{"id":21,"date":"2016-01-25T14:47:24","date_gmt":"2016-01-25T22:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/?p=21"},"modified":"2016-02-05T09:33:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-05T17:33:45","slug":"trajectories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/trajectories\/","title":{"rendered":"Trajectories"},"content":{"rendered":"

FOR SALVADOR PLASCENCIA, WRITING IS NOT A<\/strong> science, but a logistical problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow do you move this character there?\u201d the College\u2019s new assistant professor of creative writing reflects. \u201cHow do you get this character to fight that character? How do you heal that character, get him to the hospital? It\u2019s logistics.\u201d<\/p>\n

For a writer often labeled as experimental, Plascencia is surprisingly interested in writing\u2019s moving parts: words, syntax, the labor-intensive stuff of grammar. Close reading. Sentence isolation. While his literature courses explore broad problems related to politics, history and identity, in his workshops, the sentence is king. He\u2019s fond of employing constraint exercises\u2014short spurts of prose that focus on those diminutive yet crucial mechanics. A lipogram, for example, might require students to pen 300 words without using the letter \u201ce.\u201d Or students might \u201cinherit\u201d a century-old word bank and construct something syntactically new from this list.<\/p>\n

\"Professor<\/a>
Professor Salvador
Plascencia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cAnytime there\u2019s intense focus on the word or the sentence, that\u2019s really what we want to do,\u201d he says. \u201cPragmatically, we can\u2019t all write novels and talk about them in a workshop setting. I\u2019m much more interested in the sustained effort of a single page.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following creative writing positions at Pitzer and Pomona colleges, as well as at UC Riverside, USC and CalArts, Plascencia heard about an opening at Harvey Mudd through the 5-C grapevine. He says he wasn\u2019t daunted by the idea of teaching writing at a STEM institution. Plascencia\u2019s interest is in magical realism, a genre that incorporates fantastical or mythical elements into an otherwise realistic narrative.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that\u2019s probably not science related,\u201d he says jokingly. \u201cMy critical inquiry class is called Unreality, so we\u2019ll be looking at [Gabriel Garc\u00eda] M\u00e1rquez, [Jorge Luis] Borges. I have not really thought about any sort of technically related thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

He does not envision STEM shaping his instruction in major ways, at least to start.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy function is to explore humanities,\u201d says Plascencia. He aims to teach writing as craft, rather than explore broad, conscious themes related to science or otherwise. He\u2019s also not concerned with students (or himself) getting published.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think about whether a piece of writing has potential trajectories that are exciting to me,\u201d he says. \u201cMy hope is students never try to tame or correct what\u2019s happening, but rather be open to the potential of what it could be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plascencia\u2019s own novel, The People of Paper<\/em> (McSweeney\u2019s Books, 2005), was rejected by more than a few major publishers. \u201cAll of them,\u201d he says rather proudly. (Many of these same publishers scrambled after the fact to release the paperback.)<\/p>\n

Now translated into a dozen languages, The People of Paper has received critical acclaim and earned him the Bard College Fiction Prize\/writing residency in 2008. His stories and reviews have appeared in Los Angeles Times, Tin House and McSweeney\u2019s Quarterly Concern. Poets & Writers called Plascencia one of the 50 most inspiring living authors in the world, noting \u201cPlascencia alters our experience of the text and challenges our associations of symbol and meaning by incorporating drawings, figures and text objects into his writing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, he remains reluctant to qualify writing in terms of accolades or publishing credits.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy first draft [of The People of Paper] was a B- story in an undergraduate workshop,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the way we talked about it was not \u2018how to fix it,\u2019 but \u2018where can this go?\u2019 So I\u2019m far more interested in the trajectories of where the imagination can go than in controlling or taming it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from Whittier College with a B.A., Plascencia went on to Syracuse for an MFA in creative writing, studying under author George Saunders, whom he considers a mentor.<\/p>\n

\"Translated<\/a>
Translated into a dozen languages, The People of Paper<\/em> has received critical acclaim and earned Plascencia the Bard College Fiction Prize\/writing residency in 2008.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now in the instructor\u2019s seat himself, he\u2019s taught numerous creative writing workshops and a slew of interesting literature classes, including fall semester\u2019s Lit 179L: The Novel as a Print Technology. He\u2019s at work on various writing projects\u2014most notably a novel about a newly discovered ocean in Southern California\u2019s San Gabriel Valley, which he admits he\u2019s \u201chaving trouble finishing.\u201d<\/p>\n

For now he relishes the chance to introduce his favorite works\u2014books by James Baldwin, Roberto Bola\u00f1o, Borges, M\u00e1rquez\u2014to a new crop of \u201csophisticated readers\u201d who \u201care able to take the text and talk about it in any way.\u201d Acclimating to the Harvey Mudd environment is also a priority, he says, and the cross-disciplinary nature of the College intrigues him.<\/p>\n

\u201cKen [Fandell] is next door, a photographer, and then Gary [Evans], an economist, and this idea that it\u2019s all close together\u2014conversations with people in different areas of expertise are basically built into the architecture of the campus. In other places, all I had [nearby] were other English professors. So even just how you bounce around campus, it makes these conversations possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FOR SALVADOR PLASCENCIA, WRITING IS NOT A science, but a logistical problem. \u201cHow do you move this character there?\u201d the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faculty"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magazine.hmc.edu\/fall-winter-2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}