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May 2021

Dr. Mark Wallace

• What's your favorite book to read for fun?
  Just one? An impossible question! I’ll name four. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury are two novels I can read again and again. In poetry, the same is true for Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell and Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.
• What's your favorite book to teach?
  Again with the impossible questions! I find The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Dubois to be crucially informative in many of my classes. And Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea, which rewrites the narrative of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, is an overwhelmingly powerful experience both to read and to teach.
• Do you have a favorite film?
  I’ve always loved the 1948 movie The Treasure of Sierra Madre directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, and which is based on B. Traven’s 1927 novel of the same name. It’s the story of how the greed for gold, and distrust of others, leads to terrible but well-deserved results for some Americans trying to strike it rich in Mexico.
• How do you spend your free time?
  Here in San Diego I love hiking and day trips to the mountains or the beach. I also love to travel (though not lately, of course), especially to cities with lots of museums. Paris, London, New York, Washington D.C., San Francisco and L.A. are cities I love to be in.
• What is your biggest literary inspiration?
  My biggest literary inspiration is the people I’ve known personally who become interested in writing, whether they’re friends, work colleagues, or students. Seeing other people love literature is one of the most important things that encourages my own love for it.
• What's your cure for writer's block?
  Writer’s Block comes from not thinking about writing until it’s time to write. It’s difficult to think about writing and write at the same time, although writing always involves rethinking. Thinking in advance about what to say, and brainstorming about it, makes getting started easier. If the work is creative writing, try a prompt. Getting an assignment always helps me have a next line to write.
• What are you working on outside of class?
  I always work on several things at once so there’s always something to do. I’ve been working for many years on a multi-book long poem The End of America. A book from one section of it has just been published. I’m also currently working on a trilogy of novels called Sir Sleepy of the Bunny Nest: A Saga of the Revolution. It’s a satirical adventure about a gang of extremely deadly bunny rabbits who declare war against the destructiveness of the human race. 
• Fun Fact:
  I love rock and roll and jazz. My first published writing was as an album reviewer. I have a bigger collection of music than of books, and I don’t want to talk about how many books I have.