John Tiedemann
Writing Lecturer, Literature PhD

Personal info: Where did you get your undergraduate degree? What was your major? Where did you get your Masters and/or PhD and what was it in? Why did you choose DU?
I received my BA in English from Hofstra University, then headed to the PhD program at the University of WisconsinMadison, where I concentrated in literary theory and American literature.

Describe what your writing process is like:
Like a choose-your-own-adventure book, minus the element of conscious choice. I typically start out thinking Im heading in one direction, then after several miles of sentences discover that Im headed in a different direction altogether, and so regroup and reorient, now confident that I know my true destination, only later to discover that Im in error yet again, and so on and so forth, repeating severally, until eventually I arrive somewhere that I ought to have know I was heading all along, or so Im persuaded.

What do you enjoy most about writing?
On the one hand, I enjoy the element of surprise: To find yourself saying things that youve never consciously thought, purely by virtue of the combined force of logical necessity and stylistic accident: well, thats living, aint it? On the other hand, I much enjoy the feeling of control one has on those rare occasions when the process of discovery concludes well enough before the piece of writing is actually due to allow time for lavishing attention upon diction, phrasing, the unfolding of paragraphs, and so on.

Briefly, how would you describe your teaching philosophy?
I think that good teaching changes minds, including, hopefully, the teachers; and so I try to create syllabi, assignments, lessons, etc., that are structured enough to demand disciplined effort while remaining open enough to encourage the unexpected.

What drew you to become a writing teacher?
The intellectual camaraderie. At Madison I team-taught several writing classes with Jon Fowler (wholl be teaching here with us in the winter) and, as a program administrator, worked pretty closely with the 40-odd teachers we had on staff. I find this kind of collaborative work so much more appealing than thinking and teaching in a vacuum.

What do you enjoy most about teaching writing?
I love that the classes are compulsory, believe it or not, because it gives you a chance to interact meaningfully with students before they leap into their comfortably insulated pre-professional chutes. Plus theres the challenge of working one of the toughest rooms in show business.

What are your hobbies and outside interests, or, guilty pleasures?
Lately I cant seem to read enough about outsider artists, especially Henry Darger, a schizophrenic hospital worker who spent the bulk of his life toiling away in his lonely room on a fifteen-thousand-page fantasy novel. Would that Henry were alive to sign up for 1122.

Name an unusual or little-known fact about yourself.
I am allergic both to cats and to caterpillars. And they to me.

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