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Literature and Writing Department
College of Humanities, Arts, Behavioral and Social Sciences (CHABSS)
Literature and Writing Department

March 2021

Professor Janette Larson

 Professor Janette Larson

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  • What's your favorite book to read for fun?
    My guilty pleasure read is the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon (which I’m nearly through a 2nd time). As an undergraduate, I worked in a bookstore where the series was flying off the shelves. There was also a debate between the store managers about whether they should put Outlander in the romance section or the fiction section. Romance won out (though, I’d put in under historical fiction, personally). Several customers told me to read the series, but I didn’t until decades later. The series has resulted in a trip to Scotland and a deep affinity for nearly all things Scottish (haggis being the exception).
  • What's your favorite book to teach?
    The Complete Grimms’ Fairy Tales or the play Topdog/Underdog.
  • How do you spend your free time?
    The pandemic has challenged “fun” for nearly a year now. I am lucky that I like spending time with my family. So, it has been fun to talk books, movies, and TV shows with my older daughter who is in high school. My middle-schooler and I go on walks and usually end up laughing (which is quite therapeutic).
  • What is your biggest literary inspiration?
    I discovered Margaret Atwood as a teenager and Virginia Woolf in my 20’s. In grad school (which I didn’t start until my 30’s), the authors that I gravitated towards were Amy Hempel, Catherine Wagner, and Rachel Zucker. In all of those cases, the characters and ideas about womanhood, selfhood, marriage, and motherhood still haunt me (in a good way).
  • What's your cure for writer's block?

    For creative writing, it’s actually to “rest” (take a walk, read something un-related to what you’re trying to write, just be.) I’m fairly certain the amazing Sandra Doller advised me to do that when I was writing poetry for my M.A. at CSUSM.

    For academic writing, I often tell my students to have a conversation with someone (in-person if possible) about what it is they want to do, what they have so far, and where the writing still needs to go. That verbal processing is often all writers need to think through something. I survived grad school because of the conversations I had with my cohort!

  • What are you working on outside of class?

    I’ve had a novella/novel about suburbia simmering for years. I have about 15 pages that I like. I’ve often considering “forcing” myself to finish it by enrolling in an MFA program.