Literary Guests

If you could meet any writer, living or dead, who would it be and what would you talk about?

English professor William C. Spengeman: "Emily Dickinson. I'm reading all 1,800 of her poems carefully, and most are written to a specific person about something that she and her audience both knew as 'it.' I want to know what 'it' is. Sometimes she's talking to herself, sometimes she doesn't talk in complete sentences or she talks in code. Nothing would make me happier than to sit her down and ask her to sort things out for me."

English professor DonaldSheehan: "Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He has a great character in his last book, The BrothersKaramazov, who says, 'From these meek ones, thirsting for solitary prayer, will perhaps come once again the salvation of the Russian land.' I would like to ask him how he would assess the character's understanding and how he views the last century in Russia and the world."

German professor Steven P.Scher: "Goethe. We celebrated the 250 th anniversary of his birth last year. I would ask him about Elective Affinities [a novel in which two couples swap partners]—how did it occur to him to write something that would be very occurrent 200 years later? He would probably say that these are eternal occurrences."

German professor Joan K. Campbell: "I would invite the [Austrian] poet Rainer Maria Rilke, but I would not invite him to come to my office. I would like to invite him to ride on the carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris with me, although it burned down years ago. His poem 'Karussel' is my favorite and I would like to share this experience with him."

English professor David Wykes: "I've just been reading Cormac McCarthy's Child ofGod with my English 5 class. This novel has interested my students because it's about Lester Ballard, a character who seems utterly depraved. He's a murderer and a necrophiliac, and I have so many questions. At the end of the book Lester says that he's 'a child of God, like you, perhaps.' My kids are asking whether Lester Ballard is a child of God. It would be so nice to take McCarthy by the arm and have him stand in front of my class to answer their questions."

Spanish and Portuguese professor Lia Schwartz: "Borges. I would ask him why did he always go back to the authors he studied in high school—Virgil, Homer and others. What impact did these authors have on him?"