Non-Fiction Class Speaks With Best Selling Author

photo: Jeffrey Payne

by: Jeffrey Payne
edited by: Nalina Shapiro

Cadavers, sex, and ghosts were the topics of choice as the Introduction to Creative Non-Fiction class got the opportunity to phone conference with best-selling author Mary Roach.

On April 28 the Creative Non-Fiction class met in Petrocelli 315 to phone conference with Roach. All of the students and their professor, Donna Decker, were prepared with questions for the author about her career and her book Stiff which they had read for class. At 2 p.m. the class made the call to Roach who was at her office in Oakland, California.

The conference consisted of the class asking Roach various questions about her career as a writer and about her books Stiff, Spook, and Bonk. Roach not only talked to the class about her life but also gave advice for the young writers. “It’s so easy to talk yourself out of a book. Don’t talk yourself out of it,” said Roach.

The conversation went on for an hour and was filled with both serious questions and answers and humorous discussion. “She was so generous giving us time, a full hour. She answered all our questions with honesty and humor. She gave good advice about writing. All through the conference, students were giving me thumbs up!” said Decker.

Roach not only talked about her books but also discussed with the class about her various ventures into magazine writing before she started working on books. “After you do one story for a magazine you have a relationship with them,” said Roach.

The idea for the phone conference came a week prior from student Tom Remp who noticed that Roach’s agent’s phone number was in the back of Stiff. “He called and got her email address. I emailed. She responded. This all happened one week before the actual phone call,” said Decker.

Mary Roach wrote her first book Stiff as an offshoot of a column that she wrote for Salon.com. “It was sort of a reported humor column, wherein I covered things like vaginal weight-lifting and amputee bowling leagues and the question of how much food it takes to burst a human stomach,” Roach says on her website.

The book discusses cadavers in aspects covering everything from their history to their current uses. Roach continued her writing career with Spook, which discusses souls after death, and Bonk, which is an exploration of human sexuality. Roach even discussed with the class how, while researching for Bonk, she and her husband volunteered to have sex in an MRI tube with a doctor looking on.

Students were excited to get the chance to speak with Roach and hope that there are more chances to do similar conferences in the future. “Mary Roach was fascinating, an amazing resource that helped top off a fantastic class. This is the sort of thing that we need to become the norm at Franklin Pierce,” said Remp.

Decker agreed and would not only like to do this again but would also like to bring authors to campus. “This is a great idea, and it is less expensive than bringing in an author, but, of course, we should do this too.”