College of Arts and Sciences

How did you first come to write mysteries? And why mysteries particularly? And why funny mysteries? Actually, I wrote my first mystery story at the age of ten, and during my teens I was very drawn to romantic suspense. Nancy Drew happened early, and Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie...

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"Students enter programs with ideas of their own about what is acceptable and what is not, but they are strongly influenced by what they can observe during their three or six or ten years of graduate study. They graduate with clearer ideas of what is ideal, what is...

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"That led to an invitation . . . to become an associate editor, which mainly consisted of proofreading, but a year later . . . the publisher asked me to become the magazine's editor." 1.   Talk a little about being a medievalist. What was your particular area of interest? Your...

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"Cataclysms are associated with war, famine or natural disasters, but this region has been undergoing a slow-moving, inexorable decline for decades due to economic restructuring, global competition, free trade, and wage stagnation that looked at with a longer lens surely resembles a bloodless war.  These characters stumble across that...

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"When I was writing my first murder mystery, then untitled, I asked the Wednesday Writers Workshop for suggestions for a title. I was in favor of Thesis Interruptis." 1. You're an academic, author of Aspects of the Novelist (1995) and numerous journal articles. How did you come to write mysteries as well? I was pleased with...

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We’ve probably all found ourselves falling into the abyss while explaining a joke. Comedy is hard. Comic theory is harder." 1. Why does comic poetry make people uncomfortable? If someone says comic poetry to me, I think of something like “jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I kin be!”...

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