Professor Lectures On His Life, Post-Mortem
April,2010
They are ubiquitous questions: what happens after we die? And, what if we could look at our lives post-mortem? Ian Miller, professor of English writing at WCMC-Q, explored these queries in a lecture based on his work in progress entitled “The Job.” His talk marked the second installment in the college’s April Literary Lecture Series.
Based on the idea that he dies in a plane crash and has a chance to look at his life after death, Miller’s novel, “The Job,” describes time as an element that drives people and is driven by accomplishment in the eyes of others. The novel’s idea was born from Miller’s sense that he hadn’t accomplished all that he had hoped to—that choices he made early on precluded wild success in his life. “I had a thousand plans that depended on me doing the things I wanted to do in time for other people to recognize that I had done them, and done them well,” he read.
“So this was part of the genesis of the novel—this idea that I had made these choices that put me in a particular position in my life and, had I done a couple of things differently, I would have been someplace else. The work explores the disconnect fantasy between what is and what could have been,” he explained. “Which is of course completely ridiculous and incredibly immature.”
Miller read from his novel and explained that its style and content reflects the influence of Anton Chekhov and Raymond Carver—authors who, he said, wrote less for the sake of plot and more for “how experience can be distilled into one particular moment.”
“Like how much you can tell about a person by how they push a pen across a table or take a drink from a bar,” Miller explained, “and how much just that movement can express about their character.”
A phrase fundamental to the novel is “and suddenly everything became clear to him.” Miller explained that this phrase, originally written by Chekhov, alludes to the fact that “if something is meant to be clear, to be seen, revealed or unveiled, then it will be so, though never in a way we expect, which is exactly what makes the process remarkable.”
During the lecture, he went into a graphic description of his experience as a lineman on a college football team—how he went from a moment of running and moving in seemingly timeless space to an intense collision with a notoriously monstrous player on the opposing team. The collision was marked in time, an experience, in which he found that “suddenly everything became clear to him.”
Discussion followed the lecture, and an audience member aptly commented on his work as a series of action sequences interspersed with expansive ideas prompting philosophical explorations of life. Miller shared more about his writing process as well, explaining how words can grow ideas—how nouns in particular can encourage sections that contribute to the greater whole of a novel.
A section of “The Job” won a “Unified Literary Contest Fellowship” under the direction of the Summer Literary Seminars, and Miller will be presenting parts of the work at the 13th International Creative Writing Conference at Bangor University, United Kingdom, in June.
Report By: Emily Alp
