“I’m intentional about the way I write. As a creative writer, what I found is that I have to think a great deal about not just the audience per se, but about trusting the reader. Because in academic work, you have to be very precise about how you’re structuring your argument and what you want to say. But in fiction, you can trust your reader and you can allow that space for them to imagine a world that you’re trying to create, but also for them to have some creative interpretation of the work that you’re doing. So one of the things that I’ve learned from my writing group is that I might write with a certain intention, but someone else might interpret that differently from me. That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong or that I missed something, it just means that the creative process is just very different in fiction than it is with academic nonfiction.”
Debra Lattanzi Shutika is the Chair of the English Department and an Associate Professor of Folklore