The next faculty member under the Spotlight is Dr. Catherine Carter, a professor in the Department of English. She has been teaching for a total of about 31 years. Of that time, she has spent 22 of them here at WCU.
In this interview, you'll hear about being a recipient of the 2021 Awards for Excellence in Teaching, a few favorites of hers, how long she's been writing, what inspired her to teach, her current projects, advice she has for beginner poets and students, and more.
Her requested use of her time in the spotlight: a big thank you to teachers and proto-teachers!
Below the cut are her answers to student questions and other information:
How does it feel to be one of the recipients of the 2021 Awards for Excellence in Teaching?
I was very, very pleased. It felt like some kind of external validation of the work I do, and that’s generally a wonderful feeling. However, it’s worth noting that there are relatively few teaching awards for the thousand-plus faculty at WCU, and that we have an awful lot of very, very good teachers…which means that there also has to be a certain element of luck in receiving an award like this, which so many deserve. So I’m really grateful to have been lucky, or, if you prefer, to be privileged to receive the award, but that absolutely doesn’t mean I’m the only one who deserved it, or even, perhaps, the most deserving of it.
What’s your favorite movie?
I don’t have one, but the best one I’ve seen in the past year or two was probably Fast Color or maybe Fences.
Are you a dog or a cat person?
I’ve had both; I love them differently. Cats are a lot easier, but dogs provide a lot more interaction. Right now my spouse and I have two cats, but I think we’re about to foster an older dog for some friends who are having to move into an apartment for awhile.
How long have you been writing?
As long as I can remember being able to write—say, from early elementary school. My mother was an English teacher and my father a biologist, and they were and are both avid readers. My mother began reading children’s books and poetry to my brother and me from the moment she brought us home from the hospital, and both were the kind of parents who get up from the dinner table to check a word origin or a reference, so my brother and I had a really solid foundation for being interested in words.
Who are your top three favorite poets?
I don’t think I could pick just three, but three I like a lot are Lucille Clifton, Marge Piercy, and Jane Kenyon.
If you could choose only one memory to sum up your college experience, what would it be?
You keep asking all these questions where I can’t choose! Maybe staying up all night talking and arguing with my friend Sonda, questioning the whole world and trying to envision a better one.
What inspired you to become a teacher?
I didn’t really plan to become a teacher; I went to graduate school because there wasn’t a lot of active career or post-grad advising of students in those days (1989), and I didn’t really know what else to do. I thought I was good at being a student, so I went to graduate student to go on doing that. And when you go to graduate school, you generally teach. I didn’t like it all that much at first, but it grew on me; the penalties for doing poor work in teaching are immediate, humiliating, and painful (and sometimes that happens even when you’re doing good work.) So over the years I worked at it, trying to get better, and I did get better. But I didn’t get REALLY better until I began working toward teacher certification in 2002; it turned out those folks in CEAP know a lot about actual pedagogy, asking questions that no one really talked about too much in my graduate program. What makes you think such-and-such an approach will help students learn better? How do you know if it did? How do you know your assessments are reliable and valid? What premises underpin the choices you make as a teacher? I learned an awful lot in those two years, and it was a huge help.
What's it like to work in the same department as your spouse?
Mostly pretty wonderful.
Why did you write the poem about the anus?
I wrote it at a point when I was just getting interested in odes—in fact, you were in that graduate poetry seminar last spring where we read Sharon Olds’ book Odes, which was right around that time, I think. A key aspect of the ode, for me, is celebrating what we don’t always think to celebrate, so you can’t get much better (or go much lower) in that line than celebrating the anus. And that subject lends itself to the kind of kindergarten humor which often appeals to me, as well as to readers—poetry ought to be fun and funny sometimes. But I also like poetry that’s simultaneously lighthearted and deep-down serious, and this subject allowed me to raise some serious questions: why do most cultures think food and eating are holy, but excretion is profane? Why is “shit” a curse word? Why don’t we think to be grateful for the miracles of our digestive system, start to finish? How DO we decide what’s sacred and what’s the opposite of sacred, and is anything other than cruelty and waste really the opposite of sacred? That’s why I have all that stuff about monasteries in the poem—that, and to give the shout-out to Buson’s famous haiku about the old abbot fertilizing the withered fields with his droppings.
What are you working on right now? (What are you publishing next?)
I have three projects on hand right now.
The first is that my spouse, Brian Gastle, and I are putting together a translation of the 33,000 line Middle English poem, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, or The Lover’s Confession. We’re about 30% of the way through our second draft; we have a contract to publish it with Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University.
The second is my fourth full-length collection of poetry, which doesn’t yet have a working title; I think I’m about halfway through. It uses metaphors of witches and magic to consider how we decide what’s sacred, how, societally, we think about women ageing, and global climate change. The thread between those themes is often fire—the burning of woman as witches, the hot flashes of menopause (which can be really fierce), and the warming planet. It’s also concerned, like most of my work, with how we interact with nonhuman life; I have some animist tendencies which often come out in the poetry
The third is a pedagogy book project I’ll be undertaking in earnest next spring, when I have scholarly development leave. It’s meant to be a book for secondary English teachers about teaching poetry, mostly comprised of lesson plans for teaching poetry. There’s a long tradition of teaching poetry as some kind of literary sudoku—find a few literary devices—as if the point of poetry were a successful symbol hunt. Teachers aren’t to blame for that; it’s how they were taught, and it’s one reason why so many English teachers, even, don’t really like poetry. They’re afraid of it, and no wonder, given how we handle it. But I think having some lesson plans teachers could open right up and use to address Common Core State Standards might be really helpful to a whole lot of teachers—and I’m hoping to also draw on the work of the many amazing teachers in the region who do teach poetry by soliciting some plans and/or short essays from those teachers for the book. I expect I’ll be writing a lot of it, but it’ll also have some qualities of an edited collection, if the teachers are willing.
What is the most important thing for someone who is interested in poetry but not very good at it?
Come talk to me, and I’ll show you some non-threatening poetry? Seriously, though, read some, and keep reading, and write as much as you can, and then keep writing. Some poets may be basically born great, but the vast majority of us aren’t. If you don’t like a particular author, go read someone else. If you don’t like ten particular authors, don’t feel ashamed and inadequate—there are thousands of other ones, and you can go read some of those. If you find a poem you do like, maybe read more by that poet. If you really love a poet and that poet’s teaching a class, maybe try to go take it, if you can. You could also see if you could gather a small group of writing friends and share your work—it’s always easier to see the weak points in someone else’s work than in our own.
What advice do you have for students?
This advice is mostly for so-called traditional students: the ones who come to college at 18 and who can manage to live on or near campus and find a congenial group. It’s different for older students—not worse, necessarily, but different. But, to get to the advice: enjoy the time you have. If you need an extra year to graduate, and you can afford it, take it, rather than carrying 18 or 20 hours every semester to get through “on time.” People will tell you college constitutes the best years of your life, and I don’t think that’s so—and it’s a good thing it’s not. Imagine how sad it would be if the best days of your life were over by the time you were 22! But they are unique years, and even though they’re stressful and anxious sometimes, it’s a different kind of stress and anxiety than we know later on. So try to enjoy them. If someone says, “Let’s go do this thing [raft a river, listen to a reading, watch a film you’ve never heard of, join this student group, stay up all night talking with someone you don’t know well], consider saying, “Hell, yes!” instead of “I don’t have time.” There’ll never be enough time, but it’s also true that you’ll never have MORE time than you have right now, only less. Try to make the most of it.
Anything else you would like to share for your time in the spotlight?
As you know, I work mostly with teacher education candidates—proto-English teachers. And those students, by and large, are just amazing. They have a work ethic and a drive and purpose that I couldn’t’ve imagined when I was their age, and it has been such a privilege to work with and support them, as well as with their host teachers in our public schools. Teachers and proto-teachers, they are by and large amazing. Thanks, teachers!