Today@Sam Article

Noted Writer To Share Life Story In MFA Reading

Oct. 19, 2016
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt

Story by Scott Kaukonen.

In the prologue to her memoir “My Unsentimental Education,” Debra Monroe sits in her office at Texas State University in San Marcos, smooth and polished, as one might expect of a well-established writer and professor. She’s talking to a young woman who is her student.

“(I’m) glad to have such a modern role model,” the student says. “And I always admire your shoes too.”

Debra Monroe

It’s a moment full of complication for Monroe, the implication that she embodies some ideal of modern womanhood—a serious academic, but still fashionably stylish; a publishing writer, but, also, at the time, the mother of a young child. To the student, Monroe is an example to be followed. All the student needs is to know how Monroe had done it.

“Look, it was all a Plan B, C and D,” Monroe tells the student.

Those plans—and their revisions and their erasures, their reversals and their accidents—provide the structure for Monroe’s memoir, which charts the winding path that brought her to that office, from rural Spooner, Wisconsin, through waitressing jobs and failed relationships, cross-country moves and cheap apartments, sex—some good and some bad—and plenty of bars. It’s a story of gender and social class, of books and ideas. It’s also a story of public education. 

“If it weren’t for public education,” Monroe writes in the prologue, “I’d be a small-town waitress, divorced with grown children by now, haughty with boredom.” 

Monroe, the author of two memoirs and four works of fiction, will read from her work at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday (Oct. 27) in the Evans Complex’s Ralph W. Pease Auditorium.

The event is sponsored by the Sam Houston State University Department of English’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing, editing and publishing.

Before the presentation, at 3:30 p.m. in Evans Complex Room 212, Monroe also will deliver a craft talk on narrative momentum in creative nonfiction.

Both events are free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing.

“Sometimes when we meet people, we think there was some sort of inevitability that made them who they are,” said Scott Kaukonen, director of the MFA program. “We read a writer’s book, we meet a professor in class, and we assume there’s some straight line that led them from point A to point B. They knew what they wanted, and they went and got it.

“But I think it’s important we acknowledge that it so often doesn’t work out that way,” he said. “Detours, contingencies, mistakes, dumb luck—that’s all a part of it. And Monroe’s honest about that.”

“My Unsentimental Education,” published in 2015, has been widely praised for its humor, its lyricism, for its “stinging revelations” (Dallas Morning News), for its “fresh insights” and “funny-sad” moments (Chicago Tribune).

Monroe’s first memoir, about being the white mother of a black daughter in a small Texas town, “On the Outskirts of Normal,” was published in 2010 to national acclaim.

Her fiction includes the short story collections “A Source of Trouble,” winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award, and “A Wild, Cold State,” as well as the novels “Newfangled” and “Shambles.” She also has published poems, stories and essays in many magazines and journals.

Monroe was born in North Dakota and raised in Wisconsin. She has since lived in Kansas, Utah, North Carolina, and Texas, where she lives now, and she teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University. 

The MFA program’s reading series will continue at 5 p.m. on Nov. 7, when Olivia Clare, fiction writer and poet and the newest member of the SHSU creative writing faculty, reads from her work.

For more information, contact Kaukonen at kaukonen@shsu.edu or 936.294.1407.

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