By Hilary Donatini
Professor Deborah Fleming agreed to answer some questions about her active program of research and creative activity here at AU.
Q: In addition to teaching and service, you maintain an active writing
and research program. Could you discuss some of your recent
presentations and publications?
A: Recent presentations include "W. B. Yeats and
Ecocriticism" at two conferences and fiction readings in Columbus and
Mansfield.
Q: Describe your works in progress.
A: My current work in progress is my
third poetry collection. My first collection, "Morning, Winter
Solstice," was influenced by James Wright and focused on nature poetry
of two local bioregions; my second, primarily influenced by W. B. Yeats,
treats the themes of love, art, death, and war and uses many
landscapes. About half the poems are formalist.
The
third, influenced by Robinson Jeffers, uses landscapes as far apart as
Alaska and Nepal and explores the issue of how the greatest ecological
disaster in history--climate change--is related to our myth-making. I
am also working on my third novel about three rural women from different
generations.
Q: What do you value most about writing?
A: What I most value about writing is the chance to use language to and metaphor to explore ideas.
Q: How does your research and creative activity complement your work in the classroom?
A: Research and creative activity are not separate from the classroom
because I teach works by the writers who are the subjects of my
research; when I teach creative writing I can draw on my own experience
to help students with the challenges of writing and revision.
Q: You have taught at Ashland for over twenty years. How has your
research and creative activity developed over the course of your career?
A: I had one scholarly book in press when I came here and have finished
the second as well as scholarly essays and two edited collections. I
still have one article on Yeats that I want to finish. My primary
interest was always Yeats.
I always wrote
poetry but in the last twenty years I have written more of it and begun
to write fiction and nonfiction seriously. Recently I also wrote a
screenplay. Scholarly work inspires and enhances the creative work and
is by far the most difficult type of writing I do because of the time
research requires and the tremendous amount of organization.
Among
the creative genre, fiction is the hardest because of the difficulty of
avoiding sentimentality and cliche. Although no writing is easy, I find
poetry presents fewer challenges because I have been writing poetry so
many more years. Not every writer would have the same experience.
