Composition professor works on first novel

Claire Taylor Guest Writer

The term ‘sparsely decorated’ barely begins to cover Josh Harmon’s office. There is nothing to break up the white monotony of the walls save a window and two shelves loaded with books. There is a table pushed against a wall facing a desk. He reclines in his desk chair, smiling with an amicable air. The professor wears dark blue jeans, brown bowling shoes, and a button down shirt obscured by a zip-up sweater.

To translate: this almost 34-year old professor will be mistaken for a student on more than one occasion. And that would probably not upset this man who treats his students as he expects them to treat him, ensuring that they address him as Josh, just as he uses their first names. This makes sense coming from someone who graduated from Marlborough College in Vermont. Marlborough College has a “town-meeting type democracy where everyone had one vote and each vote (faculty, student, president, groundskeeper) was equal.”

After leaving college, the professor who claims “I didn’t pick creative writing as much as it picked me,” went to Cornell University in Ithaca, NY where he earned a Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing. After meeting his wife, who is a Vassar librarian, Harmon stayed at Cornell for two years to teach. He then taught at Bucknell University before spending a year as a writer in residence at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. He went on to teach at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth before leaving his native Massachusetts to work at Vassar. “He seems like a good teacher,” said his current student Caitlin Pollock ’06. “I have heard really good things about him.”

Harmon, a man who admits that Smithers is his favorite Simpson’s character (and he even mentioned Smithers’ Malibu Stacy collection among his reasons), has two goals in life: to write a lot of different books and to “be happy.” And, as his literary agent is already seeking publication for his first novel, a Faulkner-esque book about a small town which, for a short time, seceded from the United States, it seems that both goals have a good chance of being realized. This “Renaissance Man” should have no fear about running dry on material, as he also writes poetry, short stories, essays, book reviews, and interviews for newspapers. Harmon was recently published in The New England Review, TriQuarterly, Southern Review, Iowa Review, and Verse. He is also completing a 2004 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, he is working on not only another novel, but an essay on one of his more obscure passions: record collecting.

So, what advice does he have for aspiring writers? “It is important to try new things, to stretch yourself a little bit as you are learning new techniques and styles; and not to get too comfortable right away, but to come up with challenges for yourself, whether those are technical challenges or more thematic challenges or personal challenges. And read, of course, that’s the big one. As I said in class, to be a good writer you have to be a good reader. You have to read as much as you can. You know, read what’s new, read what’s old, read fiction, read non-fiction, read poetry, read a how-to-build-a-barn book, how-to-raise-champion-goldfish. And just practice—no one writes brilliant works of art on their first try.”