A Bland Full of Wisdom
Carol Samson

Janet L. Bland met with the Writing Program faculty on Tuesday, October 16. The Writing Specialist at Marietta College in Marietta, Ohio, Bland received her PhD in English/Creative Writing from the University of Denver in 2001. For one year, 2004-2005, she served as Interim Director of the DU Writing Program. Along with Margaret Earley Whitt of the DU Department of English, she wrote a composition textbook, The Civil Mind, published in 2006 by Thomson/Wadsworth. Blands visit to Denver to talk with the Writing Program faculty coincided with her attendance at the Colorado Book Awards dinner, held at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Seawell Ballroom on Wednesday, October 17. Blands short story collection, A Fish Full of River, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Awards.

I was Janet Bland for one day in 2005. She lent me her parking pass when I sprained my ankle one summer so I could be close to the building when I had to hobble to Sturm Hall to a seminar. I can testify that, as Janet Bland for that day, I was funny. I was chatty. I was the DU Writing Program director, and I enjoyed the administrative tasks as much as teaching. I was more gregarious. I tempered my critical mind with humor. I understood the title of her book, A Fish Full of River, because I watched the world swell with possibilities. Then in October, when Bland visited with the DU Writing Program faculty, I watched that sort of burgeoning happen again.

Janet Bland is an English professor and a fiction maker. She loves rhetorical play, seeing a fish full of river or a bird full of sky and wondering at the capacity of a small thing to hold a vast space. In her fiction, she is interested in the Other, in difference, in the obsessive behaviors that define us. Her stories look to a woman who goes off of Niagara Falls in a barrel hoping to find fame, to a couple looking for the Dionne quintuplets so that they can gaze at the oddity, to a teenage girl who brushes elbows with Ted Bundy in a convenience store. In her short story collection, A Fish Full of River, Bland looks at the first half of the 20th century in America, turning an eye to the peculiar only to define the complex humanity in the eccentric being, in modern American history itself. Then, too, Bland is an actress of sorts, her most recent credit a speaking part in Chick Flick: The Miracle Mike Story, a French filmmakers 2004 documentary about a summer festival in Fruita, Colorado, that celebrates an historic event wherein a farmer beheaded a chicken, thinking it would be the Sunday dinner, only to have it live for eighteen months. Mike, the chicken, became an American oddity, a showman that toured the country; and in the film, Bland takes on a professorial role, providing the academic color commentary on the meaning of this folk event. She invents interpretations for the Mike phenomenon, framing Mike as an icon. She refers to the historic period of the Cold War, to belief in extraterrestrial beings, to Flannery OConnors use of the grotesque, and ultimately to James Joyces Ulysses as she offers a reading of Mike as a kind of wandering Leopold Bloom. Her performance is a tour de force. She parodies her own field with a self-irony that is witty and broad-minded.

During her visit with the Writing Program faculty, Bland demonstrated both her wit and her discipline as she spoke of writing as an expressive gesture of our humanity. Be it creative writing about our philosophical or personal selves or academic writing that guides us to logical and well-substantiated conclusions, it is all, Bland notes, the same process: a rendering of our selves. As a graduate student, she said, she would tell the instructor in her Rhetoric class, A short story is an argument, too, for much like an academic treatise, it draws us in, saying, Come with me. Now follow me here. In her time with us, she read to the Writing Program faculty from A Fish Full of River and from her new project, a novel to be titled On the Roof, a story of an Alzheimer patient in the aftermath of Katrina. She offered comments about writing classes and about finding time for her own work. She emphasized the need for writing teachers to commit to their own personal writing time and explained her ritual of setting aside space for her projects from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. each day. She wanted us to know that, as teachers of writing who stretch the day to make space for student conferences and classes, we must remember to privilege our growth as well as that of the students. As Bland phrased it, we are to take time with our own projects, to value [our] own work so that others will come to value it.

A native of Washington state, Bland lived in Denver for many years before taking the position as Writing Specialist at Marietta College in Ohio; and now that she and her partner find themselves in a small town, hours from a city center, she says she is learning the kindness of a small-town community. Because she is the only fiction writer with a published book on the staff, she says she sometimes feels like a rock star. They treat her, in her words, like I am Sheryl Crow. One of her colleagues placed a sign on her door that read Do Not Interrupt for Any Reason so that she could meet her 4 to 6 p.m. writing standards. Her students are kind. They wanted to know why she was coming to Denver. They cheered her in her Colorado Book Awards finalist status. While she misses Denver and DU, she is comfortable and appreciative of the support she gets at Marietta where, even now, she is going through her tenure evaluation.

The day after Janet Blands reading at the Writing Program, Margaret Earley Whitt of the DU Department of English and I attended the Colorado Book Awards ceremony with her. It was a formal evening, a black-tie event. The Seawell Ballroom at the Denver Center, with its glass wall that opens up to a panoramic view of the Rocky Mountains, was designed with draperies, gold and white panels. In one corner, photographers took pictures of the finalists, and at the opposite end of the room, Barnes and Noble bookstore, an event sponsor, displayed a large sale table full of the books of each finalist. Somewhere in the room, a voice on a microphone kept announcing the names of writers who were being called to a sale table to sign books. Then as part of the evenings charity event, the finalists had been asked to create baskets of writing materials and to donate them to a pre-dinner silent auction, the proceeds to go to Colorado literacy programs. Blands basket contained her version of a writers survival kit: her own fiction book; a book of writing exercises, 3 AM Epiphany, by Brian Kiteley, head of the DU Creative Writing program; a coffee mug; a bag of peanut M&Ms; and a bag of coffee. Some writers donated wine baskets, others baskets with scented candles and lotions. One box held old, antique board games; another, collectible literary journals; and one, a hatbox full of poetry books. By the end of the evening, the Colorado Book Awards committee announced that the auction had raised $3,900 for literacy programs. And though we, the supporters who sat at her table, were all disappointed that Blands book did not win the fiction prize, everyone there was impressed by the quality of the winning works as each winning writer read for several minutes from the podium. The childrens literature winner was Kathleen Pelley, a Scottish woman who read, her voice rich with Scottish r syllables, about an inventor named McGregor. Shari Caudron, the creative nonfiction winner, read from her introduction to a book titled, Who Are You People?, about hobbyists who become obsessives. The writer admitted that she herself had tried them allthe knot tying, the veganism, the running through the woods naked wearing only a crystal tied around her neck. Somehow, she said, some people find commitment and years of delight and refreshment in certain hobby activities while others, she herself included, remain fickle dilettantes.

As I sat at the table awaiting the announcement of the fiction winner, I remembered that Bland once told me that her grandmother had told her how to approach life, saying, Janet, go in there and show them how its done. So there at the ceremony, I saw that while an award might be a good thing, Bland seemed to understand that it is the going in to the experience that holds the challenge. On the dining tables at the ceremony, each finalist had a centerpiece photo and commentary sheet, a list of answers to short questions. Blands answers were direct and authentic. The virtue she most admires: restraint. An historic character she would like to be: Eleanor Roosevelt. Her favorite characteristic in a woman: courage. Her favorite saying: her grandmothers admonition about showing them how its done. And of course, the evening ended in possibilities. As Bland was exiting the room, she saw her editor from Ghost Road Press, and she approached him to congratulate him on the several awards the Press won that night. He told her how much he had enjoyed working with her on A Fish Full of River and requested that she send him her next novel. She shook his hand and thanked him. She said she would.

As we walked into the cool and dark October evening to say our goodbyes, I watched Bland. There was not a fish full of river nor a bird full of sky to be seen. But I could tell that in Janet Blands world, reality was already filling up, swelling once more with stories yet to be written, with tales and color commentary to take back to her students in Ohio, with thoughts of how she must be back at her desk working on her novel from 4 to 6 p.m. on Thursday afternoon, or maybe yet, with questions as to how, the next day in Ohio, she would frame the evening with the kind of lyricism expected of a Sheryl Crow.

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