Faculty Profile: Virginia Fowler
Virginia Fowler on Fiction, by Laura Dulaney
Sitting in the office of Virginia Fowler, Professor of English and Director of Literature, Language, and Culture, is always a pleasure. Framed posters of favorite authors, books, and plays cover the walls, intriguing tchotchkes fill the desk, and the scent of 24 Faubourg, her signature perfume, delights the nose. On any visit one is sure to receive her keen, focused attention and scraps of personal wisdom (i.e.: guilt is overrated), but recently I had the added pleasure of discussing her love of contemporary fiction.
Dr. Fowler is an avid reader, seemingly flying from one book to the next. When asked how she chooses books, she replied that she rarely reads book reviews or top seller lists but rather starts with the titles. If a title intrigues her, she’ll move on to the flap copy, and then the blurbs on the back cover. A positive blurb by an author she admires encourages her to buy the book. Of course, if the book is by an author she’s read and enjoyed before, she’ll give it extra consideration.
Dr. Fowler finds herself drawn to stories of the contemporary immigrant experience. Lately, she noted, she’s been reading various ethnic-American authors, such as Arab, Chinese, and Caribbean-American. When asked what pulls her toward these stories, she remarked that it is important to understand people who come from other cultures. “We no longer live in a singular society,” she said, adding “the world today is small and made up of many kinds of people.” Does one have to possess feelings of “otherness” to relate to or be drawn into literature of the “other”, I asked? No, she replied, but she acknowledged that as a reader one must be open and willing to be self-reflective about the baggage one brings to the text in order not to impose a norm or structural demand upon it. She believes that through reading diverse authors, we can start to see patterns, similarities, and differences among our cultures. She also finds that culturally diverse authors bring fresh perspectives to stories and themes, making their work compelling and rich.
This desire for access to diverse voices has influenced Dr. Fowler’s work at Tech and benefited the university greatly. In 1981, she and a small group of women began creating the courses that would become the Women’s Studies program. In 1988, she wrote and was awarded a two year grant to work with faculty from various departments to reshape core curriculum courses to be more inclusive. This prompted her to read more minority writers, and she claims she focused on African-American authors because that was who she was least familiar with. She recruited Nikki Giovanni to Tech, which provided a great opportunity to learn, as well as someone to talk with about her burgeoning interest in African-American writing. Today, Dr. Fowler is a top scholar in the genre.
Thinking about her desire to better understand various cultures, I asked Dr. Fowler why she preferred fiction over non-fiction. “Sometimes fiction gets at the truth better than non-fiction,” she replied, adding that fiction can speak to deeper truths about the human condition. “Plus,” she added simply, “I love stories.” Ah, a writer’s reader, if ever there was one.