Oates to retire after 2015

Nationally renowned author and creative writing professor Joyce Carol Oates said she will retire from her teaching position at the University in July of 2015. She will teach her last creative writing seminar in the fall of 2014.

Oates said she is not sure whether she will teach at another institution following retirement.

Oates, 74, is the recipient of numerous accolades, including the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently spending the semester teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.

Princeton Alumni Weekly reported that Oates received a retirement package encouraging her to teach one semester per year for three years before retiring. According to PAW, she accepted the package “reluctantly.” Oates is currently in the second of those three years.

Oates has taught at Princeton since 1978. She said her students and colleagues throughout the three decades she has taught here have been “wonderful.”

“My students have all been at a uniformly high level,” Oates said in an interview shortly before beginning a discussion of her newest novel, “The Accursed,” at Labyrinth Books on Monday.

Margaret Fox ’13, who took Oates’ introductory creative writing seminar in the fall of 2010, describes Oates as a really good instructor and said she is sad to see her retire.

“She is tough on everyone and would assign more work than in other creative writing classes,” Fox said. “But you knew that when she praised your work she really meant it.”

Fox added that Oates made students think about the characters in their work before beginning to write and that Oates’ presence at the University provided more visibility for the creative writing department.

The creative writing department is larger and consists of more tenured faculty than in the past, according to Oates.

Karis Schneider ’13 said that she wanted to be in Oates’ class so badly that in her freshman spring, she showed up to wait in line at the Lewis Center for the Arts at 10 a.m. a day before course sign-ups to make sure she got into Oates’ class. Schneider said that she knows of many students who applied for creative writing classes mainly because they wanted to take a class with Oates.

“Anytime you were given a good comment, you just got so excited because she’s so famous,” Schneider said.

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Acting Director of the Lewis Center for the Arts and creative writing professor Chang-rae Lee, who has been a colleague of Oates’s since he came to the University in the fall of 2001, said she is an inspirational figure within the creative writing department.

“She’s a force of nature,” Lee said. “The creative writing program certainly won’t be the same without her.”

Oates has produced a sizable volume of work even while teaching and going on book tours at the same time.

“She’s always working on something,” Lee said, “You would think between all the reviews and tours that she wouldn’t have enough time.”

Eric Silberman ’13, who took Oates’ introductory creative writing course in fiction in the fall of 2010, said he was impressed by how she is able to keep up with everything between writing books and reviews. Nevertheless, he said he had to get used to her teaching style, which he called novel and exciting.

“She was different than any teacher I’ve had before,” Silberman said. “She would give comments at the spur of the moment when we would read our work out loud.”

Silberman said he enjoyed the “forced practice” technique she used through weekly assignments based on prompts.

“She’s gotten a lot of people in the door of creative writing and has inspired so many people to write,” Silberman said. “She’s a name that people know, and people are proud that she’s teaching on campus.”

Silberman said he hopes that Oates will be a continued presence on campus and that she will become an even more prolific writer following her retirement.