Congratulations to Debra Gwartney, selected by her students as winner of the 2007 John Eliot Allen Teacher of the Year Award for the writing faculty!-----
Ceremony for the Allen Teaching Awards
Friday, June 8, 2007
Smith Memorial Center
Room 327/329
3:30 - 5:00 PM
(Ceremony from 4:00 - 4:30 PM)
Refreshments and drinks will be served!
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Debra, this roast is for you, fresh from the newly incorporated WEGO sub-group known as FOG (Friends of Gwartney). And you're wondering if we're kidding, aren't you?
Bwahahahahahahaha....
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My head can be swimming with ideas, insecurities, passion, or meaningless thoughts, and I'll enter Debra's classroom, full of students with their own moods and issues, and collectively, we seem to reach an understanding of wanting to be there, wanting to learn. Debra's energy is focused and her disposition is easy, almost tranquil. But when I walk away from a class discussion or a chat in her office, I'm amped up and inspired to challenge myself as a writer. Her steady, light-handed guidance encourages me to get more out of my writing.
--Jessica Machado
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I am not a religious person, but more times than I can count this year I have thanked God for Debra Gwartney. I cannot imagine a finer colleague and this award demonstrates--no surprise here--that her students feel the same way about her as a teacher and mentor. We're all so lucky to have her and it's lovely to have this opportunity to formally acknowledge that.
--Liz Ceppi
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Debra-- Congratulations! As long as you realize that now they're going to expect you to work this hard every year.
Thanks for everything,
--Tony Chiotti
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Congratulations, Debra. Your voice will forever echo in my brain when I'm writing an essay--"what are the stakes, what are the stakes, what are the stakes" Thank you for requiring me to think; your award is richly deserved.
--Karen Kirkwood
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Hooray, Debra! The world is full of people like me who’ve been lucky to have you as a mentor, teacher, and friend. It’s no surprise to any of us that you’d win this award in your first year at PSU! Congrats!
--Kathleen Holt
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Debra! Congratulations on the award. You're one of the most talented people I know and I look forward to taking another class from you. You're one of the best teachers I've ever had.
--David Holley
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When I began the graduate nonfiction program two years ago, Debra was my first writing teacher—in a class on memoir writing. At that time, she was still commuting from Eugene, riding the train back and forth once a week in what must have been an exhausting schedule. But you’d never have known it to watch and listen to her in action. She has been one of best and probably the toughest teacher I’ve ever had, in any subject. And it’s been wonderful, because no matter what she asks you to do, she’s right there with you while you’re doing it. Her professionalism, kindness, high self-expectations, and mentoring are examples for us all to aspire to, and her writing’s not bad, either. (big grin)
I just finished my thesis—as my Advisor, Debra chaired my committee and led me through a somewhat grueling oral defense that proved a meaningful rite of passage. To my fellow students I say, “Take a class with Debra Gwartney. It will make you a better writer.” To Debra, I offer my deepest thanks, and, as she would say, warm wishes.
--Sue Pesznecker
P.S. Debra—I’ll email you again in ten years or so. I have a feeling that with a little reflective distance, new insights will bubble to the surface.
(Below: Sue's May 11 thesis defense. L-R: Katy Barber (History), Sue, Debra, Susan Reese, and Hildy Miller.)
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You can tell Debra that I tried to list her as all numbers 1-3 of my top choices, but had to settle for just number 1. She richly deserves this award... she's a great teacher and an amazing woman. And her reputation as a hard ass is still intact!
--Shannon Carson
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Debra is the best editor I’ve ever worked with. And it’s a good kind of pain.
--Anonymous
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When I first came to PSU, after a 12year break between finishing my BA and starting my MA, Debra was my first professor. My first thought was, "My God, this is going to be hard!"
And hard it was. Debra holds her students to her own high standards, balancing time and compassion for us with staunch demand for accountability. Even as she mentors her students, she also pushes us to shimmy farther and farther out on the skinny branches of our comfort zones, to take risks in our writing, and, in the case of personal narrative, to eschew the victim role and be ever more culpable as we proceed.
The word "den mother" comes to mind, fierce and protective as a mama bear, but also stern and formidable.
In addition to her vast knowledge and commitment, Debra is a poised, classy lady whose very presence has professionalized the PSU English department. I wouldn't mind being more like her when I grow up (grin).
Congratulations Debra on this much deserved award!
--Meryl Lipman
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I love teaching at PSU primarily because I fall in love with my students each term and feel like the luckiest person alive because I get to share time with them, so when the wonderful writer (yes, I read her c.v., have heard her read, and have read her work) Debra Gwartney joined our full time faculty, I couldn't help notice that she is always on campus whenever I'm there, that her door is always open, and that her students flock through that door...and she is always quietly and patiently, with her warm, soft smile, offering them her ear and her valuable feedback...her friendship. Now she (and Paul and Tony) have transformed the Kellogg Awards into a true celebration of students and their work. Oh, how lucky we are to have Debra among us, bringing her constant caring light to us all.
--Susan Reese
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Congratulations, Debra! My older and younger selves agree that you're an awesome teacher.
--Alexis Nelson
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There are three things the very wise Debra Gwartney told me:
- "How do I know where you're going, if I don't know where you've been?"
- "When the action is hot, write cool."
- "We need to see you in scene rather than in summary."
All kidding aside—congratulations on your well-deserved award. I'm so happy you're here at PSU.
--Julie Miyagi
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Debra Gwartney: Learning with her Students
PSU students have chosen Debra Gwartney as an outstanding teacher, though she was appointed professor less than a year ago. Based on five of Debra’s classes I have a theory how she’s developed rave reviews.
First of all, Debra, a teacher of writing, is a writer who’s regularly published in Salon, and the Oregonian. She is a student of Vivian Gornick, whose book on the craft of writing (The Situation and the Story) tops her students‚ must read list.
Second, Debra’s a bundle of energy—gracefully balancing a dozen enterprises including her role as thesis advisor to graduate students and co-manager of the PSU non-fiction writing universe. The only rest she takes—that I have witnessed over three years—is to fix herself in her chair, fix a deadline in her mind, fix her pencil in her hand, and write.
Third, she continues her main job of single mom, partner to four women, ages 19 to 34 whose normal adolescent outrages form the centerpiece of Debra’s forthcoming book-length memoir.
Fourth, Debra is a grandmom twice over, and commutes from Portland to Eugene to nourish and to savor her growing family.
Debra has been a writing teacher - journalism, memoir, creative non-fiction—for a dozen years. She’s held adjunct appointments at the University of Oregon and Portland State, and presented a variety of short-courses such as those at Haystack on the Oregon coast.
Her first PSU teaching assignment in the fall of 2004—at which I was one of twenty five lucky students—perhaps reveals what makes her such an extraordinary teacher. The English Department had assigned her the regular offering entitled Writing About People. There were a few undergraduates, taking a full class load, but the majority consisted of part-time students: mature writers, employed women, and a handful of moms and grandmoms.
We got underway reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and—in turn—each of us wrote and circulated a short original work which, through class discussions, served as grist for our learning mill.
And learn about the arts of writing we did. Debra led the discussion of each student’s work—interspersed with creative writing classics that she selected—with a standard set of questions for us: What was memorable or particularly vivid in the piece? Where did the piece really begin? What confusions, if any, did we experience? Where in the work were we fully engaged? What craftsmanship gripped us relentlessly?
Time after time, piece after piece, we examined each other’s work and began to identify landmarks in our readings: pitfalls to avoid; useful scenic devices that oriented us; dialogue that built depth; deployment of too many, too few or just enough characters; learning the tools that keep readers grounded while turning pages.
We focused on the work before us, never the craftsman—and we learned to dissociate the narrative voice from the character in the story named “I.” Since most of our own writing took the form of memoir, we learned to deepen the voice of “I,” reflecting about a character named “I,” learning what the older “I” has come to understand about an earlier, younger character. In the first days the focus of the class—without any formal decision, but to everyone‚s satisfaction—shifted to memoir from our starting point of Writing About People. We redesigned our course to suit ourselves.
And there you have a hallmark of Debra’s tradecraft: to go, with the class leading the way, where the students want to go. Time after time in the classes I’ve taken with Debra, I've been a part of an unusual learning-centered community, with we students doing most of the talking during classes and with Debra in the role of attentive umpire: allocating air time and verifying the direction of our march.
There are few wall flowers, shy, inarticulate members in Debra's classes. And few or no prima- donnas. She recognizes and makes available to us, the insights of other master teachers; their books, their theories, their pet peeves. Primarily, she rounds up the wealth of experience that each class citizen brings to our mutual task. Her two-hour classes, and her three-hour classes, flash by.
I’ve studied with Nobel scholars including Mark Van Doren, Linus Pauling, and Irwin Edman, who, like Debra, make student digging and discovery a vital part of classroom learning.
Thank you, Debra,
Felix (and Norene) Gurley-Rimberg
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Hot damn, Debra! It's great having you here.
Cheers,
Dennis Stovall
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