Sandy Florian is Here.
By Aaron Hoover
Sandy Florian is here, and she wants to see your work.
Florian joins the WVU Creative Writing department this fall as a visiting associate professor. She brings with her an MFA in fiction from Brown University and a PhD in English and Creative Writing from the University of Denver, as well as an amazingly cosmopolitan background. Of Puerto Rican and Colombian descent, Florian has lived in Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, France and England.
One might expect a writer to make a lot of hay out of a background like that, but Florian has an unusual perspective. “I’m not interested in myself,” she says. “My environment doesn’t influence my work, per se.” Rather, it informs the focus on language that dominates much of her work. “It does trigger culture clash, misunderstandings, communication problems,” she says, “and those things make me think about the problem of language.”
As a writer, Florian finds writing “gruelingly laborious.” She tries to set her goals just out of reach, so that she needs to struggle to meet them. When the work gets to be too much, she takes a break. “I have a hula hoop in my studio,” she says. “I hula while I listen to Indian pop rock, which makes me very happy, or I go running or practice yoga.” If physical relaxation techniques fail, she may look for inspiration in others’ writing. In a particularly tough spot on her most recent work, Boxing the Compass, “I threw up my arms in surrender and read parts of Blanchot’s The Essential Solitude. It was this pretty little thing about the shadow of the hand that writes. Blanchot spoke directly to the questions I was asking about my work, and I was able to resume with some confidence.”
The product of all this labor is a style of work Florian describes as “neither fiction nor poetry,” but “philosophical prose, prose that forces people to think about reading, to think about knowledge about the act of entering the complicated process of interpretation and engaging with the exchange of ideas. All my work,” she says, “questions the problem of what is. What is language. What is time. What is God. What do I believe and why.”
We all fantasize about the books we’d like to read when we’re free from professional obligations. Florian’s dream list includes Gravity’s Rainbow and Roberto Bolano’s 2666. For workshop in the spring, she’s chosen Sons and Lovers, Berg, and The Dead Father (with reference to Oedipus Rex for background).
She also loves to read student work. “You’ll get excellent critiques of your work,” she promises. “It’s my forte. I have a knack for understanding what writers are trying to do, and a productive way of helping them actualize their goals. I’m very excited,” she says, “to see what you all are doing.”
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