Liza Wieland

East Carolina University English professor Liza Wieland

With kind, wise eyes, in an office filled with papers and books, accomplished writer and East Carolina University professor Liza Wieland sat in Bate 2300A.

Wieland recently received the 2017 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The fellowship is a nonprofit organization that encourages literature in the South. Though Wieland was born in Chicago and then lived in Texas and Pennsylvania, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, when she was six and considers herself a product of the South.

“I really feel like my writing has been influenced by southern writers, particularly I would say Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, so I think in terms of influence and the sights and sounds and smells I absorbed as a child and as a teenager, the South is very important,” Wieland said.

Wieland will be going to Chattanooga, Tennessee, in November to receive the award.

“It has been won in previous years by some pretty impressive writers, and some of my favorite writers… so I’m very honored to be in their company and it’s an award that’s for my career-long achievement, so all eight of my novels, from the beginning to the end, so it feels like a real vindication of what I’ve been doing,” she said.

The recipient of around 40 various grants, awards and honors, Wieland is an example to her students that becoming a successful writer can become a reality.

“It shows my students that there is a way to achieve their goals and being a writer, writing a novel, it does happen,” Wieland said. “Writers live in the world and they’re not all dead and men and white, so it kind of brings my students a sense that this, it’s not so extraordinary or it’s not impossible for them to want to be writers.”

Wieland has been at ECU since 2007 and says she has noticed a real, new passion for writing in ECU students. Junior Garrett Yarbrough and ECU alumna Sarah McKeever are two students Wieland has taught. Both say Wieland has inspired them, bringing out and encouraging their own passions for writing.

“Her combination of humility and greatness is what inspires so many students to be better writers,” McKeever, who majored in English with a creative writing minor, said after spending the past year in some of Wieland’s fiction courses. “It is why all of her students garner the respect and admiration for her that they do. My writing is forever changed from the epiphanies I experienced in Dr. W's classroom over the past year.”

Yarbrough, an English and history double major with a creative writing minor, has had Wieland for three writing courses while at ECU.

“Dr. Wieland has supported my creative writing even prior to my college compositions,” Yarbrough said. “While applying to colleges, I was torn between creative writing programs, and the ECU English Department put me in contact with Dr. Wieland.”

Yarbrough said he toured several other campuses, sat in on different writing panels and had briefly spoken with some writing faculty at other universities, but Wieland went out of her way to speak with him.

“For Dr. Wieland to go out of her way to have quite a lengthy conversation with a completely random high school student over the phone about their dream of being a writer, while she was cooking dinner at her home, showed her dedication to her career of fostering each bit of creative writing talent she could find in every student,” Yarbrough said. “Dr. Wieland took a chance on me and, two years later, she has become a mentor.”

Wieland says ECU and its English department provide great opportunities for students to learn.

“Students benefit from being taught by people who are actually practitioners of their discipline or of their craft, and the English department is full of professors who are writing and then teaching about what they write and really walking the walk as well as talking the talk,” Wieland said. “The more we publish and the more we do our work, the better we can engage with the students and show them the truth of what we do.”

Yarbrough says Wieland never lost faith in his ability to make a career out of writing, constantly helping with revisions.

“She pushed me constantly to submit my work for publication, and my first published story was a product of one of her workshops,” Yarbrough said. “Dr. Wieland’s consistent support convinced me that I have potential, and I do not see myself giving up my pursuit of a creative writing career.”

Yarbrough added, “I have the privilege of calling Dr. Wieland one of the best professors I have gotten to work under, and I have a deeper understanding of the point-of-view I inject into my fiction and my motivation to write because of my experience with her. One day I hope to call my aspiration to write my profession, and Dr. Wieland’s tutelage would be a formative experience.”

McKeever said on the last day of Advanced Fiction Writing in the spring, some of Wieland’s students sat in the classroom after the class was dismissed.

“We all knew that we were about to leave something very special behind and we all wanted to savor the experience for a few moments longer, for posterity,” McKeever said. “I know I will never have a better creative writing teacher than Dr. W.”

Students unanimously agreed that Wieland is well deserving of the 2017 Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, as well as other awards, not only for her personal work but also for her ability to support and help her students grow as writers.

As Wieland sat and spoke of her novels and teaching experiences with a mixture of humbleness and pride in her voice, the love she has for writing and the passion she has for sharing her talent and experience with her students was undoubtedly clear.

(2) comments

Brian Glover

Nice coverage. However, 1) you can win or receive an award, but you can't accomplish one; 2) "humbleness" is not a word. Try "humility." Keep reading, kids...

HYst

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