Patrick Henry, creative writing coordinator at UND, teaches his students to write with skill, humility and imagination.
A UND Assistant Professor for English is in a position that every author would like to be in: one of his books was recently published and another will soon be in bookstores.
And the process of achieving this publishing success, which is due in part to working with his students, also provides him with valuable insights that he can pass on to them.
Patrick Thomas Henry, Director of the UND Authors Conference and coordinator of Creative Writingsays his scientific book The Work of the Living: Modernism, the Artist-Critic and the Public Craft of Criticism was published in April by Clemson University Press. On the creative side, his collection of short stories, Practice to become a ghostwill be published this month by Susquehanna University Press.
Henry said he was excited to see his short story collection take shape, having previously published individual stories in literary journals and magazines. This is a publishing process writers often go through as they build their own portfolio, he said. Collecting these stories in book form is the next step in a writer’s career.
“The fact that this work has resulted in a collection of short stories is just incredibly fulfilling for me,” said Henry.
But what does it mean to practice becoming a ghost? The book’s name comes from one of his stories: a fantasy ghost story in which a woman tells her boyfriend to imagine that he is the only one who can see her. She is actively practicing and wants to become a ghost herself.
The online description of Henry’s debut collection states that he “walks the line between the real and the fantastic, summoning the ghosts that haunt both our past and our present.”
He agrees with that description: “The title of the whole book really conveys how we are always living with things we have lost, with grief, with memories, and how we learn to deal with and process these very human and deep emotional experiences,” he said.
Henry’s academic work, whose title is different from that of the short story collection, advances the idea of considering the criticisms of writers such as Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot as literary works in their own right. Viewed in this light, the book examines how these works resonate with different audiences – including, but not limited to, academics – and become “public works of the humanities.”
Practice and rehearsal in class
Henry’s teaching methods are influenced by high school drama and marching band playing. He compares his work with students to practicing and rehearsing the story that is to come. After all, that’s what musicians do, focusing on a few bars at a time, getting the bars right, and understanding how the section is supposed to work. The same is true for actors, who rehearse scene by scene.
By using practice and rehearsal concepts, Henry helps his students understand that they can’t just sit down and whip out a finished story in one writing session. The writing process depends on a certain humility and modesty that he wants to instill in his students, he says. That means instilling in them the idea that perfection is probably not possible on demand.
To do this, Henry shows his students his own modesty and humility – by having them look at a portfolio of his own work. This portfolio contains story false starts, drafts that had to be rewritten and reconceptualized, and, most importantly, stories that took a long time to complete.
“That’s what I try to do in my creative writing workshops,” he said. “In the fiction workshop I’ll be teaching this fall, I’ve started to develop a pattern that I think works really well for this course. It’s actually entirely designed to get students thinking about an exercise or rehearsal, which leads to a more polished process in the form of a story.”
While Henry makes it clear to his students that it’s okay not to be perfect on the first try (sometimes he hopes they’ll stick with a story for the entire semester), those same students inspire his own creative work.
That’s because his work as a teacher at UND, where he teaches students about writing, storytelling, and the importance of narrative, has fostered his ability to craft and develop his stories.
“I don’t think I could have done my creative work without our students here at UND and the work we do in the classroom,” he said.
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