The Adviser: An Interview with Michael Spurgeon

The Staff of the 2020 issue of American River Review would like to honor and celebrate Professor Michael Spurgeon’s tenure as the magazine’s faculty adviser, and for cultivating a deep-rooted love and understanding of literature within his students.

What follows is a short interview with Professor Michael Spurgeon, the man behind the scenes of ten years of ENGCW 450, the College Literary Magazine class for American River Review.

You recently stepped away from American River Review after being the Faculty Adviser for the past ten years. Can you tell us how you got started as the adviser for American River Review?

Professor Merson had been adviser for ten years and was ready for a change. He and the previous adviser, Professor Schneider, and the dean at that time, Rod Siegfried, thought I might be a good replacement. As I considered the job, I couldn’t help but be impressed with the dedication of the students. All the students were great, but Danni Gorden was the Editor-in-Chief back then, and she was an absolute rock star. I just didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to work with students who were that talented and passionate.

What were some of the first hurdles you encountered when first taking over the faculty role for the magazine?

The biggest challenge came in the second year. Craig Martinez and I both started advising at the same time, and the first year went off without a hitch, so we thought we knew what we were doing. The second year, the editorial team had to re-edit the magazine over and over again. Toshi Casey was EIC at the time. She would edit the magazine and the next day all of the same errors would be there again. Nobody could figure it out. Toshi re-edited the entire magazine like four times in the week before we went to print, and lots of the errors were still in the printed magazine. It was soul-crushing. I felt terrible for all the students who had put their hearts and souls into that issue.

That was by far the biggest and most ambitious issue of my tenure, and the students had really risen to the occasion. To have all the errors in the final product, errors that had been fixed multiple times, was brutal. Even the dean, who was new at that time, was freaked out. She suggested that we’d have to reprint it, though where we would find the $15,000 to do so wasn’t clear.

Ultimately, it was the president of the college who walked us all back from the ledge. David Viar. A cool man. He said something like, “It is an educational program, and this is a learning experience. We can’t expect top national prizes every year. BUT don’t let it happen again.” That’s when Craig and I received some release time from our teaching load to put together the operational manual. We went through the whole project to really understand how everything worked. It turned out the problem had been a file management protocol in the Art New Media class. How we had avoided the same problems in the first year is anyone’s guess. Anyway, we got the problems resolved, but that was the biggest hurdle.

I should add that that issue of the magazine won more national awards than any other despite the errors. It is a beautiful magazine. The students that year, particularly Toshi, Zac, Karen, and Richard, were amazing. The whole team was amazing.

The magazine is often referred to by prior students with fondness and praise. What are your thoughts on how the magazine has affected those who have come through the class?

It is the single finest educational program that I have ever been affiliated with as a professor or as a student. I doubt that I would have participated in launching 916 Ink if I hadn’t had the experience of advising the magazine, so it had a profound impact on me and the projects I have pursued. As for the students, I witnessed a lot of people be transformed by that class. There is something about joining a team dedicated to excellence that makes everyone bring their best selves. I watched a lot of young people really find their footing in that class. I won’t embarrass anyone by naming names, but there are a lot of people who found a sense of purpose and belonging from the magazine who are on meaningful trajectories in life because of the magazine, and a lot of them would acknowledge that fact.

And then there were the older students who sort of found a new calling from the class. There were many of them, but I’ll mention Betsy Harper, who passed away this year, as perhaps the greatest example. She loved the magazine, and she loved the people who loved it. It’s extraordinary, really, what the magazine does for those involved with it.

Now that you have handed the advising role for the magazine off to Professor Michael Angelone, where do you see the class in the next five years? Ten? What are your hopes for the magazine?

I’d like to see two things happen. First, I’d like to find a better way for the college to promote the magazine and the classes associated with it. It really is the best educational experience I have ever been a part of, and more students would benefit from knowing about the ways they can be involved.

Second--and I’m likely to receive some angry emails from current and former staff for what I am going to say--I’d really like to see the magazine move from a physical edition to an online digital edition. There is no doubt that there is a lot of value in the printed magazine, but it costs roughly $15,000 a year to print 1000 copies, and the moment the next issue comes out, the previous issue feels somewhat obsolete. If there was a website--and I mean a really nice website- -that was being updated every month or so, it would be an ever-evolving thing. It would have a pulse.

Also, it would cost a lot less and would have the potential to reach a much larger audience, both on and off-campus. So I’d like to see that happen.

As part of this issue, we asked you for a selection of your poetry. One of the poems you provided is “Dinosaur DNA.” What was your inspiration for this poem?

Many of the poems I write begin with a technical goal. In this case, I had noticed that I was writing poems with strongly linear narratives. This poem was my effort to break away from that. I wanted it to be a sort of collage of images that would create the experience. I don’t know how successful I was, but that is what I was going for. As for subject matter, I guess I was questioning the notion of human progress.

The speciation of Homo Sapiens out of Homo erectus is estimated to have happened roughly 350,000 years ago. While we certainly know more about our world and interact with it differently than the first sapiens, biologically we are the same. It seems pretty clear to me that we are going to evolve ourselves out of existence if we don’t simply exterminate ourselves first. Whether it is through the atom bomb or climate change or artificial intelligence gene manipulation, H. sapiens are nearer our end than our beginning, and we might be quite near. That’s what the poem is “about.”

We also asked you for a prose excerpt from your novel-in-progress, “The Province of Men.” Can you provide some context for this excerpt?

The book is set on the US and Mexico border in a fictional town that looks a lot like Calexico. The protagonist has just returned home after having done time in Leavenworth military prison, which he was in after striking a superior during combat in Iraq. This is a crime that can be punished with death, but he got prison time because unofficially the military recognized the person he struck pretty much deserved it. The protagonist, who is white Anglo-Saxon, was orphaned at a young age and subsequently adopted by and raised in a Hispanic family, the patriarch of which was his father’s Vietnam war buddy.

In this family, the protagonist has two brothers and a sister. The sister was also adopted, and the protagonist and the sister have a “complicated” relationship that goes beyond brother and sister. When the book opens, the family is under a lot of financial pressure because the matriarch is in the hospital racking up big medical bills, it is a poor county, and it is the middle of the recession.

When the protagonist went into the military, he joined with his best friend. As young men, they were quite wild and prone to getting into trouble, but they managed to avoid getting recruited into the local gang run by his friend’s older brother. They went into the military as really their only escape from getting dragged into the gang, but the friend subsequently was killed in Iraq.

While the protagonist was away, the brother’s gang grew into the local arm of a Mexican drug cartel. The heart of the story is the protagonist’s efforts to help his family while trying to avoid getting sucked into the world of the cartel.

Is there anything else you would like to say about your experiences with the magazine and staff that you have worked with?

Just that serving as Editorial Adviser to American River Review was the greatest privilege of my teaching career, and I sincerely thank all of the students who shared the experience with me. Please stay in touch.

New Car Smell

Michael Spurgeon

The new car smell of Rochelle’s Cadillac déjà vus me back to another car, not new, not a Cadillac, and not so much the car as the yards of silence that unfolded between us. Not the silence,

I don’t mean the silence, but the distance behind the silence, how far I felt from myself, from my own emotions and from you as we cruised out to the ocean. It’s in moments like this I know

if you could look inside me you’d see a storm of television snow, and when I think of television snow I think I know what death will look like: the endless transmission and reception of nothingness…

But my mind can’t boomerang around the whole of death. It falters, and I think of how, even in television snow, I look for a familiar pattern, an order to the chaos, something others could identify,

like a search light or signal flare, like a beacon, like a sensation like this: twilight, arriving home, when I’m alone in my own car, I’ll sit unmoving for a long time, and then, barely perceptible,

as if frightened, the world starts to twitch and the lawns sigh and the sky backs up and the letters in the mailbox cry and I start to consider the art of architecture and what it means to call a place home,

let alone arrive home, casting a creeping doubt about homes, or, more precisely, about arrivals and about the roads that bring me to them. We’re on the wrong road. At least that’s what you said,

boomeranging me back, as if the knowledge of being lost together might make us less lost, even map a way across the distance between us. And it is true, I instantly felt closer to you. Perhaps that’s love:

that instant we realize we’re lost but not alone. Perhaps not. Call it what you will. I wish we’d stopped long enough to call it something, and after it went bad I wish I could’ve called you. I should have,

if only to say, Today, driving, I thought I saw us in my rearview mirror, and we really were closer than it may have appeared. But I didn’t. Isn’t it odd how what we do and don’t do become the same route to

the present? Then Rochelle says, We’re here. And voilà, just like that I am here, back in her Cadillac, back inside myself, unsure I remember the literal landscape of the last minutes, or a single road of our arrival.