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Steve Davenport
 Teaching Philosophy:
The route I took to the position of Associate Director strikes me as curiously indirect. Nearing the end of a series of one-year appointments at a liberal arts college an hour down the road, I returned to the old idea that I might become a writer by writing. I remember carrying books by David Wojahn and Sharon Olds in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and sitting down before my old monitor and a window that featured snow. I know it was January 1. I think it was 1995. My plan was simple: begin the morning with a poem from each book and then write a poem of my own. Over the years I’ve abandoned that plan for others, all of which turn on my interest in organizing voice on paper. Trained in literary scholarship (PhD, 20 th-Century American Literature, UIUC, 1992) but easily distracted, I wander from one writing task to another, from a sequence of liquor-soaked ballisto-sonnets to an essay about Stephen King or Richard Hugo, from a second-person meditation on a family murder-suicide in an environmentally damaged neighborhood to corn-fed fictions that may or may not ever add up to a novel about a bomb called Bomb. My role in the Creative Writing Program, undergrad as wells as grad, is primarily administrative.
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