Each year in October the English Department invites an author to spend a week at WVU for the Virginia Butts Sturm Writer-in-Residence program. During the week, the author gives a reading and leads workshops with twelve graduate students and one undergraduate who have applied to participate.

This year, we were very pleased to host Susan Straight, author of seven novels and one middle-grade reader. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Straight lives and teaches in Riverside, California, and loves to tell stories about her neighborhood.

WVU faculty member Glenn Taylor first met Straight five years ago at the Miami Book Fair. At an event surrounded by authors and academics, he was happy to find in Susan another writer who could talk tacos and college basketball. What most impressed Glenn, however, was Susan’s loyalty to her daughters, her family, and Riverside.

Author Susan Straight reading in the Robinson Reading Room for the 2015 Sturm Writer-in-Residence program on October 15.

Straight’s characters and scenes often pull heavily from people and places she’s seen and known throughout her life, from her brother-in-law to a boy from her daughter’s kindergarten class to a woman working at a linen plant who was deported. “It’s not that we honor or exorcise someone,” Straight explained during the reading, “it’s that we remember them.” But it can take a long time to get these characters right: Straight began writing Highwire Moon at 19 and finished when she was 35. Her book Between Heaven and Here also took 15 years because she had “altogether the wrong thing in my mind about the character.”

Her connection and sense of place helps her to write strong characters. She told her workshop students that she calls writing from this place “Deep Frank”—really getting inside the mind of Frank (or whatever the character’s name is). The place, the scene can also be a character, because geography is destiny: There are people who stay, people who go, and people who come back.

The workshops Susan led on the evenings of October 13, 14, and 16 were focused on the students’ writing: what was on the page, what needed to go, and what needed to be added. One of the most helpful writing tactics Susan employed was asking what was memorable from the story. The things that we remember after reading are the things that the story should be built around. She also stressed finding a reader with whom you share work and honest feedback since graduate school can’t last forever.

On the last night of workshop, Susan delved into publishing, both in literary journals and publishing houses. Her books have come out from a range of publishers, from Hyperion to Anchor to McSweeney’s, and the different types of publishers each offer varying benefits.

This year’s Sturm participants were: Whit Arnold, Margaret Behringer, Bryce Berkowitz, Jordan Carter, Emily Denton, Kelsey Englert, Megan Fahey, Barrett Lipkin, Kelsey Liebenson-Morse, Sarah Munroe, Andrea Ruggirello, Kat Saunders, and Natalie Updike.

To hear Susan Straight’s reading, visit the Creative Readings Podcast hosted by the Center for Literary Computing.

You can watch Susan Straight’s talk, “To Make You Cry: Why I Tell Stories” from TEDx Redondo Beach on YouTube.