A Profile on Patricia Gorman

Patricia Gorman, an assistant professor of the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, has always loved the Irish culture. Over the years she has written essays and dissertations about their literature and theatre. She has also traveled to Ireland many times.

“I’ve always had an infinity for Ireland,” she said. This passion springs from her family ancestry and being part of the third or fourth generation of Irish Americans, depending on which side of the family. She doesn't know where her family is from in Ireland, but she says that that adds to the "intrigue and mystery" that drew her.

This semester Gorman is teaching the course “Irish Writers and Cultural Context,” which is a class that she created. In the class, Gorman teaches her students about the Irish culture they have likely heard so much about though the medium of plays, short stories, novels, and movies. Plays such as “The Bog of Cats” by Marina Carr, “Eclipsed” by Patricia Burke Brogan, and “Dancing at Lughnasa” by Brian Friel, juxtaposed with the movie “The Magdalene Sisters” and poems by people who partook in political activism during the fight for independence from the English. This knowledge is what she has obtained from years of study and multiple trips to Ireland.

                        Her first trip was in her twenties. While she was there she went to the Yeat’s Summer Program in Sligo, where she did graduate work on Yeats, though she eventually changed her topic to James Joyce, and specifically on "Ulysses." Another one of Gorman's trips to Ireland was academic, earning her Ph.D. in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from the University College Dublin in 2008.  Another trip ended up being an extended stay, living there during 1983 to1985 with her husband, Douglas DaRif, and two children, Meghan and Devin.  Though the Irish culture is in a state of “dramatic influx”, she still found the culture widely accepting.

One of the aspects of the culture that was difficult to adjust to was the pub culture, she said. In Ireland, people go to the pub in order to hang out with people, and have a variety of drinks ranging from alcohol to tea. People also commonly brought their children to the pub because it was a place of community, which was a culture shock for Gorman because of the American culture of not bring children into institutions such as bars.

However, Gorman had more trouble adjusting to life in the States when she came back because the pace of life in America is much faster than Ireland. Gorman said that the cities, and even the towns, in the United States, were more fast-paced than life in Ireland.

Her other degrees include a Master's in English, Liberal Arts and Education. This is because she continuously wants to learn and enjoys being on both sides of the desk, she said. “I just want to keep learning in a broad way,” she said in reference to her multiple degrees. When she retires, she wants to learn Thai in order to prove to herself that she can.

She remembers how her father would come home and tell stories from the classroom. “He would then lean over and grab my arm and say ‘And Pattie, they pay me for this.’” Her father’s love for his job inspired her to want to have a job that she loved. This job is teaching. “I’ve always wanted to be a teacher,” Gorman said, citing her father as her inspiration.

                        Before Umass, she taught graduate and undergraduate classes at Clark University and Clark's affiliate, Worcester Art Museum. At Clark she created classes that were based in feminism and spirituality in literature.  She liked the unique experience of being able to work and draw from the museum, incorporating the art from the museum with the literature of the class. While there she not only taught, but designed courses as well.

She came to UMass because she wanted to live in a progressive rural area, and the Amherst area gave her that. At Umass she has taught the Dean's book course, "Metaphor and Creativity", "Gender Politics in Representation", an Honors seminar and, of course, the Irish Writers class.

Among her other achievements is receiving the Commonwealth Honors College Distinguished Teaching Award for her work in the class "Ideas That Change the World, an Honor's seminar required for Honors students at Umass. She, and the other winner in 2012, were the first winners of the award. Not only that but she was nominated and selected by students to receive the award. The honors seminar that she teaches is a ground level that most honors kids take. In her version of the class, she starts off with Plato, especially his essay known as “The Cave”, which is a way to teach to her students about questioning everything around themselves.

         She encourages her students to explore what they find interesting. Lena Golick, a sophomore biology major at UMass, says "In Irish Writers she has been allowing us to explore whatever facets of Irish literature most interests us. By doing this, we all learn more because we are actually invested in what we are learning." Instead of creating prompts, she wants students to find out about what interests them, whether that be the music, history, mythology or anything that sparks interest. She lets them pick their own subjects of essays and discussions, and allows them to have a say in the curriculum, something that is unique in the sphere of education. Albert Williams, a UMass junior computer science and math double major, said "Professor Gorman took the indifferent Math student in me and instilled him with compassion."

                        She is currently editing a book on Joyce's "Ulysses." Part of her work with the book is a 400 page dissertation that examines the gender politics in Joyce’s work. By focusing on gender politics, she is able to look at the intersection between paganism and Christianity, two very different religions.

by Lauren McArdle

Profile on Jennifer Krainski Plant

     Out for a walk in the woods around her childhood home in Ware, Mass. over 30 years ago, then 9-year-old Jennifer Krainski Plant discovered a dilapidated cabin.

    

    Exploring inside the cabin, she found personal belongings scattered everywhere, as if the former residents just left one day, leaving all of their things behind.  She felt compelled to learn what had happened to them.

      

     “It was driving me crazy,” said Krainski Plant.  “I needed to know the story and I knew I’d never know, so I had to make one up.”

     

     The resulting story that Krainski Plant wrote about the abandoned cabin was just the first example of a passion for writing that would later influence her career path as both an author and a teacher.  Today, 40-year-old Krainski Plant is a published author of four books and four verse poems.  She also teaches English composition at Westfield State College in Westfield, Mass.

     

     Oddly enough, even though it was a significant part of her life, Krainski Plant never went to college for English.  She said that she “sampled majors at first,” initially going for an associate’s degree in nursing at Springfield Technical Community College.

     

     However, after giving birth to her son Chance, Krainski Plant decided that she wanted to transition from a career in nursing to a career in education.  She wanted to relearn everything that her child would be learning so she could be a good mother.  She also thought she had the laid-back personality it takes to be a teacher.

     

     After receiving her associate’s degree, Krainski Plant moved on to attend American International College, where she earned a master’s degree in education.

     

     She also spent the past four and a half years working on her doctorate in education at the University of Massachusetts.  In February, 2014 she graduated, without having finished her dissertation.

     

     Though Krainski Plant immersed herself in her education, she never lost her desire to write.  She continued to compose poetry and short stories while in college and working.  As a public school teacher of various grade levels, she would wake up at 4 a.m. and devote two hours to her writing before going to work.

     

     As an author, Krainski Plant specializes in fiction novels that are “appropriate for late middle school through adulthood,” as she says on her personal website, JennyKrainski.com. 

     

     Her first book, “Deep in the Forest,” was published by Writer’s Club Press in 2003.

    

     “The Leader of Nature,” a sequel to the first book, was a collaborative effort by Krainski Plant and her youngest sister Meghan, the artist of the book’s pictures.  “The Leader of Nature,” along with “Undetected,” and her most recent book, “My Neighbor,” were all published by PublishAmerica in 2005, 2007 and 2009, respectively.

     

     She also wrote a chapter on Beaver Lake for a Ware history book and an unpublished manuscript entitled “A Look Into the Long, Healthy Life of Spencer Beaver,” for her elderly neighbor who wanted to share his own story.

     

     Krainski Plant frequently bases ideas and settings in her books off towns in Massachusetts, bringing the world she lives in into her writing.  For example, in “My Neighbor,” there are references to the Holyoke Mall at Ingleside and the town of Southampton.

     

     Krainski Plant says that over the years she has learned to write and look for publishers and readers that are interested in what she has written, “instead of saying, ‘This is what people want,’” and molding her writing to fit what she believes a publisher would want to publish or what a reader would want to read.

    

    “The biggest thing I learned is just write,” she said.  “The first draft should be just for you and then you can gear it towards an audience.”  Through this process, she feels that she has found out things about herself as a writer that she didn’t know.

     

     Krainski Plant has also published four of her verse poems, the topics of which vary depending on her mood.  When she goes hiking at the Quabbin Reservoir in Ware, she writes about nature, but when she’s going through a hard time, her poems can sound “scary dark.”  Krainski Plant sees her poetry as a way of getting her frustrations out and de-stressing.

     

     Krainski Plant has found that her schooling, her career as a teacher and her family life have often caused her to get sidetracked from her writing.  She has vowed to make time for that part of her life.

     

     “I promised myself…that I was going to make space for writing,” she said.  “Unlike years previous, I’m making time.”

     

     However, through her position at Westfield State College, which she has held since 2008, Krainski Plant has found that teaching at the college level is an important part of her life and is a good personal fit for her.

     

     “I sat back and said, ‘You know what, this is it.  This is where I belong.”

     

     Krainski Plant said she’s eager to implement some new teaching tactics in her classroom because even though she’s always loved to write, she didn’t enjoy taking English composition classes in college herself.  She wants to present things differently than how they were taught to her in college so that her students won’t be bored by the subject matter and can get the most out of the classes.

     

     Instead, she wants to follow the methods of some of her high school teachers who provided prompts that opened up her mind to things to write about and gave her feedback to keep going.  She partially attributes their positive feedback to her motivation to write.

     

     Krainski Plant wants to emphasize what her students do right in their pieces so that they can have the same positive experience.

     

     Yet at the same time, Krainski Plant admits that the assignments she did in high school weren’t college prep by any means.  She wants her assignments to prepare her students for their other college classes.

     

     “What I’m trying to do is intertwine the creative with what the college expects,” she said.

    

     Krainski Plant’s 19-year-old son Chance, feels that his mother’s teaching methods are “easily accessible.”  Himself a student of Holyoke Community College, Krainski Plant often asks Chance to read the guidelines for her assignments, asking his opinion of them as a college student before she finalizes them. 

     

     Chance feels that his mother’s creativity and talent can be seen in far more than just her teaching career, whether it be in regards to her writing or her harping, which she likes to do in her spare time at home in Ware.

     

     “It is amazing to see her flourish with her talents as a harpist,” Chance said in a Facebook message.

     

     According to Krainski Plant, her husband Alan has always been encouraging of her teaching and her writing as well.

     

     “Jenny is more than an author; she is an artist,” said Alan in a Facebook message.  “She looks at the world differently.”

By Shelby Ashline