BRAD SULLIVAN

Brad Sullivan is a Professor of English at Western New England University and a poet. His primary interest has always been learning and knowing--how we do it, how we can facilitate it, how literary encounters may accomplish it. His work has explored early romantic models of knowing and learning, discussed connections of literature and science in a team-taught Environmental Literature course, and argued for the value of liberal arts education. He is currently at work on a book-length project tentatively entitled Artful Knowing. Here are some links to his website and his writing: http://mars.wne.edu/~dsulliva/   https://dbrad61.wordpress.com/

Do you feel as a teacher that writing is an inborn gift, or one that can be taught? 

As a teacher, I believe like Isocrates (Plato’s competitor in Ancient Greece) that formal training is helpful, but secondary to practice/experience and natural talent. So all students can improve, but only with their own passion and only to the degree their native intelligence will allow.

At what point in your life did you decide to become a writer? How has the desire to write influenced the course of your life?

I have always been a reader, so writing came naturally for me. I started journaling in high school, and continued it in college. But the act of writing itself was never the source of my passion. Reaching other people with experiences, feelings, and ideas that moved THEM was the thing that drove me to write. So the shape of my life has emerged from that need. I have taught for years, with a stress on helping students become better readers and close readers first. Then they are better equipped for the often-frustrating work of writing. My older students are challenged to think—and write—on a higher level. Their ideas, and their growth, are my interest.

What literature has most inspired you, and why?

I hardly know where to begin with the literature that has inspired me. As a reader, I have been deeply moved by Lord of the Rings and almost anything written by Charles Dickens. As a poet and a thinker, by the work of Frost, Wordsworth, and Christina Rossetti. As a writer, I aspire to the clarity and expansiveness of Steven Jay Gould, Gregory Bateson, and sometimes (yes) Stephen King.

What are your current aims as a reader? As a writer?

My current aims as a reader are to read everything good I can find. As a writer, I am working on a creative non-fiction project called Artful Knowing. In short, it is built around the processes of knowing, and how any real knowing is a process like that described by Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, more akin to the creation of art than the cataloguing of facts. Email me if you’d like to know more. 

                                                    BRAD SULLIVAN