CAMPUS CURRENT
FAC U LT Y N E WS
Trajectories
Creative writing Professor Salvador Plascencia wants to see where the imagination can go. Written by Eric Feezell
FOR SALVADOR PLASCENCIA, WRITING IS NOT A
science, but a logistical problem. “How do you move this character there?” the College’s new assistant professor of creative writing reflects. “How do you get this character to fight that character? How do you heal that character, get him to the hospital? It’s logistics.” For a writer often labeled as experimental, Plascencia is surprisingly interested in writing’s moving parts: words, syntax, the labor-intensive stuff of grammar. Close reading. Sentence isolation. While his literature courses explore broad problems related to politics, history and identity, in his workshops, the sentence is king. He’s fond of employing constraint exercises—short spurts of prose that focus on those diminutive yet crucial mechanics. A lipogram, for example, might require students to pen 300 words without using the letter “e.” Or students might “inherit” a century-old word bank and construct something syntactically new from this list. “Anytime there’s intense focus on the word or the sentence, that’s really what we want to do,” he says. “Pragmatically, we can’t all write novels and talk about them in a workshop setting. I’m much more interested in the sustained effort of a single page.” Following creative writing positions at Pitzer and Pomona colleges, as well as at UC Riverside, USC and CalArts, Plascencia heard about an opening at Harvey Mudd through the 5-C grapevine. He says he wasn’t daunted by the idea of teaching writing at a STEM institution. Plascencia’s interest is in magical realism, a genre that incorporates fantastical or mythical elements into an otherwise realistic narrative. “So that’s probably not science related,” he says jokingly. “My critical inquiry class is called Unreality, so we’ll be looking at [Gabriel García] Márquez, [Jorge Luis] Borges. I have not really thought about any sort of technically related thing.” He does not envision STEM shaping his instruction in major ways, at least to start.
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HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE
“ I think about whether a piece of writing has potential
trajectories that are exciting to me. My hope is students never try to tame or correct what’s happening, but rather be open to the potential of what it could be.
– SALVADOR PLASCENCIA
“My function is to explore humanities,” says Plascencia. He aims to teach writing as craft, rather than explore broad, conscious themes related to science or otherwise. He’s also not concerned with students (or himself) getting published. “I think about whether a piece of writing has potential trajectories that are exciting to me,” he says. “My hope is students never try to tame or correct what’s happening, but rather be open to the potential of what it could be.”
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Plascencia’s own novel, The People of Paper (McSweeney’s Books, 2005), was rejected by more than a few major publishers. “All of them,” he says rather proudly. (Many of these same publishers scrambled after the fact to release the paperback.) Now translated into a dozen languages, The People of Paper has received critical acclaim and earned him the Bard College Fiction Prize/writing residency in 2008. His stories and reviews have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Tin House and