MORE ABOUT WILL HOCHMAN
Courses Taught
First Year Composition , Intermediate Composition, Advanced Composition,
GTA Mentorring, Creative Writing (Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction),
Salinger Seminar, New Perspectives in Teaching English (Graduate )
Teaching College Writing and Independent Studies for writers, readers, future teachers and tutors
Degrees
BA, Hobart College, l974; MFA., University of Montana, l976; Ph.D., New York University, l994.
Fields of Expertise
Composition and Rhetoric, Computers and Writing,
Creative Writing, Criticism, Editing, Literature,
Teaching Teachers, Writing Centers, Writing Program Administration
Pedagogy
My teaching philosophy is to nurture and challenge students at SCSU to find the best texts of their lives. I want to work with student writers and teachers in a variety of rhetorical, creative, technological, and critical ways. I was trained to understand that students create literature and believe that learning requires respect, caring and good work. In that spirit and with the belief that revision is at the heart of writing, I'm still learning to improve and update this page.
I'm willing to serve our community in a number of ways. I try to support teachers in their endeavors to make writing instruction more effective. I am the son of a third grade teacher and like to find innovative teaching ideas. My teaching and writing often intersect--several of my published essays actually began by doing my own composition assignments. When I was ten years old, my father wrote one phrase for me: "seem not, be." I am the poetry editor of War, Literature & the Arts thanks to Donald Anderson, the editor of WLA who was interviewed in The Chronicle of Higher Education . I am the co-reviews editor of Across the Disciplines (which used to be Academic.Writing) and I manage their annual CCCC review. I've learned a lot from my generous colleagues at writing conferences. Another way I stay in touch with fields of composition, creative writing, technolgy , J.D. Salinger, and my class writing communities is through "list-learning." I think a lot about how computers affect writing and enjoy learning about cyberspace through the foci of writing teacher, poet and my students. In my eternally childish way, I can relate to Kevin in The Wonder Years. Just like experiencing how troubles often lead to growth in adolescence, I feel as though I'm learning and living with language at a great time when traditonal and technological literacies are converging. I train teachers to teach with technology and think Dickie Selfe's lead article in Teaching Writing with Computers really captures the way I see teaching as a constant experiment. I am always happy and willing to talk with high school teachers about J.D. Salinger using some of my favorite web sites and the fun of bringing together my love of all things Salinger and my love of cyberspace. I also work with talented teachers at SCSU online by coordinating technology (see Kairos 9.1) and running Writeon, a list for "Southern's" writing teachers. Archives of the list are available, and to join “Writeon,” send email to me.
At the center of my pedagogy is process and heart...I believe feeling and living ideas is as important as thinking them, and that honestly feeling one's way through writing processes is one of the best paths to thinking that matters. I learned that from Richard Hugo. But even as I write about heart in all seriousness, the next beat is from my mind thinking about how I sometimes have to laugh at myself and others who use feelings as excuses not to learn.
I think "pedagogy" is one of the silliest words I know. The saving grace of the word is that I can laugh at it's awkward sound with plenty of echoic reflectioin. While laughing, I can't help knowing about how this supposedly important word moves from unusual word association to simply sounding awkward. Laughter should always be ready to be released when such a word as "pedagogy" is put into play. Questioning pedagogy though, can't be laughed away. I know that my life as a teacher and writer has saved the best parts of me for others, so remember that whether I'm teaching or writing, I'm also playing with the words and enjoying disjunctions between form and content to help others and myself find meaning and achievement with some laughing and smiling along the way.(Whew...what a long sentence to try to nail down one word's meaning for me!) Anyway, I truly appreciate dedication, and I also enjoy haphazard luck, humour and word play. For example, I listen carefully to others, sometimes too carefully, and sometimes I don't hear well. When I mishear a phrase, that's called a "mondegreen" (which I first heard as "minder scene").What do we have here? Isn't there truth in paradox? Can pedagogy be poetic?
More and more, I answer either-or questions from good students with "both." Here's what I mean in terms of pedagogy. Teaching writing has aligned me wonderfully with living writing, even though I once believed that I needed to choose writing and not teaching to succeed. I love most reading but know that disliking texts makes some of my critical thinking sharper. I love words and I also love silence. (Perhaps our real poetry is in the silence or "white space" of a page anyway?) Loving the ways language connects us and makes us human is the here-and-now of my pedagogy (and page), even when we understand as Holden Caulfield does in The Catcher in the Rye that "People are always ruining things for you." It may not sound like much, but when I boil all this down, the best I can say is that I try hard to help all students and teachers while being mindful not to ruin too much, and while always trying to love and respect language as some of the best ways I may knonw people and be known.
There is little about English that doesn't interest me. I will serve where needed.
Publications & Publicity
I published student writing and wrote my department's first web pages for Colorado State University at Pueblo throughout the nineties. From l997 to l998 I collaborated with other Colorado State University compositionists to present athe first hypertext on hypertext at the CCC. We then publish,ed our work as "Hypertext Reflections" in Kairos and it won the journal's "Webtext of the Year" award in l998. At SCSU, along with developing wireless writing classes and training "techie teachers" to use wireless laptops in their pedagogy, I've developed my teaching pages and initiated a Composition Program Homepage as part of the English Department web space. I'm currently at work with Mike Palmquist on a chapter about wireless pedagogical transitions for Going Wireless.
Pignoli Press published my poems with Kim Skhapich in Just Around the Corner--Coffee Poems in l981, and Mellen Poetry Press published Stranger Within in l993. One of my more unusual academic essays was presented at the l996 Computers and Writing Conference and published in _Issues in Writing_ (Volume 7, Number 2). "The Legacy of Richard Hugo in the Composition Classroom" was included in Teaching Writing Creatively (edited by David Starkey) and published by Boynton/Cook in l998. "After an Old Picture of Schoolhouse Children" was included in In Praise of Pedagogy edited by Wendy Bishop and David Starkey and published by Calendar Island Publishers in 2000, and I teamed up with my wife, Jan Spiegel, to interview John Updike for The Missouri Review (Vol xxiii, number 2, 2000). Recently, I published Creative Non Fiction in Amarillo Bay about using multigenre approaches to writing and teaching and in 2001 I used a multigenre approach to criticism in a chapter ("The Ongoing Poetry of Andre Dubus") of Tributes edited by Don Anderson.. You can access some of my publications, interests and resources through the links in this page and at the end by clicking on the numbered "box seats." Since l992, I've been talking about the"Poetic Electric" of hypertext because I enjoy the ways ideas in different genres support each other and I love to use hypertext to advance the art of collage...in other words, multigenre writing makes more sense online than it ever did before.
If J.D. Salinger were online, he would probably read this web page and think there's too much ego and I would agree...sort of...I co-edited and wrote the concluding essay for Letters to J.D. Salinger. This book was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2002 and is still ringing readers' bells (with the sound of one hand clapping?). You can hear discussion about this project as part of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye on the second half NPR's July 18, 2001 "Talk of the Nation" and you can read more about my Salinger scholarship in The Chronicle of Higher Education where I did a short interview about my Post Script essay in Letters to J.D. Salinger. One of my favorite Salinger-projects was working with Paul Kennedy and other "Salingerians" like Tim O'Connor on a CBC hour-long radio show called "The Holden Caulfield Fan Club." Strangely, being a Salinger section man and scholar is alright with me.
Some of my poems recently appeared in The Connecticut Review and The North American Review. My newest publication is a chapbook of 12 poems and an essay from Pudding House Press's "Greatest Hits" series. On Septemeber 30, 2005, I read "Sunrise at Noon" to celebrate and inaugurate Dr. Steve Kaplan, the sixth president of the University of New Haven. My most recent book of poems, Freer, is published by Pecan Grove Press. I'm hard at work researching and writing A Critical Companion to J.D. Salinger. I couldn't be doing this without help from my favorite buddy-librarian and Salingerian revising me in a city cabin.
Some Favorite Authors & Texts
Try a fine short story by Don Anderson called "Stunted." It's one of my favortites!
Balzac, Garcia Marquez, Richard Hugo, Pablo Neruda, J.D. Salinger, and Wallace Stevens top my list, as well as short stories by Lee K. Abbott, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Tim Parrish and John Updike, essays by Stephen J. Gould, Wolfgang Iser, Bill Kittredge, Adrienne Rich, Louise Rosenblatt and Alice Walker, and poems by Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Phillip Levine, Antonio Machado, Tony Moffeit, Vivian Shipley, Gary Snyder, William Stafford, Ceasr Vallejo and Walt Whitman. I also enjoy reading about Composition and Rhetoric with crossover thinking from Creative Writing from Wendy Bishop, I've been influenced by hypertext heroes like Michael Joyce and sages of the screen like Sherry Turkel and William Gibson, I continue to play with educational thinking like Paolo Freire's, and artistic philosophy like Susanne K. Langer's, and I usually read The N.Y. Times and Inside Higher Education every day. Some of my favorite writing comes via email from one of my favorite writers' lists, Crewrt-l. .One of my favorite poems that is very hard to find is Neruda's "Ode to the Liver." (Thanks to Heberto Morales for help with the translation.) And of course, my favorite text is this ever loving hypertext, the WWW!
Will etc.
I enjoy writing and revising this web site (but you can click here to destroy it!). I net, body and channel surf, dog walk and play chess. for fun. love most things about New York City, but since moving to Connecticut, I have also learned to love the Sound at Short Beach. However, I'm still a Yankee fan and believe Yogi Berra is a poet! Got any tickets? Anyway, here are some more "field level," box seat, "ticket/links" to some more of my hypertext moments...box 1...box 2...box 3...box 4...box 5...box 6...box 7...box 8...box 9 box 10...box 11...box 12 box 14...box 15...box 16...box 17...box 18...Box Vista Presentation 5/19/06 19... Box Keynote Address 3/17/07 20...box 21...box 22