From the Alumni Mailbag

I suppose no one today will have taken a course with Professor George Healey, but the class of '52, of which I am a member, will have English majors like me and people from other schools, like my roommate, who will never forget him. Aside from being a fine scholar (to be expected at Cornell), he was wise and kind and wonderfully funny. My roommate and I both annotated our now-moldering 251 and 252 books with comments we hoped to preserve forever. 

When I arrived at Cornell back in 1962, I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to study or much of a clue generally. I was pretty good at math, so I gave that a whirl and crashed hard on the rocks of calculus. So much for math. I had always liked to read, so I more or less followed my inclination. My freshman year was chaotic personally, and my reading habits were all over the place. I do remember reading the entire works of Edgar Rice Burroughs and struggling through English 101. Our teacher, Mr. Schreiber, had no patience for wannabe literary hotshots and mercilessly dissected our pitiful attempts at constructing a decent sentence—no wonder he chain-smoked.  I was never much of a student (Spenser’s The Faerie Queene drove me around the bend—maybe I should try again—but life is too short) but did finally come to the conclusion that an English major could more or less go in any direction in life he or she wanted. At that time the ‘canon’ was more or less what was taught, certainly not "literatures in English"—what a vast improvement!
 
Well, time passes, and here we are almost 60 years later. To get through COVID and the political horror show of 2020, I reread the Aubrey/Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian—quite a step up from Burroughs. I also brushed up on my Tolstoy and read Anna Karenina (very poor taste in men), Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, and the The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich. I also have a weakness for mysteries, especially Michael Connelly and Louise Penny, and work those in when I need a brainless read.

When I read about Ken McClane’s retirement (and enjoyed his fine poem), I took another look at my treasured copy of his book, Moons and Low Times, published in 1978 while I was a student there.

I was an aspiring poet-essayist then too, hanging on every word from teachers like Jon Stallworthy, Jim Merod and my most encouraging advisor, A.R. Ammons. I recall much department buzz about McClane.
 
My career after Cornell led me in a different direction, to the business press, where I reported and edited a series of magazines in Manhattan, and continued my studies in Media Ecology at NYU. I remain a writer today—paid by businesses to tell stories that spread their knowledge and justify their value. 

I approach my commercial work like the poet-essayist I aspired to be back then. Merod first observed that tendency in me in a very kind note about an imperfect paper I had submitted. Ammons infused me with his belief that “verbs drive the language,” advice that guides me still and—I believe—has helped set me apart from most others in my profession.

I still write poetry and song lyrics too. If I have penned a few good ones over the years, it’s because I am channeling such immense influences from my times in Goldwin Smith Hall.

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Back in 1994, I graduated Cornell with a degree in English, but my path to receiving my diploma from the back of Goldwin Smith was rather detoured. Even though literature was my favorite subject in high school, I matriculated in Materials Science and Engineering. As a child of struggling immigrants from South Korea, I couldn’t justify pursuing my dream of becoming a fiction writer.

But after a semester of toiling over Miller indices and logarithmic integral functions, the prospect of spending the next three and a half years doing what I despised made little sense. So I changed majors, and four years later, I filed into Schoellkopf Field with my fellow graduates and listened to President Frank H.T. Rhodes give one of his wondrous commencement addresses. After witnessing the pandemic-cancelled 2020, I know how blessed I was to have had a normal graduation.

Okay. So now that I’ve established my Cornell career, let me establish my corporate one. I’ll skip over the boring parts and get right to the point: despite my very liberal education, I’ve been at the same Fortune 500 company since 1997 in Information Technology. Next year I’ll have been with Automatic Data Processing for a quarter of a century, holding the title of software engineer.

How did someone without a Computer Science degree end up in IT? Chalk it up to the wild west of the World Wide Web back in the late 1990s, when one could conceivably become a webmaster with passing knowledge of HTML. Plus it didn’t hurt that I’d been versed in computers since the early 1980s, keying in little programs in BASIC and logging onto Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) with a modem over a telephone line. And I’d be remiss if I neglected to mention my ability to write coherent sentences, which of course I learned many times over in your Department, from my first Freshman Writing Seminar to my final Seminar in Fiction.

For my boss to give me a chance to become my division’s web developer, I had to compose a convincing proposal, and I couldn’t have done that without all those essays I had to crank out—for Paul Sawyer’s 1960s, for Hortense Spillers’ William Faulkner, for Frederic Bogel’s Jonathan Swift—sometimes well into the night.

As exciting as it was to work in the nascent Internet Age, I was well aware it was not my real life. In my spare time, I lived in the realm of fiction, and I’m proud to have kept those embers alight. In 2009, I published my first novel, Everything Asian (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press); in 2015, my second, Love Love (Counterpoint/Soft Skull), and last year, my third, Skin Deep (Polis Books/Agora). (All three books are available from Kroch Library!) The last one was especially gratifying, as Skin Deep was one I had started back in my senior year, in English 480-481, creative writing classes taught by Lamar Herrin and Maureen McCoy. Believe it or not, what finally ended up on the page has some resemblance to those first words I wrote back in 1993: the mystery of a missing girl from an all-women’s college.

I’ve also written half a dozen essays for The New York Times in the last fifteen years, including a “Modern Love” piece that was turned into a podcast, read by a pair of Oscar-nominated writers. It is legitimately my brush with Hollywood.

I read this in an interview with an author a little while back: You don’t have to make a living as a writer, but your life could be about writing. That’s me in a nutshell, and of course, none of it would be possible without the support of my wife, family, and friends. One person in particular to whom I must pay great respect is a fellow Cornell writer, Stewart O’Nan. He was my first creative writing teacher, and he has mentored me throughout the decades. He is my model, my beacon.

I’m currently writing my fifth novel, which is a sequel to the third. That one is guaranteed a home, as I’d received a two-book contract, but what about my fourth? That’s been done for a year but has been roundly rejected by many publishers. So I’m back at it, trimming and cutting and tweaking and praying. I believe it is the best work I’ve done, but now my agent and I have to find the editor who agrees. This is the grand struggle, and when things are at their lowest, I remind myself, like a poetic mantra:

            it is a privilege to be where I am
            to have the opportunity to do what I do
            to have received my education from an institution like Cornell.

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Janice Obuchowski is the author of The Woods, which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (University of Iowa Press, 2022). Anthony Marra, this year’s judge, described the collection as “a genuine work of art.” Her stories have twice received special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthologies and have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions online, and LitHub. She earned her MFA from UC Irvine and served as a fiction editor for the New England Review. She’s taught writing at the University of Vermont and Middlebury College, and lives in Middlebury, Vermont.

She writes: “I graduated in 1998 and I think often about my luck in getting to study in Cornell's English Department. The way the department privileges creative writing along with the study of literature seems rare and lovely.“ 

Since 2017 I've been working on a documentary called Inherent Good, which explores the increasingly popular idea of Universal Basic Income as a way to transform the American economy into one that is centered around the well-being and deservedness of all people. The film premiered with a virtual screening in September 2020, and then released on digital platforms on 1/26/21. Coincidentally, Cornell was the first university to license the film. We are super honored!

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My second novel, The Most Precious Substance on Earth, came out with Grand Central/Hachette this summer and with McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada last year. It was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Award for Fiction. I have a third book, a short story collection, coming out in 2024. After Cornell I got an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins. I'm currently a professor of creative writing at a college here in Canada, just outside of Vancouver, and I'm the editor-in-chief of a literary magazine called EVENT. My time in the English Department at Cornell really shaped me as a writer. I'm so glad to see the recent newsletter and social media activity.

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While on campus and taking creative writing courses in the English department, I began writing my first novel, Pricked, which actually served as my Senior Honors Thesis in the College Scholar Program. After many years of revisions and query letters, I sold it and celebrated its release in August 2019, with the sequel, Screaming Beauty, in 2021.