“It doesn’t happen often, but I think you made the essay worse”—this from long-time WVU professor Kevin Oderman to his MFA student Whitney Arnold last year after seeing Whit’s revisions. Whit relayed this anecdote to a large audience when he introduced Kevin at his reading with former student Sarah Einstein on November 16 in the Robinson Reading Room. But after making this pronouncement, Kevin and Whit went through five rounds of revisions together to make the essay work. And this is what Kevin is known for, this is why he is beloved by students: he reads closely and makes careful line edits; he is dedicated to writing and teaching.

Sarah Einstein acknowledged as much when she took the podium after being introduced by second-year MFA student Kelsey Liebenson-Morse, recognizing Kevin’s help on her manuscript. Sarah, who graduated from WVU’s MFA program in 2011, said that being back at WVU and reading with Kevin felt like sitting at the big people’s table at Thanksgiving.

Sarah Einstein

But in terms of writing, Sarah has earned her place at the table: her book Mot: A Memoir won the 2014 AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction and was published this year by the University of Georgia Press. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. At the reading, she read the first chapter of Mot, “The Nearest Walmart,” in which she drives from West Virginia to Texas to spend a week in a KOA camp with Mot, a schizophrenic homeless man whom she first met in Morgantown. Her complicated friendship with him is relayed in a straightforward, humorous, and compassionate way. Sarah understands that although her times with Mot are in some ways a relief from her regular life, they are also a “remnant of disappointed desire,” reflecting the romance of being Mot’s person to talk to and the lingering hope that maybe one person can change the world.

Kevin read his essay “Selling” from his new collection of twelve essays, Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel, which came out this year from Etruscan Press. Set at a cremation ceremony in Bali, “Selling” is a mediation on faces as signage—what they reveal and what they hide both individually and culturally. In the essay, Kevin reflects on his own face, the way his own signage has always been out of his control, yet even in middle age he has “retained a hopeful sense of becoming” about his face, about looking friendlier. “It helps to have looked at the dead to see how living shows.”

Kevin Oderman

To hear a recording of this reading and other readings from this and previous semesters, visit the Creative Readings Podcast hosted by the Center for Literary Computing.