selves.

Jan and I also used a lot of children's texts as examples because even though they are simple syntactically, they use the same narrative techniques for entering the experience of the character. For example, in this brief excerpt from a story about a cat named Socks – “Socks looked up at Charles William and meowed. How was he going to get out with the door shut?" (Cleary 128) – the second sentence represents the cat's experience. These very sophisticated shifts of self were in syntactically simple children's books, which made them good as examples, while also showing that this deictic sophistication emerges very early in story understanding.

While I was a graduate assistant for the Cognitive Science Group in Buffalo, I worked on a prospectus for a book called Deixis in Narrative. It was to be a big fat book that was made up of twenty chapters by members of the group, coming from many different disciplinary perspectives. Erwin Siegel and I contributed theory chapters from a cognitive and literary point of view. He was in the psychology department and I was the literary spokesperson. The book, Deixis in Narrative, was ultimately published in 1995, five years after I left the group.

Fast forward to 2017: I received a request from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature to write the entry on deixis. My theory chapter, it turned out, had been influential in narrative theory and cognitive linguistics – I had dubbed the particular theory we were using the "deictic shift theory", and my chapter was used in seminars on the topic to give a strong and concise argument for this position. When I got the request from Oxford, my thought was I haven't read anything in this field for twenty years, so this is going to be a heckuva job, but there was no way I was going to turn down such a challenging opportunity. So I went to work reading, trying to get up to speed with current work and pulling in a lot of other older relevant literary theory. It has taken me two years to feel somewhat conversant with the territory – it's like a second dissertation, but more so.

I submitted my first draft last year; you usually get one of three responses when you submit something for publication: “publish it immediately; publish it soon, but here are some revisions we want you to do; don't publish it.” I got the second reaction: “recommended for publication, but with a few revisions.” My topic involves a vast territory of knowledge, so a simple little revision such as "say more about drama" is not going to be a simple revision. It’s going to have to go through a ridiculous amount of reading. And so when they said, “oh, yeah and send it in three weeks” (laughs)-- I'm still working on that revision a year later. I'm hoping that feedback I get from this talk and another one next month will help me finish these revisions.

My other project in the pipeline is a contribution to a collection of essays on "optional-narrator" theory. I was invited to contribute to this collection based again on my work from the 1980s and on a paper I gave at the Society for Novel Studies entitled: "Silent self and the deictic imaginary: Hamburger's radical insight." The manuscript was submitted in 2017 and I just learned this week that it has been accepted for publication in 2020 by the University of Nebraska.

My talk on October 30 draws from these two projects. 

The relationship between children's literature and this theory: they’re intimately connected in my mind, probably because the theory of narrative that I'm looking at is much less about that top-down (=adult-child?) way of looking at literature as an art form. The techniques for writing from a child's position are very controversial because many people in the field will say that adults can't write with authority from a child's position. The question is “Can you write from a child position and how do you argue for that?” Also, “how can you represent nonverbal mind?” Ironically, the computer science people are much more happy with talking about nonverbal mind because for them, words are way down the line from the basic unselfconscious processes. They're working with ones and zeros, and they're looking with neurological synapses. They even ask the question whether thought is primarily verbal. But in English departments, that's an oddly controversial thing to say, that you have nonverbal experience that has some independent reference from words. That brings up the evolution of language and that’s connected to language acquisition, the semiotics of the body, and childhood experience, so you see the whole thing wrapping together. I'm somebody who likes to flip things, so I enjoy asserting that, far from being the stepchild of statement, fiction comes before statement. Fiction is actually prior to statement, because the imagination comes prior to language in the theories that I’m looking at; it’s pretty exciting.

What is it like teaching children’s literature, especially to people who will become teachers in the future?

Well, the main thing is to blow their minds a little bit, because most adults think children's literature is about teaching life lessons to children, and that adults are a benign force in children's lives. That’s also the commonly held assumption by people who are going to be teachers. My radical position is: don't come between children and books! Don't be the mediator between the child and the book. It's like a sacred relationship to me, the reader and the book. The literary author is in some way opening themselves to their subconscious, in such a way that you can step into it. It's not like conventional communication. It’s more like a scaffolding for very radical one-sided dialogues, like a psychoanalyst and a patient. If a psychoanalyst is good, they are emptying themselves out and allowing that other person this huge conversational turn, and [the psychoanalyst] is just following, right? A reader is not a therapist, but they are a complete listener. They are implementing the language of that person and the emotional content that people are putting out and following into it (by the way, I have never put it quite this way before-- I'm improvising as I go along--but this is an issue I've been working on). People try to frame narrative as a message from speaker to listener, but I don't see it that way. Great literature comes from authors opening themselves in a very special way to a subconscious, metaphorical adventure. Most authors don't know where it's coming from and that's fine – it's a level of sedimented experience that normally does not get expressed. The work of writing is putting "what comes" into the right words. Authors have these experiences and they'll tell you, “I started out with this image and then it sort of started walking.” The writer who is an artist is not just working from here down (gestures from head to body). They’re working from here up (gestures from body to head). The communication act that is reading a book is a very special one that doesn't follow the conventional rules of conversation.

There's such a distance from this to the top-down idea of a book as a teacher, teaching you something, which is a transitive act: “I'm going to tell you something and I'm filling your head with all the proper things.” That's so far away from what literature does. Literature is revelation. It’s opening parts of yourself that you don't know about. John Stuart Mill who says, “Art starts with talking to yourself.” Allowing something to happen in yourself. And if you pay any attention to anybody watching, you're going to lose it. So it is like performing. It’s like they say, “dance like nobody's watching.” That you have to be absolutely true to what's in here before you have something valuable. Then you might begin to say, “Now gee I don't think anybody will understand this unless I translate it into something they can understand.” That's where you must make sure to keep the treasures alive-- when you adapt to your audience.

In that case, do you give advice to teachers about which books to present in the classroom?

No, I am totally unqualified to do that, and I think the term "teaching literature" is a minefield. First of all, how many people have said, “that book was ruined by a teacher for me because they were picking it apart”? I'm not saying you don't need to know something about the background of the literature. Right now I'm talking about history and literature. Those are two topics that elementary school teachers have to do. I used to teach The Little House on the Prairie a lot. Well, that is still a great book, but it's written from the point of view of a white settler kid. Put it that way. The actual opinions of the white settlers are all over the book. Now the child in the book questions that but she doesn't really know anything about being a Native American. A book written recently by Louise Erdrich called The Birchbark House has been offered as a companion book in a way to work off of each other. This book was written recently so it wasn't written from the historical time of Little House. But it is a very good book. This semester for the first time, I said, “forget Little House this semester. We're just doing The Birchbark House. Why not just go with the neglected voices for a while and give a rest to some of these older classics? I do love the classics, but they have this problem that they are seeing from a very partial perspective. I'm fine asking them to sit down for a while. Let's hear from some other people. What we've been talking about this week in my 306A (children’s literature course for future teachers) is “How do you teach history in primary school if the idea is to talk honestly about things that are unbearable? To learn about slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans?” When I was in school, there was this tendency to want to be cheerful about everything and I'm not saying that is completely wrong. But at the same time, it’s no good teaching history if it's white-washed (excuse the expression). What do you do? It's a real question. I'm not going to be teaching history to primary school students, but my students are! And I would say that’s a real dilemma. I don't know how much control people have over what books they use. I hope they have lots of control (as opposed to a set curriculum), but I’m not familiar. So no, I’m not qualified to tell them what to do with literature in the classroom, except to say, “don't stand in the space between the reader and the book," and "be honest." And I hope I practice what I preach in this regard.

Do you have any teaching moments in your career that were particularly memorable?

Every day, you go home and you're either saying “wow that worked” or “that didn't work.” We've had a lot of really wonderful moments in the classroom where everybody's together and we can feel it in the room.  Here's one example: students have an optional assignment to create their own picture book and talk about the process. A couple of semesters ago, there were a lot of good student-created picture books and we had to devote a couple of class hours to people reading and talking about them. Several were quite personal. One of these was a picture book about colors. After the person was finished reading the book she had made, she talked about her process: “This book comes from my depression; everything was grey. Then one day I looked up and there was green.” A student responded by bursting into tears and saying how the book had moved her; we all felt the lyrical resonance even without the explanation. It's not so much that I'm looking for people to reveal anything personal--I would never ask for that. That day in that class we felt safe going there without being pressured in any way. A simple picture book went deep. That was pretty special.

That’s a really tangible example of all of the things you’ve been talking about with authors putting themselves into books.

Yeah, I felt “that was great” and “see?”And that, by the way, is another thing that all this leads to: pedagogy that enacts itself. It should follow the logic that you're using. Just look at one paragraph from a work of literature for half an hour: “what’s that doing and what's this doing?” That’s my favorite question. “What does it do?” not “what does it mean?” Just looking at the language of “what does it do?” You don’t need to talk about the author’s intention, because that's beyond our grasp and probably beyond the author's grasp. But you can talk about what the author did. That is a more answerable question.

The last question I have is about deixis, which you will be speaking about. I remember when I was in your course and you were working on the final revision to submit for the first time. You were reading tons of books.

I’m the library’s best customer. They have this limit of 100 books and I would bump up against it. They would tell me “you can’t take any more books out until you put some back” and I said “Seriously? The books that I’m taking out, no one has taken them out in years! Let’s not hoard the books!” I joke to them that they should give me a prize for taking the most books out of the library instead of chastising me for not bringing them back.

How has it been to prepare a talk?

Well, I'm still working on it. I'm teaching four classes and trying to keep up. People do want their papers graded, and I've got some other life things going on. Here's what I do. I put my presentation deadlines into a special hopper inside of myself and then my body just makes sure I do it. That's it. As it gets closer to the deadline, you know, the ideas start popping. I really do believe in all this subconscious stuff because that's where everything comes from: bottom-up. I'm not going to say it's always super successful because considering the audience is also important when you're going to deliver a talk. It's not enough to have all this content that you yourself think “oh that's wonderful.” It has to be understandable to my audience, so I'm working on what's the best way to frame it when I'm not very sure what my audience knows.

One of the things I want to talk about is how many different fields are implicated in literary theory: the evolution of language, linguistics, philosophy of language, all of the 20th century arcane conversation on literary theory. Taking a trenchant quote from each of maybe five or ten chief people that I use, let's see, in these different fields, what this looks like, and then see how it's converging. My argument is that theory in a lot of different fields is converging on a kind of grand theory of what literature is, based on imagination as the evolutionary engine of humanity, an idea that began with Giambattista Vico in the 18th century. It is exciting, but most people in literature departments don't know about it. There's a lot of interdisciplinary work, but there's a lot to do to bring that up to the surface where you can display it as a unified theory of the humanities.

Thank you so much to Dr. Mary Galbraith for telling us about such an incredible career!

This is part three of a series of blog posts in preparation for Dr. Mary Galbraith’s talk, "The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation," to be held in LL430 on Wednesday, October 30th from 4:00-5:00PM. We hope to see you there next week!

 - (AN)

Note: this blog post has been updated to the most recent version. AN apologizes for her mistake in initially posting an earlier draft of the interview.

CFP for American Literature Association's Annual Conference

Hello children’s literature scholars!

We invite you to apply to Children’s Literature Society’s panel in the American Literature Association’s 31^st annual conference in San Diego, CA. The conference is May 21-24, 2020, and abstracts or proposals are due January 10, 2020.

The theme is: Building New Worlds: Empathy and Expanding Moral Boundaries in American Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Below is the call for papers for the conference!

For several years Children’s Literature has been expanding its boundaries with stories that reflect the diversity of our nation (e.g., socio-economic, racial, ethnic, gender, and religious diversity), stories that engage previously marginalized multicultural historical perspectives and such critical concerns as the environmental crisis.

For example, Mango Moon by Diane De Anda tells the story of a young girl watching her father taken away by ICE and her attempt to find some sort of comfort with this devastating loss. This story—as well as a remarkable growing number of other narratives—appeals directly to the heart, to a moral vision that both illuminates and embraces the voice and plight of “the Other.” And at their core is empathy.

These narratives reflect the change in the construction of childhood we have seen for several decades from the Romantic Idealized Child, whose most identifiable trait was innocence and a need for protection from the harshness of the world, to an adultified construction of the child who can and must hear about these harsh realities. We are witnessing what can be termed a “new moral literature” in which moral boundaries are being stretched through powerful appeals to the heart and empathy, leading the child reader to a new world of understanding and compassion. The intention of this new moral literature is not to didactically affirm rules or prescribed behaviors, but to open the heart. Empathy/compassion is the central moral of these stories—the aim is to awaken the child reader to the humanity of others, to experience compassion—and to encourage through such awareness acts of graciousness.

Presentation topics may include: (1) Historically marginalized points of view—a “new historical world” that includes the genocidal realities of Native Americans, the trauma of slavery, the immigration crisis; (2) entering into the worlds of diverse communities: the poor and homeless; gender, racial diversity; being different/feeling different: body image, disabilities/mental health, queerness/transgender; (3) environmental concerns; and (4) pedagogical and theoretical issues: how might such stories affect the classroom? What do these stories tell us about the communication and effect of ethics/morals through narrative? 

Two panels will explore these new worlds that affirm, insist on our shared humanity by sharing stories of children caught in the sorrows of the present.

The conference is at Manchester Grand Hyatt, One Market Place, San Diego, California.

Please send abstracts or proposals (around 300 words) to Dorothy Clark: Dorothy.g.clark@csun.edu and include your academic rank and affiliation and AV requests in the email.

-SS

"Living Writers" with Matt de la Peña and Chris Baron

On Wednesday, October 16th, we attended Matt de la Peña and Chris Baron’s poetry readings, presented by SDSU MFA program’s Living Writers series. Matt de la Peña and Chris Baron are both alumni of San Diego State University’s MFA program, and have been friends since their time in the MFA program together. Baron read from his novel in verse, All of Me, and Matt read from his picture book, Love. Witnessing two incredibly talented writers reading from their own work breathed life into their poetry. 

Matt de la Peña is self-described as “a working-class, mixed kid”, who like Baron, took part in sports; Peña attended the University of the Pacific on a basketball scholarship. However, he felt out of place, and says he often felt “like an imposter” both in sports and in writing. Describing his MFA experience, he shared that he “felt like [he] hadn’t read enough books.” 

Chris Baron felt similarly. Baron received his MFA at San Diego State University and is now a professor at San Diego City College. Although clearly a successful writer, he says he felt misplaced in college, even when participating in his school’s rowing team. However, Baron says he felt at home when he was writing, either on his own or for class. He is especially appreciative of the community and sense of belonging he found in the MFA program. He advised the attendees to also develop a community to be vulnerable and encouraged in.

Although both de la Peña and Baron felt out of place in college, their writing talent has shone through and to create a sense of belonging in the world of literature. Chris Baron’s published his first poem, “Origins” in 1997, and he didn’t stop there. Baron is the author of the poetry collection, Under the Broom Tree, which was published in the poetry anthology Lantern Tree, winner of the San Diego Book Award. His first novel, All of Me is described by Matt de la Peña as “beautifully written, brilliant, and necessary.” Matt de la Peña is the author of multiple books for children and young adults, including New York Times Bestseller and Newberry Medal winner “Last Stop on Market Street.”

De la Peña brought us behind the scenes of creating his 2018 picture book, Love. 

De la Peña explains how writing a picture book is “nothing different than writing a spoken word poem,” which is transcribed and given to the illustrator, Loren Long, to make into a picture book. Long then “works with text, in the margins, in and out of the letters” to create the stunning illustrations. De la Peña displayed images of how a particular illustration evolved into the form that appears on the pages. An image of a young boy looking out of a window was enhanced with the inclusion of a father catching a bus at dawn. Then Long drew in a brother handing the boy a plate of toast. De la Peña describes this as the first time he changed the text after seeing an illustration: a line memorializing his grandmother’s house slippers became “a slice of burned toast tastes like love.” The image was created through monoprint, a process in which a painting is imprinted onto glass and transferred to a separate sheet. This is done in layers so that the background of just one picture can be made up of several iterations of monoprint. Finally, Long paints on details such as the hair and facial expression. This effort is poignantly apparent in the following image in which a family gathers around a television, hiding a news story from the child’s view.

De la Peña shared that different audiences saw the new story as different things: Houston kids see it as a hurricane, high schoolers imagine a school shooting, and adults view it as 9-11.

De la Peña wanted to make the book as inclusive and accessible as possible for kids, both with how they look and more prevalently, socioeconomically. Although a seemingly simple book, he describes the hard work and thoughtfulness he put into his picture book. Peña shows kids that love isn’t always simple: “If you’re writing about love for kids, you write about… hardships” he says. He shows parents working long hours in the book, and shows some difficulties families may face, such as alcoholism. The mention of alcoholism resulted in a clash between “commerce and art:” a large and popular bookstore chain refused to sell the book for its hint at alcoholism, but neither he nor Long desisted. Thankfully so, because the unchanged picture book better reflects real adversities that children must endure. He and Baron both emphasize “emotional diversity,” understanding that children express their complex feelings in differing ways or not at all. This astute observation is aptly rendered in both Love and All of Me.

 

Baron’s All of Me is a semi-autobiographical middle grade novel in verse that includes both celebrations and hardships that Baron overcame in his life. Wanting All of Me to be accessible to the wide MG audience, he wrote in verse to imbue the text with emotion, and we can say he succeeded in pulling on our heartstrings as he read aloud. A particularly touching and resonant poem is “Fat at the Beach”, which describes the main character, Ari, being too scared to take his shirt off at the beach due to his view of his body. Throughout the novel Ari comes to terms with his own identity and appearance through beautiful and lyrical language.    

Seeing de la Peña and Baron read and discuss their work was such a treat for us. We truly appreciate their time and we also appreciate the SDSU MFA in Creative Writing Program and SDSU Library for making the Living Writers series possible. 

The next Living Writers talk will be with Karen An-hwei on October 30, 2019 at 7:00 PM. 

-(SS) and (AN)

Interview with Sofia St John, Student

We’re taking a short break from our series on Dr. Mary Galbraith to present an interview with Sofia St. John, one of the graduate assistants at the NCSCL, who discusses her experience learning creative writing from Matt de la Peña. 

Matt de la Peña is a former MFA student and a visiting lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He is "the #1 New York Times Bestselling, Newbery Medal-winning author of seven young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here, and Superman: Dawnbreaker) and five picture books (including Love and Last Stop on Market Street)." 

- (excerpted from https://literature.sdsu.edu/people/bios/de-la-pena.html)

Matt de la Peña reading from his novel Mexican WhiteBoy

Which of Matt de la Peña’s courses are you taking?

English 696: Writing the Young Protagonist. 


How does Matt de la Peña’s expertise inform the way he teaches? Can you share something notable about his teaching style?

One really cool thing about Matt is that he’s a successful, published author, so he knows the ins and outs of publishing. One day he just sat down and explained a bit about what it’s like to publish, which is a topic we will go back to later. He has a ton of experience writing and publishing, so he will just have little tidbits of information he shares with us. He’s very real with us: this is the writing world, and this is how he navigates through it.

Also, because our class is mostly workshopping, he’s giving students the space to voice opinions, whether or not they are ones the entire class agrees on. What I really love is we don’t have to completely have a fully formed opinion, because the rest of the class, both the students and the teacher, will help build on it. We basically are given free rein to discuss anything in someone’s work. I had one workshop where it seemed some of the class loved part of my work, and some of the class really didn’t, and like most aspects of writing, there’s not really a right or wrong. He lets us come to terms with what each of us think is “good” writing, because there’s no real way to define it, no matter how many classes we take or pieces we write. 


What topics have been your favorite so far?

One of the most fascinating (and most difficult) topics was on narrative restraint, which is letting the story carry itself. I admire the writer who has achieved narrative restraint. Maybe because I am also an academic writer, I feel like I need to control the character’s every motion and word, but that’s really not fun for either the reader or the writer. In academic writing, we point out almost every detail we discover which the author has carefully plotted out. In creative writing, however, we are the ones planting those details for the reader or scholar to find, and for me, it’s so difficult to make writing subtle, but he’s really pushing us to let go of what others interpret from our writing and not try to force an interpretation on the reader, which I really am fascinated by. All those subtle little details we read in books are not as easy to write as they look. I really don’t think there’s much that is effortless in writing.


How does it feel to be an MA student taking an MFA course? What are you gaining as a scholar by taking this course?

Honestly it was really intimidating at first, and even now it’s still a little scary. I believe there is one other MA besides me, but the two of us are surrounded by these insanely talented, creative writers who may have been studying creative writing for two years in their MFA. However, I quickly felt at home in the class; we are all scholars who love writing and want to learn how to be better writers. In that class, we’re all writers.

Last week I had my first workshop, where everyone reads your work and talks about it for a while, and it’s honestly the most terrifying and humbling experience. I’m showing what I see as basically my child and it is being examined and discussed by 10+ people, most of who have been studying the art of creative writing for quite a while.

As a scholar, it reminds me how much love and time and effort are put into this work, and also it reminds me how vulnerable authors are to scholars. Last year I spent a couple months pretty intensely writing about and poring over a book I was really passionate about, and I found some interviews from the author about how a lot of the book is based on his real life. I’m a bit wary to use the study of biographical influence sometimes, but I saw this author’s grief in the book that he is putting out for anyone to read. I tend to forget there is a mind, a heart, behind every writing I encounter, whether it be a picture book or an academic, analytical text. On the other hand, when we’re the ones writing it’s really hard to not be emotional about some aspect of our piece.

I’m also reminded how vulnerable my own writing is. I’m experiencing those emotions of writing, and the difficulty of putting those emotions to the page, and after all that, I show it to a class full of people who for the most part I met one month ago. Academic writing can sometimes seem cold and calculated, but it’s not. Academic writing can be just as vulnerable as creative writing, and really, in learning about creative writing, I’m realizing how creative academic writing is.  


As a literature scholar, sometimes it is easy to forget that the author’s lived experiences influence the work that they produce. Having met and studied under an author, how does it impact the way you read his works?

I haven’t read many of his works yet, but I have read “Last Stop on Market Street” by Matt. Knowing Matt humanizes the author of course, and I am able to appreciate all the hard work that goes into his writing. We mostly only see books when they are sold: finished, perfected, every t crossed every i dotted; in this class we get little insights into all of the emotions behind writing a work. It makes the work so much more dimensional; I want to know every meaning behind the words. 


What works have you produced in this course so far? How do you feel about them, as someone who studies literature?

We have only done short works in class, and for my one workshop I submitted a chapter of my novel I finished last year. I’m somewhat happy with my chapter, but after my workshop I am seeing a lot of work that needs to be done. It’s been four days since my workshop, and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about how it would be perceived by an audience beyond our class, and that’s terrifying to think of. I honestly have really mixed feelings about how my own creative writing is, and I think that might be something a lot of writers experience. Part of me thinks what I have written is good, but another part of me just thinks about how I could make it better.

I feel that my work is never done, there is always something to tinker with in writing, whether it be academic or creative. Honestly, if someone were to ask if reading my book would be enjoyable, I would have no clue how to answer. Overall though, I think getting this strong basis in creative writing, especially by studying young protagonists, I am reminded how dimensional books are, and I hope my writing reflects that. 


Thank you so much, Sofia! We loved hearing about your experience working with Matt de la Peña as an MA student. Matt de la Peña will be speaking alongside Chris Baron, author of All of Me, on Wednesday, October 16th at 7 p.m. in Love Library, Room 430. We hope to see you there!


- (AN)

Interview With Ashley Nguyen, Student

Sofia St. John had the opportunity to interview Ashley Nguyen, her fellow graduate assistant and a student of Dr. Mary Galbraith in 2018. We spoke about her experience working with Dr. Galbraith in her undergraduate class.

Image: screen grab: My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki from Dr. Galbraith’s English 501: Fantasy for Children syllabus

What class did you take with Dr. Galbraith, and when?

I took English 501: Literature for Children in the fall of 2018, and the theme was “fantasy and the touch of the real.” It was my first children’s literature class and I chose it to be my specialization course in preparation for the spring honors program. Of course, I was very excited! What was your favorite part about being in class with Dr. Galbraith? Dr. Galbraith was my introduction to a field I hadn’t even heard of before. It was fascinating to learn from someone who had excelled in the field for so long and still found new ways to talk and write about what she loves. This course was the first time I had taken a class in which I fell in love with the readings and knew I wanted to dig deeper – to read, discuss, and write more about children’s literature.

What was your biggest takeaway from the class? How did she impact your studies going forward as a literature scholar?

Dr. Galbraith emphasized authors’ backgrounds, claiming that their childhood experiences profoundly influenced the literature they would go on to create. We drew parallels between the authors’ life events and the events that their characters undergo. This concept has come to fruition in my own research a year later, as I am currently preparing for a ChLA panel on #ownvoices. Specifically, I am interested in how Asian American authors’ experiences as descendants of refugees influence their own writing, particularly in the creation of characters born in the United States.

How do your research interests overlap with Dr. Galbraith’s, if they do? If not, did you find any new research interests in her class?

Dr. Galbraith didn’t share much of her research interests, but I remember her telling us towards the end of the semester that she was writing (if I recall correctly) a definition for a dictionary. The term she was researching was “deixis.” I remember being floored by the complexity of her research, which she had never flouted throughout the semester. It was a moment when I realized the infinite possibility for the academic study of literature, which was formative for me as someone who was applying to a master’s program more out of necessity than passion for literature. I got my first look at the fun (and torture) of the life of a scholar, which I will develop into throughout my own studies as a graduate student.

I hadn’t had a specific research interest in mind, but her class provided an extensive survey of the different forms that children’s literature takes, including classics, novels, picture books, and animated movies. I was compelled by our early look at how fairy tales adapt over time, and this influenced the honors thesis I wrote in the following semester.

Does she have any unique teaching styles or aspects of her class which differ from other classes you have taken?

Professor Galbraith was very engaging and valued the input of her students, many of whom were not English majors. Her discussion questions and written assignments challenged us to think critically about books that are often relegated to the margins, as well as stories we’ve heard but never analyzed before. English 501 was notable because its texts explored a lot of difficult themes such as war trauma, adult condescension towards children, and parental abandonment.

Do you have a notable memory from class or from working with Dr. Galbraith?

The most heartwarming event I can recall occurred in the middle of the summer after I had taken her class. I had just graduated and was accepted to the graduate program, which I had asked her to write a letter of recommendation for. In July, I received an email from her which stated very simply:

Dear Ashley,

Congratulations on making the Dean's List-- that's a significant accomplishment!

Your proud professor,

Mary Galbraith

This email, to me, really sums up the kind of instructor Dr. Galbraith is. She remembered me from two semesters ago and went out of her way to send me an email and encourage me, whose accomplishments are incomparable to her numerous publications and international conference presentations. She is well-beloved to all who know her because she genuinely cares about others. SDSU is very fortunate to have a lecturer with such intellectual and emotional generosity.

Thank you so much to Ashley for helping us get to know Dr. Galbraith a little more!

This is part two of a series of blog posts in preparation for Dr. Mary Galbraith’s talk, "The Deictic Imaginary: Literature as Creation," to be held in LL430 on Wednesday, October 30^th from 4:00-5:00PM. Please keep an eye out for part three to come out in a few weeks!

-SS