Carlo Rotella, Boston Globe columnist, professor of English and director of the American Studies Program at Boston College, presented two of his essays and discussed his approach to nonfiction writing at the English Reading Series.
PROVO, Utah (Oct. 24, 2014)—What do nonfiction writers do to accurately create a scene and set a precise tone in their writing to faithfully capture the human experience? Carlo Rotella, Boston Globe columnist and professor of English at Boston College, shared what he values in his nonfiction writing in addition to reading from two of his recent essays at the English Reading Series.
Jamin Rowan, BYU English assistant professor and former graduate student of Rotella’s, discussed Rotella’s emphasis on examining how culture makers endeavored to understand the transition of the U.S. city from industrial to postindustrial.
“His writing is often interested in exploring ways in which his subject’s dedication to continue their craft, whether it be playing the Blues, boxing or writing Sci-Fi novels, gives them the tools and strategies with which they can begin to figure out what it means to be a human,” said Rowan.
Rotella’s writing aims to make sense of how humans connect with the people and places around them as well as how individuals contrive or bend meaning through their own trade or genre’s expectations and traditions in a world that is continually changing.
“I’m going to read a couple of pieces that are connected by an impulse or a desire, and that desire is the desire to write your way into a place. A lot of what I do is about craft and finding people who are good at things and finding out how they got to be that way,” said Rotella, prior to the reading.
He continued, “Another way to think about what I do is that I try to write myself into particular places at particular times. That has usually taken the form of me going out and doing legwork and trying to get into someone else’s scene, life, and neighborhood. As time has gone on I have become more aware that what I’m doing is trying to write myself into wherever I am.”
The impulse or desire that Rotella has turned to recently has been to write about the neighborhood he grew up in as a child in South Side Chicago. The essays he read, entitled “The Dogs of South Shore” and “La Pared Mester,” an essay to be published in the near future, explored how his South Side Chicago neighborhood and upbringing affected his inner life and the course of his life.
Rotella’s neighborhood experiences and memories have allowed him to better understand his connection with people and the influence this urban environment has on comprehending humanity.
Rotella concluded, “I know there’s meaning in a memory that’s not just about me but that I can connect to people’s experience. It’s really a conversation between memory and legwork.”
Dr. Carlo Rotella has written for the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Magazine, and currently has a regular column in the Boston Globe. His work also appears in the New Yorker, Boston magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Slate, The Best American Essays, and the American Scholar.
For more information about Carlo Rotella and his work, visit his webpage or his column on the Boston Globe website.
—Sylvia Cutler (BA English ’17)