A lot of the time, we don’t know how to help other people unless they tell us. And we need to be paying attention, to be aware of the times people have helped us, Professor Garrison told The S&B, reflecting on the biggest lesson he s learned so far. Photo contributed by John Garrison.
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Q&A: Professor John Garrison, English, on learning, growing and asking for help – and his newly announced Guggenheim award
April 20, 2021
John Garrison, professor of English and the chair of peace and conflict studies, won the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship on April 8, 2021, one of 184 artists, writers, scholars and scientists selected from a pool of almost 3,000 applicants. According to its
. After teaching a Grinnell short course on style the Fall 2019 semester, Greenwell joined the English department this year as a visiting professor to teach poetry, fiction and queer American literature. The S&B’s Lucia Cheng `23 met with Greenwell to talk about all things kink, his philosophy as a writer and the relationship between art and activism.
The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The S&B: What have the differences been like for you between working on “Kink,” an anthology, and your previous work in “What Belongs to You” and “Cleanness”?
Garth Greenwell: Putting this book together was really exciting. It was exciting to get to work with my co-editor, who is a writer I very much admire, R.O. Kwon, and then to put out a call to writers whose work we really admire and to solicit work. We were very careful in soliciting work not to define “kink.” The last thing we wanted was to be gatekeepers in that sense of sort of determining