Department of English
Jehanne Dubrow
Assistant Professor of English
E-mail: jdubrow2@washcoll.edu
Phone: (800) 422-1782
Office: Goldstein 116
Practice Makes Poetry
Jehanne Dubrow, assistant professor of creative writing and literature, does not believe in writer's block. Nor does she believe in inspiration. "If you don't believe in those things, writing becomes a job—but a really enjoyable job," says Dubrow, an award-winning poet and essayist whose most recent book, From the Fever-World, was published in October.
"I have a pretty rigorous schedule and try to write every day. Some days I'm rewarded by a feeling of effortlessness, the way athletes sometimes find themselves performing effortlessly. But you have to put in the practice. Inspiration is just muscle memory."
She finds teaching students to write both exhilarating and exhausting. She tells them to "read, read, read," because the best writers are "naturally obsessive and attentive readers." She advises aspiring poets to recite and even memorize poems they love, so they can "internalize the music on a cellular level."
For the spring, she is planning a class on the poetry of war, and her enthusiasm is palpable. "I thought I'd start with the World War I poets. It's amazing how poetry has affected the way we think about war."
Her husband, Jeremy, is an officer in the Navy, and her book Stateside, due out this spring from Northwestern University Press, as well as a book of essays she is writing, are based on her experiences as a military wife. The child of diplomats, Dubrow grew up all over the world, and has known she'd be an artist since she was 3. She wrote her first poem—about a seagull and its enviable ability to fly—when she was 11. But she was just out of college— she'd gone to St. John's College in Annapolis, where she met Jeremy, and where they both reveled in its Great Books program—when she realized just what kind of an artist she wanted to be.
They had gone through a painful breakup, and she was managing a chain of coffee shops in Annapolis, "making a mean espresso," when, spurred by misery, she started writing again. "They were terrible poems, but after about a month I announced to my parents that I was going to be a poet." Since then she has earned an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. She and Jeremy patched things up. At 33, she has four years of marriage and three books of poetry under her belt.
She says that her students often have strange misconceptions about writing poetry—that there are no rules, that "everything is good if it comes from the heart." Her job is to show them that the distinction between good and mediocre writing is not as subjective as they might imagine.
"Some days I believe that I can teach writing," she wrote this past October on her blog, Notes from the Gefilte Review. "Some days I believe that I can't teach writing, but I can teach reading instead. Some days I believe that I can't teach reading, but I can teach empathy. Some days I believe that writing and reading and empathy are pieces of beach glass (because I live by the Chesapeake and the birds remind me of my closeness to water), smoothed objects, beautiful, but things we only find by accident when we're staring down at the sand."
Education
- B.A., St. John's College, Annapolis, 1997
- M.F.A., Creative Writing, Poetry — University of Maryland, 2003
- Ph.D., English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2008
Scholarly and Teaching Interests
- Formal Poetry, Prosody
- Literature of Witness and Trauma
- American Jewish Literature
- Holocaust Studies
Bio
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post (three candles press 2009), and a chapbook, The Promised Bride (Finishing Line Press 2007). Her second collection, From the Fever-World, won the Washington Writer's Publishing House Poetry Competition and will be released in 2009. A third collection, Stateside, will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2010. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals such as Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, Blackbird, and Shenandoah.