Extension student turns course into fiction

Si Dunn, inspired by a literature course he took at the Extension School, has written a novella based on the tropes and techniques he learned in the class. Below he shares his story.

My novella, Jump, was conceived in 2009 in the course ENGL E-175 Southern Literature and Culture in the United States,  taught online by Dr. John Stauffer and Dr. Jason Stevens.

Our final assignment was to write a research paper or generate a bit of creative writing—our own little piece of “Southern literature”—drawing from the writing styles of some of the writers we had studied, such as William Faulkner and Mark Twain.

My effort was a lengthy short story titled “Gage.” It received excellent feedback, and once the course was completed, I decided to expand it into a novella, utilizing some styles, themes and issues explored during the E-175 class.

Structurally, Jump borrows heavily from Jean Toomer’s controversial 1923 novel Cane, a short work that is still deemed a significant example of high modernism in American literature. It was one of the readings for the class. Cane blends prose and poetry in its narrative flow, as does Jump.

Stylistically, Jump sometimes borrows from the ways William Faulkner used stream-of-conscious interior monologue in his 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury. And portions of the book are written in a straightforward style hopefully reminiscent of the clear narrative sentences in Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir, Black Boy.

Similarly, Jump tries to echo bits of the style of James Street*, a Mississippi novelist who was not studied during the Harvard course but happened to be a favorite of Dr. Stauffer.

As E-175 showed its participants, religion figures prominently in many works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern writers. And it is a factor, although hardly a strong one, in my novella. Experiences both in and out of war have left Gage Roberts, the main character, alienated, disillusioned, and not willing to give God much serious thought. There is in him, some of me.

To regain and hold my emotional footing after I came home from the Vietnam War, I sometimes went on sudden journeys, jumping from place to place and job to job. At other times, I took internal journeys where nothing much happened, and I did little moving. I was quick to have outbursts of anger, yet equally quick to sit motionless and silent when responses and explanations were needed and demanded.

Alienation manifests itself in many ways, but indifference and violence, sometimes together, are 2 of its hallmarks. Often, feelings of alienation do not go away quickly or easily for war veterans. For those who have had deeper encounters with war, the feelings of alienation, unfortunately, may never go away.

Jump has helped me dispel, if not completely expel, some old and lingering ghosts of post-traumatic stress disorder. For that, I am grateful and thank all spirits, forces, and people that have worked in my behalf, from 1944 to the present.

*Side note: James Street was my late mother’s cousin “Jimmy.” She adored him, yet other family members frequently described him in hushed tones as “the black sheep” (they actually used that term). He had, I was told repeatedly, left home as a young teenager and traveled around as a hobo. Then he became a newspaper reporter. Later, he quit the Catholic Church, went to seminary and became a Protestant minister. Next, he quit the ministry and started writing novels. Along the way, he also drank a bit and married more than once. Of all those “sins,” leaving the ministry was deemed the most egregious of all by most of my relatives.

Want to know more?

• Read about Jump on Amazon.com
• Offered this January: ENGL E-171 Satire and Resistance in the American Novel: Huckleberry Finn and Catch-22
• Take a look at ENGL E-156a Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture (spring)
• See all English classes at Harvard Extension School