After weeks of interviews and readings by a diverse group of four final candidates, Thomas O'Malley has been selected to join the faculty of Dartmouth's creative writing program. O'Malley will teach introductory courses as well as advanced fiction workshops.
The four distinct writers who made it to the final selection process sparked discussion among creative writing students and faculty alike. In a program as small as creative writing, a new faculty member can have a large impact.
Another final candidate, Margot Livesey, who grew up in the Scottish Highlands and has authored five novels, brought a highly literary approach. David Jauss has published in both poetry and short fiction genres. H.G. Carrillo, who divides his time between Cornell University and San Juan, Puerto Rico, brought a dramatic flair and creative intensity.
At his own reading, O'Malley described his creative process, divulging that he wrote "thousands and thousands of pages" from which he extracted his 300-page novel. It seemed that O'Malley also referred to teaching and his students more often than the other candidates.
Each candidate not only read from their work, but also provided sample syllabi of the classes they would teach and fielded questions from faculty and students about their work and teaching.
Cleopatra Mathis, director of the creative writing program, said the faculty was looking for "a person who has a lot of different perspectives than we do, the person who would do the most for creative writing at Dartmouth."
In the end, O'Malley's combination of unique perspective and genuine interest in teaching won out.
"I was so impressed and taken by the students, by their candor, their support for one another," he said.
O'Malley grew up in Ireland and England but was educated in the United States. His first novel, "In the Province of Saints," was published in 2005. The New York Times called the novel "a familiar Irish song" with "words [that] will break your heart."
After his childhood in Ireland and England, O'Malley attended the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the Iowa Writers Workshop. "In the Province of Saints." takes place in Ireland, but O'Malley is now finishing a second work whose "characters, voices, perspectives ... all suggest America to me," he said.
O'Malley began this longer novel years ago, but put it aside in to finish the other. "It was incredibly pleasing to return to the old characters," he said.
O'Malley is also currently at work on a collaboration with visual artist Carlos Jackson, a teacher in the Chicano studies program at the University of California at Davis. The novella takes place in England in the near future, imagining a world in which Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human strain of mad cow) has become a modern version of the plague.
"We are really feeding off each other's narratives, my written, his visual," O'Malley said of the collaboration.
O'Malley's current projects display the breadth of inspiration he will bring to the creative writing program at Dartmouth. The youngest of the candidates, O'Malley has an entire career ahead of him to explore these different interests; luckily for Dartmouth students, one of those interests is teaching.
