Professor Leigh Wilson, I realize at the end of our interview, will be the hardest article to write. Though I was a fan of hers before, I feel as though distilling Professor Wilson’s enlightening love for life into an article is a nearly impossible task, and as she tells me when we first begin talking, I have taken on an “ambitious project.” Chills run up my spine when she says this, both in anxiety and excitement. However, I also figure if I can capture even half the magic that swirls in the air when talking to Leigh Wilson, even over Zoom, I think it would be a public service.
Our interview (and I describe it as “our” interview instead of “hers” because she interviews me just as much as I interview her) ranges between elated laughter and serious but heartening personal stories from both of us. One of the first things I notice about Professor Wilson is her short, dark curly hair, similar to my own curls, and a smooth Southern accent that has clearly been cut by the vast amount of time she’s spent in the Northeastern part of the US. She confirms that she is from the South, originally from a rural town in eastern Tennessee, and pairs it with an even more interesting backstory than I could have wished for. When asked to describe her undergraduate college experience, she instead tells me about getting herself into high school, “In a sense I see that as the experience you’re really asking me about, which is what my first sort of ‘away-from-home educational experience’ was, and it was that boarding school.” She tells me she moved from Tennessee to Virginia, seven hours away from her home, and though she was homesick, the move enabled her to finally move on from her impoverished and tumultuous home life created by her parents: “I ended up going to an undergraduate school in Massachusetts and I don’t know how easy it would have been for me to leave the South had I not already made that kind of leave-taking.” Her experience is relatable to many college students in that way, as they leave home and only grow in independence and confidence that allows them to fully mature.
Tennessee, Virginia, and Massachusetts seem worlds away, especially in today’s political climate where arguments over the culture in the North and South of the US still rage. However, Leigh describes the astute observations she was able to make during our interview about not only her own situation, but the broader function and impact of America’s class system: “I was dumped into an upper-class situation in the high school, so I was prepared. It’s considered a very good school, but it’s also very privileged. I ended up surrounded by privilege in both high school and college, so those two things were very similar. I think as you go up the class scale, there is more resemblance to each other than differences. Interestingly, Virginia and Massachusetts in that way were not that different. I got very accustomed to privilege and I didn’t come from it, so it’s been a kind of defining thing in my writing and also in thinking about people.” Professor Wilson, a creative writer at heart, is of course able to connect her own life into a story with broader cultural implications. As we go on, I realize the treasure trove she has of these personal insights to share that make our interview extremely valuable, in addition to how she defines her role in the English department.
Professor Wilson is the current Chair of the English and Creative Writing Department, starting in January of this year (she laughs incredulously when she tells me this, reflecting on the nature of the pandemic ceasing most if not all in-person academics) but having originally come to SUNY Oswego as a temporary visiting professor in 1985 — the same year as the appearance of Back to the Future, “Calvin & Hobbs,” and the first NES. Teaching for now 35 years at the college, she is the longest serving professor I spoke with. She is a site of historical knowledge into the department itself and one of the only professors still remaining from her original hiring other than Professor Bob O’Connor, who I took an Intermediate Fiction Writing class with. The change in only 35 years, from the culture in both academia and the broader college, is startling to hear her describe. The hiring process when she originally signed on, as she recalls, was so informal that male colleagues were offered a job at parties. One of only two other women in the department at the time, one quit during the year she was hired. As compared to today, where Creative Writing is part of the title of the department along with a major and minor with many different general educational uses, in 1985, none of the programming offered today was offered then, nor was it a major. Professor Wilson makes it clear that ever since she began teaching at Oswego, this was her ultimate goal: “I love creative writing and I really wanted to get that program off the ground. I was very clear on what I was trying to do. I wanted not just myself to be taken seriously, but the program I was affiliated with.”
Professor Wilson did not work alone, either. She had the help of Professor O’Connor, who she talks about numerous times during our interview as her go-to person, standing beside her as her right hand man, supporting and defending her when necessary. She even states that if she had a counterpart, it would be him. Similar to Dr. Bishop’s experiences with Dr. Schaber, Professor O’Connor, as an alumni of SUNY Oswego himself, gave Professor Wilson invaluable knowledge in navigating the confusing and often “insane” circumstances they encountered. Professor Wilson makes a point to talk about how she was often able to call out things in the moment that needed to be taken care of, and how Professor O’Connor routinely understood and had her back through it. They not only bonded over their love for creative writing and the goals they had in the department, but also through the shared experience of understanding what being a professor meant during their first years of it. In a sense, the current department today is the hard fought work of Professor Wilson and Professor O’Connor.
Professor Wilson explains that the institutional leadership position of the Chair was not the dream job I, and many other young writers, might imagine. While of course the creative part of it is important, the job of the Chair is foremost management, and not only the decisions made by higher-ups, but also resource facilitation in terms of finances and programming. It is a balancing act made up of tough choices to make sure that the writing and art happens at the end of the day. However, she is adamant that she would not have changed her mind if she knew what she knew now about her time as the Chair. Something she notes is that taking on this job is both about her “last hoorah” at Oswego and also her strong sense of duty in life, “I’ve always believed in duty. We live in an age and in a time when a lot of our role models — and I’m not trying to be political but I think there are some obvious role models — are not modeling duty and being honorable to the people around you.” It is what she says next that truly takes my breath away, as if it could have come straight from my lungs and spoken out through hers in that it feels so true to my own experience, “I have loved SUNY Oswego. I mean, I might have complaints, but the fact is anything I have wanted to accomplish I have been able to accomplish— not just because of me. It is because of this place. And so I feel a great debt; a great sense of duty.” It is in this statement that she embodies, in all intents and purposes, my sentiments for doing this article series. This is early on in our interview, though I quickly come to understand that it will become a running theme.
Professor Wilson’s role as the Chair, and her time at Oswego, is emblematic of not only the duty she speaks about, but the importance of the stories we have of ourselves and each other. Crucial to her philosophy about the way writing and literature, and by extension the professors who teach it, change the lives of the students they interact with, is in the “suspension of disbelief” inherent in storytelling. For those uninitiated, “suspension of disbelief” is a concept in fictional work in which certain unbelievable or nonsensical parts of a story fall away for an audience because the rest of it is so thoroughly enjoyable. For Professor Wilson, this concept too applies to leadership positions, particularly hers as a Chair and a professor: “In order to lead, you can’t simply demand things, you have to have them believe in you. In order to get them to believe in you, you have to tell them a narrative; a story. That story needs to reveal your moral center, it needs to reveal your values, it needs to reveal how you imagine a goal. I don’t see how story is inseparable from any kind of leadership. Good leadership is a narrative that’s followed; that you believe. Why should anybody follow you? They’re going to have to suspend their own belief in order to adapt to yours.” Professor Wilson is not advocating for making up stories of course, but instead understanding the personal narratives we hold inside ourselves that make us powerful and affect others. English, Creative Writing, Cinema Studies, and other Humanities are often derided as “useless” majors that will leave graduates jobless. Instead, Professor Wilson points out the basic fact of humanity’s ability to understand patterns as larger parts of stories, which is why it is priceless in the professional world. This is also a particularly poignant way of viewing her educational goals.
As Professor Wilson and Professor Frazier are the two professors I have never taken a course with before, I ask Professor Wilson to tell me about the one course she is teaching, Honors 201 – Interpreting the Arts. She tells me since the Honors program tends to attract a wide variety of students across different majors, many not being creative writers, she is given the opportunity to expose them to many different literary genres in the course, as well as get them to practice writing of their own. She emphasizes the importance of the Creative Writing program to fulfilling general education requirements, “I think you should spread the possibility of having your own voice on the page in the world as widely as possible.” Fundamental to this is understanding the interactions we have with literature on a person level. While Professor Wilson is well published in both fiction & nonfiction, her essay in elsewhere magazine, “Flash Fiction and the Borg: In Praise of the Literary Still Moment,” is the most affecting piece of hers I read. In it, she argues the nature of flash fiction is not to be some multitasking companion to the lightning-speed technological age we are living in, but rather a place where time stops completely, “However long or short, literature makes us stop hurtling forward, stops us from doing things without thinking, lets us (for however long we read) win our race against time. It gives us the still moments to think, and to think again.” The structure of the essay itself feels like small pieces of flash essay, each its own contained, and often poetic, moment that reveals more about Professor Wilson’s revelations of the nature of literature. The most vibrant, and thus transformative, part of the work for me comes here: “My sister says that she loves the time change in the fall, when she feels she’s wrested an hour back from the hands of fate. Maybe reading flash fiction (or any literature for that matter) is wresting time from the hands of fate.”
I ask Professor Wilson about this essay, and as usual, her answer surprises me. She says she always feels slightly guilty about the start of the essay, in which she analyzes how her Advanced Fiction students perceived the importance of flash fiction in the modern day. In our digital age, when the scroll can be endless, it is easy to imagine it as the “McLiterature”, as she put it in the essay, of reading. Though Professor Wilson works through this too, saying rather than using her position as an academic to critique students which she does not feel is right, she was using it to critique her former self. What she talks about here speaks to the transformative thought that goes into a piece of writing: “The self you were before you wrote the piece is shallower and diminished somehow compared to the person who did write the piece. Before I wrote that piece, I don’t think I was any different from the student’s attitude. This is where I think writing makes us better than we are. It is part of the process of becoming a better, smarter, more moral person.”
This is where she reveals she even read multiple pieces of my own writing, not related to the previous interview articles I’ve done on Her Campus, including a personal essay of mine titled, “Where I’m Going, Where I’ve Been,” which is a play on the title of the short come-of-age story by Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” It is a piece I like to bury simply because it is so personal; so vulnerable in a way that most of my other Her Campus writing is not. There are things about it I would change, like any author thinks about all their work, but to have Professor Wilson cherish it in getting to understand me puts a whole new kind of gravity into the exchange of narratives happening in the interview. My story binds me and Professor Wilson here in this moment, but also in the moment I wrote that and published it, and in the moments I was in that I took to put into it. The depth is revealed, and what is revealed is the beauty of literature as we use it to relate to each other.
That beauty is at the heart of what Professor Wilson is trying to teach at the college. The way she speaks about the power of literature and writing echoes Dr. Bishop’s words: “When you find a book you love, there’s a reason you love that book, and one reason is that that voice is speaking to you and the rest of the universe drops away because it’s only speaking to you. It’s an intimate relationship and I think that people who don’t love reading, if they can get a sense of that intimate relationship, and then try to express themselves, it will be easier. There’s a reason that writings can speak to you and if you can understand that you can begin to have a voice that speaks to other people.” Without understanding the capacity of stories, we can’t understand our own, let alone give them to others, and if we cannot do that, the world simply can’t function. It is symbolic for not only our current historical moment, but understanding each other on a personal level.
At the end of our interview, Professor Wilson tells me she wishes I had come to Oswego sooner, something I’ve felt myself. However, I also explain to her that my last semester at MCC was crucial in order to help me contextualize my own story of transferring to the college, in particular, a Mythology course I took. In this course, we studied Ragnarok (not the Thor movie) for our very last unit, which is the Norse apocalypse myth. The Norse believed in the ability to know their destiny, and in particular, had a specific prophecy about how the world would end down to the last detail. Though they know this prophecy and that it will happen, they can do nothing to stop it. Though they can do nothing, they still fight, both gods and humans alike, perhaps even harder knowing that their fate is inevitable. On the other side of this apocalypse, however, is the rebirth of the universe with even more knowledge, wisdom, beauty, and love from before, and with the destruction of all evil. The major theme of Ragnarok was the way I approached my time at MCC ending, knowing I had to move onto Oswego, and conceptualizing the apocalypse of one identity into an even better one, or as the myth is transcribed in Donna Rosenberg’s World Mythology: An Anthology of the Great Myths and Epics: “At the dawn of the new age, the earth rose from the sea, fresh, fertile, and green. […] The world as they had known it had disappeared, but they hoped to preside over a better world.” Not only does Professor Wilson love this allegory, but it even signifies the importance of stories in relating to each other as she sees them. As the story of the Ragnarok is told to a king by the gods, it ends as such, “There he told his people what he had learned. And from that day on until this, these tales have been passed from one human being to another.”
In only an hour, Leigh Wilson gives me a lifetime of wisdom and heart— so much so that I keep thinking about it for the rest of the week afterwards, working through her words and watching the first signs of the leaves changing. Maybe like Professor Wilson’s sister, these articles are a way to wrest back the in-person time I had here at the university, with these incredible women, and also try to give some of it to other students who may be going through their Ragnaroks too. I recommend reading “Chicken” and “Love, Your Neighbor” by Professor Wilson. Thank you to Professor Wilson for allowing me to interview her, and for serving this English department so dutifully.