Roorbach's Return

Award-winning author Bill Roorbach is more than this year’s distinguished visiting writer. He is also a graduate of Ithaca College. “It was so special to bring an alumnus back to campus, especially with it being the 50th anniversary of H&S. As we celebrated him, he got to celebrate his connection to the College,” said Katharyn Howd Machan, director of the series.

Since graduating cum laude from the school in 1976, Roorbach has published eight books. His work has also appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Granta, Harper’s, and New York Times Magazine, among others. He has been a National Endowment of the Arts fellow and a Kaplan Foundation fellow, and he was the winner of the 2002 O. Henry Award and the 2001 Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction.

During his weeklong return to campus, Roorbach held a double-genre master class; students could take the workshop as either fiction or nonfiction. “He used the same examples and exercises. His goal was to show students how really fine the line [between fiction and nonfiction] can be. At this time in the literary field, it is very important that students understand what is fiction and what is nonfiction,” Machan explained. Students were delighted with the opportunity to work with Roorbach and appreciated his generosity with feedback and his candidness in and out of the classroom.

The public also had the chance to experience Roorbach’s work. He gave two free, public lectures in Emerson Suites. On Tuesday, January 31, he presented “Into Woods: An Annotated Reading” from his collection of essays. Many in the audience commented on how comfortable he seemed to be during his talk, stopping  and telling anecdotes and then picking up where he left off once again. It was with equal confidence, ease, and humor that he read from his latest book, Temple Stream, on Thursday, February 2. According to Machan, “It was so exciting because we were among the first to hear these splendid words voiced aloud.”

The Department of Writing Distinguished Visiting Writers series continues this fall, when Marge Piercy and Ira Wood teach a master class in memoir.