To this day, when I drive along the coastline of California, I remember Professor Bernard Pipkin, whose courses in oceanography and earth science I took as science electives at USC when I was a freshman in 1978-79. His passionate teaching about the power of weather, the ocean, faults, and the natural world stayed with me forever. He took us on a field trip to Portuguese Bend, on the Rancho Palos Verdes Peninsula, to show us the progression of the slump in that earth, which then was already visible, and is now causing homes to slide toward the sea.
Decades later, because of his charisma and the way he transmitted serious science to this writer, I point out the toes of major slumps along the Pacific Coast Highway to non-Californians, I describe the secret canyons of the ocean, and I know all the faults in California, which helps when there have been recent earthquakes in Ontario and El Sereno, shaking me and my youngest daughter.
As a journalism/English double major back then, my science and economics courses changed my life, and gave me knowledge I still use every day. Now, I’ve been a novelist and professor at UC Riverside since 1988, and students who take my courses as electives tell me that these hours change their lives, permanently, as well.
The Humanities are always under fire for seeming irrelevant, especially now in the age of technology, advanced engineering and medical majors. But humans need story, art, history, music, philosophy and religion to stay human. Courses in history and religion are essential to help understand the major conflicts in our own nation, and the world. Music, art history, philosophy, ethnic studies, gender studies — all are essential to help us be human.
Many of my students are creative writing majors, but over the years, I’ve created courses that are now also populated with students from biomedical sciences, engineering, history, anthropology, psychology and liberal studies. It’s been a great joy to work with them and see deep interconnection in all our disciplines. The best way to teach humans, for me, emphasizes narrative, and lets them share their own narratives.
Speaking to hundreds of students around the nation, I help them realize narrative is essential for everyone. Yes, writers create narratives of fiction, memoir, journalism and short story. But doctors and medical professionals need to construct a narrative for each patient, for how to assist that human in surviving, or dying, and be able to transmit that story in a way the human patient understands, believes, accepts. Researchers, scientists and engineers need to lay out their work in narrative form for grant applications, and for themselves, to keep on track. Lawyers? If they can’t construct a great narrative, to prove either guilt or innocence, they won’t last a month in the courtroom. And for all my business students creating marketing plans, or computer science students creating apps, new sites, and digital media, narrative is what will sell those.
For years, I’ve taught a seminar using four novels, in different iterations, and allowing students to bring their own experiences into the course, by writing essays that touch on the books and their own lives — memoir and history of themselves and their families.
“Mecca” is the latest book by Susan Straight. (Photo by Felisha Carrasco / Courtesy of Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
For example, in Road Trip Fiction, I teach “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” by Ernest J. Gaines, which follows the epic life of a woman from her emancipation, at age 9, from enslavement, to the violence of Reconstruction, which few students have learned about, and her participation in the Civil Rights Movement, when she was 110 years old.
Following that is “Fools Crow,” by James Welch, set in Montana Territory in the 1870s, in which the heroes of Miss Jane Pittman, the Union soldiers wearing blue coats, are the emissaries of death for the Blackfeet tribe of Fools Crow.
In class, we speak of history, religion, earth science, psychology, medicine, biology and botany and zoology, through these novels. My students are passionate about bringing their own family histories — migration, violence against women, learning languages, education, environment and faith — to these discussions. I have ended this course before with “The Road,” by Cormac McCarthy, which leads us to possible futures. What makes this course work for students from across disciplines is that they can write memoir, fiction and essays about the ideas in these narratives, and their own.
Last year, Gabriela Mota Orozco, a Biology major and pre-med student from Santa Ana, took my seminar Writing in Many Voices, in which the novels are polyphonic, meaning told in several narrators, and also include multiple languages. This allows students to write essays, memoir and fiction with two narrators, and also write in two languages. Stories and memoirs came in English and Japanese, Spanish, Tagalog, Korean, and also invented futuristic languages. Our discussions of the female characters in several of the novels, as well as how illness was treated, led her to work on a deeply felt essay about the death of her mother.
Ms. Orozco wrote about being the daughter who monitored her mother’s cancer treatments, who physically cared for her mother in her dying, and in drafts, I asked her to think about the emotions, the details, the body, in her piece. The final essay was so moving that I cried — and Ms. Orozco realized how she will work on her applications for medical schools, her narratives encompassing her family history, her own journey, and her desire to help others. Recently, she told me that on the fourth anniversary of her mother’s death, she finally felt different, having written that narrative.
I’m tearing up while writing this, right now.
The beauty and endless changeability of language is vital to all our narratives, and though AI threatens to alter the way we receive and use language, think about how impossible it is to translate any language, given history, slang, and community differences! I’ve looked up so many Spanish words to see whether AI recognizes particular Southern California usages, and it doesn’t, which students tell me happens to them as well. Language is evolution — and learning languages means learning humans.
Two years ago, Isaac Jun, from Yorba Linda, also pre-med, wrote a story about a grandmother who speaks Korean and little English, shopping with a granddaughter who speaks English and little Korean. He demonstrated on the whiteboard how we could use, in context, Korean, the English translation of those Korean phrases, and the English words for those items. We practiced on food. The class was entranced, and their narratives enriched.
In fact, over the last 20 years, I’ve had countless students write fiction and memoir about three generations of language learned and lost. I tell them about my grandparents, who spoke Swiss-German, my mother, who learned English from Dodger broadcasts, and my own obsession with language, vernacular, slang, and speaking “American.” Many students have written about being child translators for their parents and grandparents, in society; these were future engineers, scientists, marketers, and especially, future teachers, social workers, and doctors.
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My middle daughter, Delphine Sims, went to USC, like me. Her plan was to be a sports agent, and she signed up for pre-law courses. Ah, the humanities courses she took! She had always loved photography, and she graduated as an Art History/African American Studies double major.
She’s now an assistant curator of photography at SFMOMA, working with photographers from around the nation. I’ll never forget 2020, when she taught an Intro Art History course for UC Berkeley, as a grad student, via Zoom here in my house. (Finally, she understood how tired I’d been all these years, grading papers!) But she was so passionate about it, choosing the images for those students, most non-majors, that I was thrilled.
Her colleague, Marcos Cisneros, is teaching a course this fall for Georgetown University, for the Culture and Politics Program. “Lying, Liars, Fake and Frauds,” Cisneros says, “is about how artists can help us complicate and navigate” ideas of manipulation, photography, truth and lies.
Cisneros, who studied Russian literature at Princeton as an undergraduate, has enjoyed spirited debate on how “fake” works in the world — noticing a group of tall women in class, and finding out the women’s basketball team was enrolled by their advisor to this elective. The players “come straight from practice,” Cisneros said, “but they’re always down for class discussion.”
It’s a Humanities course. It will change their lives.
Susan Straight’s most recent novel, set in Southern California, is “Mecca.” Her new novel, “Sacrament,” will be released in 2025. She is a Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside.