The University of Wisconsin will welcome author and alumnus Danielle Evans to its creative writing program this spring, where she will teach fiction workshops similar to those she attended in Madison years ago.
Evans, who is on leave as part of her hiring agreement, is getting settled in Madison and finishing up the first draft of her new novel before she begins teaching next semester.
Evans first took writing as a career seriously in college, she said, when she began taking creative writing courses and talking to contemporary authors. Originally from Washington D.C., she graduated from Columbia University in New York City with an anthropology degree and a creative writing certificate.
“That was the point in which I started realizing kind of what my life might look like as a writer as opposed to writing being just a thing I did while I had my real job and my real life,” Evans said.
She then got her graduate degree at University of Iowa in 2006 and attended UW’s fellowship program for the Creative Writing Institute. Evans got her first teaching job at Missouri State University, where she taught for a year before moving back to D.C.
Sean Bishop, creative writing program administrator at UW, said Evans’ time at UW was a factor in knowing how effective of a teacher she can be.
“We’ve known Danielle for quite awhile,” Bishop said, “so we know that she’s an incredible teacher of creative writing. Certainly she was the best writer of our faculty search.”
Evans will be teaching graduate and undergraduate fiction workshops and an advanced fiction class.
She said the focus of the workshops is primarily improving the students’ editing skills. Even if not all of her students will go on to be a professional writer, Evans said learning to communicate effectively is a valuable professional skill.
“The editing part gets easier but the generating part is always kind of terrifying and painful because if you’re risking anything at all there’s always the chance that it can go terribly, wildly wrong,” Evans said.
Coming off the success of her first collection of short stories, “Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self,” she said the fun part of being a writer is being able to start all over again on the next project.
Evans said she is always aware of the critics that constantly say that “no one cares about writing anymore” or “the novel is dead.” However, she said her experiences in teaching have always proven this to be false.
“Every year someone publishes a piece that declares the novel dead,” Evans said. “One of the things I like about teaching is that you see that people are still engaging with writing and that it’s still a way that we learn to understand ourselves.”
As she wraps up the first draft of her novel, Evans said she is excited to get back in the classroom and meet her graduate and undergraduate students.
On whether she plans to keep moving around the country or settle here in Madison, Evans said she is where she wants to be. Bishop said the department even has plans for her to become a director of the Master of Fine Arts writing program or the one of the fellowship programs she was once a part of.
“I’ll be here as long as they let me stay,” Evans said. “I don’t think all writers want to be teachers, but I very much want to be both.”
