Name: Amy Wiley
Classes Taught: English 134, 145, 251 Great Books, 345 Women Writers, 350 Modern Novel, 352 Modern Drama
Where did you attend college?
AW: Back then, one could pay for one’s own college, and I did. I put myself through school. So I actually went to community college for two years, and tuition was $50 a semester. Then I transferred here, to Cal Poly. I was an English major here, and a German minor. When I started, it was about $300 a quarter and I was in the first batch of 40% increases in tuition. By the time I left it was around $700 a quarter.
Where did you go after Cal Poly?
AW: I went to Davis. It was a weird decision for what I was choosing to study, but apparently I love Ag schools. When I came to Poly I thought I would pursue elementary or high school education, but it became clear or me pretty quickly that I was grad school bound. I was hungrier. It was a good fit. It was a good time to be there, and I still go up and visit a lot.
Have you had any odd jobs besides teaching?
AW: Oh my goodness yes. We didn’t do internships when I was young. I waitressed in high school and through college when I was on break, but I never worked while in college, which gives you a sense of why it was important that tuition was as low as it was. I graduated with no debt.
I worked for the USDA for a while, for the United States Curator of Lettuce. We did cross breeding. It was the United States repository for all the kinds of lettuce seeds that existed, so there were hundreds of thousands of these tiny little envelopes that all had samples of seed, and one of my less glamorous jobs was to sit in front of this homemade contraption where you put a seed in, and it blew out fluff and captured it, so you would be sitting there with tweezers trying to pick out the seed and file it away. I’ve also done field work and picked lettuce, so I have a pretty good appreciation of actual physical labor.
Also, while I was in Davis during school, the husband of a bio professor was the maintenance man at the complex I lived in, so I was the maintenance muffin. I installed toilets, unclogged sinks and I used to be able to install a garbage disposal in under fifteen minutes.
Have you always wanted to be an English professor?
AW: I don’t actually think of myself as an English professor. That matters to very few people other than me, but for me it’s an important distinction. My degree is in comparative literature, which has a very distinct world view. In most comparative literature programs—and it is a program because it shares departments with literature, or sometimes anthropology or sociology—you have to be able to pass a translation exam in three languages that are not your mother tongue. If those languages are in the same family, one of them has to be from a different language family. The thing that I liked about it was when you were sitting in a comp lit class, you were in a room with people that shared a particular ethos, but you didn’t know what they were doing. People paid close attention to where they were coming from. You weren’t in a room where everyone knew Emily Dickinson; instead, it would be someone from the Ming Dynasty. People got accustomed to speaking outside of their expertise, compared to working in a close knit literary community that shares a lot of the material and points of view.
How does this translate to what you’re teaching now?
AW: I think of the C1 sequence as world literature classes. Being able to think of the big picture aspects of where the works connect as opposed to thinking of it as separate fragments is something I feel is very important that help students to grasp. It’s the relationship of the part to its system. You’re working with genre, language and period, and there is always a reference that seems to be going out and across. My comp lit degree helps to bring that all together.
What is the most important thing that a student should be able to take away from your class?
AW: I want them to feel empowered. I want them to feel like even if they don’t know what the answer is, and even if they don’t have the specific knowledge, that they can really understand how to approach and master an issue.
Has anybody ever told you that you look like Ginnifer Goodwin?
AW:Not until I cut my hair. I looked her up and thought of ‘My gosh, I need to take these pictures into my hairdresser!’
If you were able to teach a fun, random class at Cal Poly, what would it be?
AW:I have a few ideas actually. A class I’ve wanted to teach for a really long time is some kind of literature for engineers. I’ve also wanted to teach architecture too, and I’m married to an architecture professor. I used to work with students on writing and exploring the spatial aspects of architecture through writing. Also a good friend of mine, Diana Stanton, and I have been toying around with the idea of how great it would be to teach a combination choreography composition course. There’s fundamental aspects of the principals of composition in writing that are very similar to the kinetic aspects of composition in a choreography situation, especially for students that are kinetic and visual, it could really help to sink in concepts.
What is a fun fact most students don’t know about you?
AW: Besides the fact that I’ve installed toilets? Well, I knit. I can do a handstand on a good day.
I love statistics. Databases make me happy.
What are your top 3 favorite books?
AW: 1. I will never lose my love for 100 Years of Solitude. I read it when I was 15 and it’s changed my life.
2. Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers. It’s a mystery in the same period as Agatha Christie.
3. It’s a hard tossup between the Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies and Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.
If you were writing an autobiography, what would it be titled?
AW: The only idea that keeps popping into my head is “The Good Interred”. It captures that kind of struggle of manifesting good intentions.
If you were a scented marker, what would you smell like?
AW: Black marker, probably. Just chemical. No pretense towards cherry, just chemical.
Say you could only eat at one SLO restaurant for the rest of your life. What would it be?
AW:Well I would like to eat Thai food in Davis, but in SLO I love a good carpaccio from a place over by the train station, called Café Roma. Go sit in the bar, and order a cocktail and a carpaccio.