ARTS

Chaon, Schwartz to read Monday

Visiting writer and wife to share stage

by Rumaan Alam

Don't make the mistake of calling them the next Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the next Raymond Carver and Tess Gallagher, or (God forbid) the next Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. According to Dan Chaon, "I think literary couples are obnoxious." Yet that is precisely what he and his wife Sheila Schwartz are. The two will read together this coming Monday.

Chaon is currently a Visiting Writer teaching in the Creative Writing program. Schwartz is also a teacher; she is an associate professor in the English Department at Cleveland State University. Schwartz is, like her husband, a fiction writer. She has recently completed a novel to follow up her previous collection, Imagine a Great White Light, a book of short fiction. The Philadelphia native is also completing her second fiction collection.

Chaon, originally from Nebraska, a geography which figures prominently in his work, is spending his eighth year in Ohio right here in Oberlin. He has previously taught at Syracuse University, Cleveland State, Kent State University and Ohio University. He too is hard at work with his writing as well as his teaching. He is finishing his second collection of short fiction and is also marketing an anthology which focuses on neglected and forgotten American short fiction writers of the twentieth century. Chaon's first collection was Fitting Ends. The title story from that collection was anthologized in the prestigious Best American Short Stories 1996, edited by John Edgar Wideman.

Speaking of the complexities of teaching writing, Chaon commented, "I think that in some ways teaching is almost the wrong word. It has elements of dialogue and coaching. What you're frequently doing is showing the students what's already there."

An experienced teacher with a strong frame of reference, Chaon had this to say about Oberlin students: "I'm excited by the sophistication and quality of the student work I've encountered." And Oberlin students will likely be similarly struck by the work of Chaon and Schwartz.

Dan Chaon and Sheila Schwartz will read on Monday, October 12 at 7:30 p.m. in Wilder 101.

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Copyright © 1998, The Oberlin Review.
Volume 127, Number 6, October 9, 1998

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