Impishness was in the air this week on 2nd Laird! Yours truly sat down with Prof. Mike Kowalewski to talk about the first Carleton Miscellany. We then had the privilege of attending his fabulous talk, entitled “Revisiting the Carleton Miscellany: An Illustrated History”! (Watch for more on that next week.) And speaking of a previous Miscellany…
As we were sweeping the dust off the history of the department with Mike, we were visited by a specter of the past, as a message from our predecessors appeared in our inboxes. Where did they come from? Where did they go? Who can say. They vanished as quickly as they came, leaving behind only a curious proliferation of Hugh Dancy images and a conversation with a pair of professors. We leave their words to you, dear reader, and implore you to remember the Ghost of Miscellany Past.
Hello, good afternoon, and let us offer some belated congratulations to the class of 2022! If you’re looking at that class year and wondering, didn’t they graduate already? How very astute of you! Yes, indeed, we have received our diplomas and disappeared into the sunset. We are briefly re-emerging, however, because the Miscellany knows no bounds. So for one last time, please pull up a chair and join us for one last Paired Professor Profile.
This time, we asked the unflappable Greg Hewett, (sadly former!) head of the English department (but you can still find him in Creative Writing and Advanced Poetry Workshop) and the ever-dry Jessica Leiman (teaching A Novel Education and The Rise of the Novel) to spare us some time, and they very graciously obliged. If you’re wondering why we wanted Greg and Jessica together — it’s because we heard, from totally legitimate sources who wish to remain anonymous, that Greg and Jessica are actually a call-each-other-on-the-drive-home, discuss-what’s-for-dinner, best-friends-forever dynamic duo. You don’t believe us? Let us allay your doubts: “We almost got married,” Greg declared. “But then she married somebody else and I married somebody else.” Which, yes, could be said of just about anyone ever, but you must admit it’s wonderfully dramatic.
But let us backtrack. We began with our now-classic opener: if you could have every student on campus read one book, what would it be? Because we still haven’t recovered from Connie and Tim, we offered a long spiel: we know this is a big ask, you can ponder for the whole interview if you’d like, honestly if you want to just email us later with a recommendation, we can work that in, perhaps if you want to confer with friends, family, or students…
“Do you want an answer now?” interrupted Greg. He pounced like this was a trivia question and Arnab was standing by with a timer (actually, in retrospect, Greg was way more invested in this than in our department trivia; make of that what you will). Not wanting to over-sell his pick, he declared that the collected poems of Emily Dickinson were “an antidote to everything in this world.”
“What’s yours?” he then asked Jessica. Readers, please know that Greg, throughout the interview, repeatedly tried to usurp us. Anyway, Jessica declared that she had a “guilty” sense that she had already managed to assign Samuel Richardson’s Pamela to the entire campus. She’s certainly hoodwinked your lovely editors, but in case you’ve somehow avoided his heartwarming classic, it goes something like this: an incredibly virtuous, horrifically young heroine gets kidnapped by a very creepy older man by the name of Mr. B and then, quel surprise!, the two get married.
Speaking of plot twists, our next question was this: is there a plot point in any of the books you teach which annoys you so much you would change it if you could?
“Oh, I don’t really read for plot,” Greg piped up cheerfully.
Oh, the things we hear in these interviews. We politely asked Greg to elaborate on his statement, and by politely asked, we mean we stared at him, utterly flabbergasted, for a solid five seconds. Luckily, he didn’t seem to notice.
“I teach a lot of poetry and there’s sometimes not a lot of plot there,” he continued blithely. Greg talked about the non-importance of plot for some minutes, we think, but (un)fortunately we all blacked out for this part of the interview, so we’ll just move along to Jessica’s answers, which happily did not deal psychological damage.
Jessica said she had issues with both The Monk and Pamela — but her issues are spoilers, so we can’t tell you them. Technically, we gave you the entire plot of Pamela already? The Monk, at least, we’re gatekeeping. Take one of Jessica’s classes if you want to know more!
Next up, we entered what Jessica rightly termed the “pugilistic phase” of our interview. We simply needed to know who in the department would be their partner in a zombie apocalypse, and Greg didn’t hesitate to nominate “the only person with any practical sense on Second Laird.” If you have to ask, you haven’t spent enough time in Laird: it’s obviously Solvei, our incomparable and unflappable departmental assistant. And here Greg redeemed himself by proving that, even if he doesn’t like plot, he can certainly find evidence to support his claims. “Today Solvei helped me find my glasses,” he reported. “I couldn’t find my glasses! And I couldn’t see where to go.” Stand down red alert, everyone; they were on a bench. Where they were exceedingly well camouflaged, we can only assume.
While we of course agreed that Solvei’s levels of competence would spook any zombie, we wanted to know — can Solvei fight? Can she hunt? Does she have any, you know, skills applicable to an apocalypse scenario? “She has this really gentle, lovely demeanor, but underneath there’s a warrior,” Greg said very seriously. We have no real idea what he was talking about, but he certainly spoke with great assurance, so we all nodded gravely and moved on.
Then, in a crossover episode — or a metatextual moment, if you will — Jessica brought up our Tim and Connie PPP. “Tim has cocktails,” she mused, carefully weighing the benefits of drinks in an apocalypse, “but I do hear Connie has a rapier … and a rapier has style. And really, if you’re fighting zombies, you’d want to do it right.” Has anyone considered replacing our Imp’s weird little brush with a rapier? Because speaking of having style…
Now, dear readers, it’s the stuff you’ve been waiting for: the weirdly personal questions that our professors, for mysterious reasons, continue to let us ask them. We had heard through the grapevine that Greg and Jessica used to carpool together, so, as Very Serious Journalists, we inquired about the veracity of the rumor.
“I have no memory of this,” Jessica began, a less than promising start. But Greg swooped in to redeem us: “we sometimes phone while we’re commuting in parallel,” he said. Let it be known that the two of them acted like this was very normal between casual acquaintances. At this point, we had used up all of our surprise, so we simply asked what they might be talking about as they make their separate ways home. Dinner, as it turns out.The highlight of this particular departure from our pre-planned questions was Greg declaring that he’s like “a combination of a fifties husband and wife,” because he doesn’t “do the housework,” but he expects supper on the table when he gets home. Greg proceeded to look confused when we supplied the term ‘trophy wife’ — presumably this is the sort of moment profs are talking about when they say they’re always learning from their students.
Next up, we played a round of Marry, Date, Kill, in which we totally bullied Jessica for truly no reason at all, sorry again, Jessica. Our first draft for Jessica’s choices were Mr. B (almost like we have a grudge against Richardson?), Van Helsing, and Maxim de Winter. The last made the list because, while none of us have read Rebecca with Jessica, we were sure she had read it at some point. It’s totally a classic gothic novel, we said. Right up Jessica’s ally, we said. Bet she totally has thoughts on the movie, we said.
“I have not read Rebecca,” was, word for terrifying word, what Jessica said when we mentioned Daphne Du Maurier. “Oh, it’s a great movie,” Greg tried, as someone who has also not read the book. We spluttered about Rebecca for some minutes until Jessica pointed out that it was, in fact, a post-Gothic novel, at which point we had to reluctantly un-clutch our pearls and move on.
Anyway, when forced to find a last-minute substitute for Mr. DeWinter for Jessica’s Date, Marry, Kill, we plucked someone from an old cast list: Hugh Dancy.
(We were once reading a novel in which the leading man had to be absurdly pretty for the plot to make any sense at all. That’s where Hugh came in.)
After we reminded Jessica that she couldn’t just kill everyone, she came up with: “Kill Mr. B, marry Hugh Dancy, date Van Helsing.” Date Van Helsing? “One date. Like coffee. Quickly.” Thus were Jessica’s estimations.
Discontent with letting them be, we went darker. If you had to pick one author to write your obituary, who would it be and why?
It’s Percy Shelley for Greg, on account of the fact that, “when you read Adonais, then you want that person to write about you being dead… [Jessica] hates Shelley, by the way,” he adds, just casually dropping that detail. (And Dickens, and Byron, all of whom she might exhume to fight, but ask her about that on your own time).
“I would want to write my obituary,” Jessica states. “I’m an obituary obsessive. I love reading obituaries. They’re like little miniature novels, you know, half a column.” Or she’d need “Margaret Lee Fox, who used to write the obituaries for the New York times… My husband has always joked that he’s going to get her to write my obituary, which given that she’s my age seems not particularly optimistic about my lifespan.”
But Greg, with his usual directness, paused her. Apparently, without any prying from us, the two of them already have an obituary pact – “you can do my Carleton obituary,” Greg grants to Jessica, “but she won’t let me write hers. It’s like my husband, my husband cuts my hair and he won’t let me cut his hair. It’s a trust issue.”
Their scruples aside, we asked them: if you could move Carleton into a fictional setting, where would you move it? The Shire is suggested as one option but Greg lands on (and becomes captain, after he deposes Kirk) the starship enterprise. “I’ll make it happen,” he insists, “That’d be my last act as chair.” Readers, we know we’ve recently graduated but we have not noticed that Carleton’s been suddenly transplanted, so perhaps Greg lied.
Now, not to suddenly turn genuine, but — yes, okay, to suddenly turn genuine: we want to thank the entire English faculty. Thank you to Jessica and Greg for participating in PPP, as well as every other professor who has put up with our interviews, who has answered our questions in class, who has gracefully managed our pre-10 am delirium and looked over our hastily-drafted essays. Your knowledge is invaluable, your generosity unforgettable. When we say we’ll miss Laird, know that, of course, what we’re really saying is we’ll miss the classrooms and offices you welcomed us into.
To all the Miscellany readers: thank you for reading. You could have commented, even once, on any of them, but all in all we respect your non-participation. We leave you in the capable hands of our successors.
Signing off for the last time,
Octavia, Julia, and Madeline.
We leave you this gif of Hugh Dancy, in all his confused beauty, to remember us by.
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