Dr. Ann Peters is associate professor of English at Stern College, Yeshiva University, and the recipient of the 2012 McGinnis Ritchie Award for Nonfiction. She lives in Brooklyn and in upstate New York.
Observer: Dr. Peters, congratulations again on your promotion and tenure! Can you explain to our readers how this changes your status as a professor?
AP: Earning tenure is a major event for me. It means that Stern College has committed to me for the long haul and has officially welcomed me into their intellectual community. With tenure comes greater job security and academic freedom.
How did you feel when you heard the news?
I was at our house upstate on my own when I got the call, and quite honestly, I felt a bit dazed—just sat there on the couch in silence trying to process it all. Then I called my husband and let out a whoop. After that, I went to sleep for three days. I hadn’t realized how tired I was and how much pressure I’d been under. I still have to pinch myself every day and remind myself that some of the stress of the last few years is behind me.
How competitive is tenure at Stern? And who is eligible to be granted tenure?
Stern takes the granting of tenure very seriously, and the process is rigorous, usually lasting about six years, from the time one is hired on a tenure track line to the final stages of submitting a tenure dossier. (You can’t really apply for tenure, but are hired on a tenure-track line at the start.) Over the course of those six years, teaching, scholarship, and service to the department and the school are assessed. In the final year, your scholarship or creative work is sent out for review to outside scholars in your field.
Your upcoming book, House Hold (Amazon, $24.95, 1/9/2014) is a “memoir of place.” Can you explain what motivated you to write the book?
For most scholars, the first published book is an expansion of the Ph.D. dissertation. Once I started working on the revision of the dissertation, however, it became clear there was another book I needed to write instead. It was a risk—why start over?—but I simply couldn’t stop thinking about this new idea. I wrote my dissertation on mid-century women writers of New York and in that work, an analysis of public space was an important aspect of my argument. For the book, I wanted to continue to reflect on place and its connection to literature but this time much more personally. The book I envisioned would explore the connections between place, literature and the experiences of my own life, first in rural Wisconsin and later in New York City. I saw it as a kind of hybrid—part memoir, part meditation, part literary analysis. I came to this idea after re-reading a Henry James story, “The Jolly Corner,” which led me to write a short piece about my father, an architect and developer who built the house where I grew up. The experience of weaving my reading of the James story with my father’s story was an exciting challenge, and from here the book began to take shape. My growing interest in the genre of literary nonfiction also motivated me to shift focus. I wanted to create a form that would be serious yet accessible to a more general readership, that would address my academic interests but free me up to really play with language. I was itching to write a certain kind of sentence that one doesn’t typically find in a traditional academic book.
Yale University professor Alice Kaplan praised your book as being a “perceptive and deeply affecting book about belonging to a place and yet never quite belonging.” That’s a very poignant quote. Can you say more about this?
Yes, the subject of this book is as much about the problem of not belonging, of not taking root, as anything else. The section on New York City explores, for instance, all the challenges I faced finding an affordable apartment when I moved to the city. For many years, I never felt properly housed, and I don’t just mean this in the literal sense. This desire for home was complicated, though, since I was also drawn to New York in order to be free of the attachments to place and property. This swinging between a longing to take root and a longing to hit the road is a constant theme in American literature. In House Hold, I tell my version of it and explore the theme in the work of some American writers I love.
I’d also say that while the book is very much about physical place—the actual rooms and houses and apartments that shape our lives—it also speaks to the problem of attachment in a larger sense. While writing the book, I saw that underlying the concerns in House Hold is a bigger question about attachment in general. Statements like “I will live in this house for the rest of my life” or “this piece of land is mine, I own it” are, I suppose, strategies of avoidance as much as anything else. We hold tightly to a place in order to convince ourselves we will be here forever. This might be another way to think about the idea of “never quite belonging.”
So, in your opinion, is it really the “places” that make us who we are, or the people?
There is no separating them. The places I describe in House Hold are all portraits of people. In telling the story of my childhood home, for example, I am giving you my parents. In another chapter, “Manhattan,” I describe a small studio in the West Village where a close friend lived for over sixty years. That room defined her. People touch us through the places they create.
What is your favorite “place” to be in the world?
If you read the book, you’ll see that the house my father designed in eastern Wisconsin had a major influence on my life. Another place: a little peninsula on Burntside Lake in northern Minnesota where the naturalist Sigurd Olson built a small cabin and where I was married. These days, I’ve grown very attached to the house in the Catskills where I spend my summers. And of course, there are quite a few rooms in New York City. Right now our landlady is in the process of selling the building in Brooklyn where I’ve lived for the past seven years, and I’m already feeling nostalgic about that apartment and worried about where I’ll go next.
Yes! Although if we are talking in terms of New York real estate, you could also say earning tenure is like landing a rent-stabilized apartment. In both cases (finding a home, gaining tenure), you can turn your attention away from those consuming anxieties— “where will I live next?” or “where will I work next?”— to other aspects of your life. It disturbs me now to think of how much of my first years in New York were spent agonizing over real estate. I lived in nine different apartments in just my first ten years in the city. I seemed to be always looking for an apartment or moving in and out of one. It took up so much time! Later when my housing situation was more stable, I was amazed to see how much more room I had for the other aspects of my life: family, friendship, and career. I imagine being tenured will feel a bit like that. It will eliminate some worries so I can focus on other things—new books to write, new classes to teach. This is an incredibly rare kind of security, of course, and I hope I never lose sight of how lucky I am to have it.
What classes are you most excited about teaching this semester?
This semester, I’m teaching Literary Nonfiction which I’ve taught here several times. I’m working on the syllabus now, and am excited about some of the changes I’ve made to the reading list. We still begin with Truman Capote and end with David Foster Wallace, but except for Joan Didion and Joseph Mitchell, all the other readings will be new. In the spring I’m teaching the Introduction to Creative Writing course, and instead of three genres, we’ll only be focusing on fiction and essay. I’ll also be teaching two new courses in the spring, both of which I’m thrilled about: a seminar on two authors (probably Henry James and Edith Wharton) and a course on the American short story.
How do you compare our English department to those at other universities?
For a small department, we manage to offer a wide range of courses. We have a remarkably dedicated faculty who are as committed to teaching as they are to their scholarship. This balance between scholarship and teaching isn’t easy to maintain, and in many schools, faculty members are forced to forego one or the other. We are also unusual in the kind of interactions that happen between professor and student. English majors here are assigned mentors almost from the day they declare, and we try to meet with our majors at least twice a semester. Every major is also assigned a senior exit project mentor who works closely with her in her final year. In other schools where I’ve worked, I didn’t see the same kind of one-on-one connection. Even part-time composition teachers here give an extraordinary amount of time conferencing with students. That’s pretty impressive, I think. Also, unlike many English departments, we offer several tracks: the regular English literature track, but also tracks in Creative Writing and in Media Studies (journalism, advertising, public relations). We try to help our majors find the right fit for their interests and career aspirations.
What is the most important career advice you’ve received?
Before I moved to New York, I attended a summer program for people interested in publishing. I remember one woman, an invited speaker, talking about how finding the right career often happens through a process of elimination. You try things partly to find out what doesn’t make you happy or doesn’t match your personality. We assume the day we graduate we’ll know exactly how our career path will unfold. But that path often takes surprising turns. Rather than seeing my early jobs as mistakes or time-wasting detours, I like to see them as just what I needed to get me to where I am now.
Any writing/ editing tips for interested students?
Ha, well you know I always do! At the moment, I’m trying to start an essay, and of course it’s always horribly difficult to get started. To deal with that blank page, I’m trying all the tricks I share with my students. I’ve tried writing up interview questions and answering them. I wrote myself a long letter and then wrote back. I called a friend and talked through my ideas, taking notes. I went back and read something else I’d written that I liked, reminding myself that yes, in fact, I CAN write. (It’s amazing how every time I begin something new, I completely forget I’ve done it before. “Who was that person who wrote that book?”) I looked through my “Good Stuff” file to see if I could find a sentence, any sentence I’d written, that might get me started. I read some prose I admire (today it came from a Vivian Gornick essay) and typed out a paragraph, then tried to mimic her sentence structure. What came of all that wasn’t much—a big mess in fact. But at least I’ve started and no longer have to face that blank page. Hopefully tomorrow when I open that document, I’ll find something beautiful or puzzling in there, a sentence or idea to get me started.
You can pre-order Dr. Ann Peters’s book here!