Professors are funny people. For most us, they tend to become a figure we know from a distance, someone who supplies us with information or advice but remains somewhat in the background. It’s not often that we are given the opportunity to get to know the person behind the walls of the classroom. Peter Selgin, professor of English and Creative Writing at Georgia College, is the kind of professor whose history is as interesting as the subject he teaches.
Professor Selgin was born in Maryland and grew up in small-town Bethel, Connecticut, the son of two Italian immigrants. He and his family, including a twin brother named George, were often seen as “exotic” to the more homogeneous inhabitants of Bethel. Their curly hair and his parents’ thick accents were seen as strange to the rest of the town. Selgin’s father was an inventor and staunch atheist, his refusal to take his family to church further alienating them from their religious neighbors.
When Selgin was 18, he left Connecticut and moved to New York, enrolling in Pratt Institute as an art student. He discovered his love of words one day after being heavily criticized by one of his art professors for being an “artistic illiterate.” He caught the film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on television and was swept off his feet by a mesmerizing monologue delivered by Richard Burton. After taking to the library and devouring the entire original play, Selgin began writing his own. While he still made his living as a visual artist, writing became another form of his artistic expression.
Rather than stick with plays, Selgin now enjoys writing “anything with paragraphs,” and has made a name for himself doing so. He’s written several books, including a collection of short stories called Drowning Lessons, a novel entitled Life Goes to the Movies, and an instructional book, By Cunning and Craft, that he uses in many of his classes. Drowning Lessons received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction in 2007, an award offered through Georgia College, and Life Goes to the Movies won 2nd place for the AWP Award Series for a Novel. His writing reflects his darker and more serious perspective on life. One of his most common themes, loneliness, stems from his childhood experience of being a misfit. He believes that books themselves are artwork: their layout and designs, the structure of the paragraph and the punctuation within, is beautiful on its own. They don’t need anything to be added to them.
Selgin describes his art as “faux naïve:” the artist tries to paint in an innocent way, giving the illusion of unsophistication. His main intention with his paintings is to invoke joy and feeling, citing his use of bright colors and simple shapes as the means of providing the viewer with a pleasant experience. Rather than avoid clichés, Selgin wants to charge them head-on with “innocent, exuberant joy.” The child-like elements of his visual art contrast with the darker themes and tones of his writing. He views his paintings as a means of countering his tendency to take life too seriously.
Nowadays, Peter Selgin enjoys teaching Creative Writing classes at Georgia College. He likes the school, believing it has a sweet campus with a decent work ethic and a good sense of humor. He wishes that students—not just his—would ask more questions. “More often than not, the ones who ask the most questions are the best students,” he says. Selgin has also garnered attention for his love of striped socks, which he wears on a regular basis: “I think the world would be a better place if everyone wore striped socks.” His style in general, he feels, has its roots in Europe thanks to his Italian influence. He is drawn to the sensibility of the “Old World Europe,” the era between the World Wars. More than anything, Selgin considers his style to have an “aesthetic sensibility”—his love for things like paragraphs, colors, and stripes are his “religion.” His creativity, intelligence, and uniqueness make him a welcomed addition to the GCSU community.