Tag Archives: University of Oklahoma

Reading Adrienne Rich was such an incendiary experience for me that I actually contemplated burning my copy of Diving Into The Wreck when we were finished with it. My friend/roommate/fellow-English-major-cum-feminist was aghast, and I realized she was right. So, my copy of Diving remained intact, though I don’t know where it is anymore. 

My sophomore year in college was epic. I was coming off a fatally fucked up relationship and had decided to do everything different that year. I walked over a mile to school on the first day of that fall semester and surfed into class on an endorphin high. I’d decided to join the women’s rugby team and be social with someone other than my former boyfriend, who’d fled the confines of our relationship to the snowy north. We read Diving Into the Wreck in Mr. Frank’s 2313 course in the English Department at the University of Oklahoma: the first required course for English majors, which schooled us in close reading analysis. It was a room full of college sophomores from a red state – I mean a deep red state; our school color was crimson – who’d idly thought we’d like to continue talking about Wordsworth and Shakespeare rather than train as accountants or engineers. We’d checked a box next to English as our major and declared war with ourselves, unknowingly, because Frank was a bit of a gatekeeper. He insisted that English majors question everything, and do so with perfect grammar. The class was full of boys, and we crammed into a seminar room the size of a tinder box: a handful of us brave enough to sit around the oak table where Frank sat at the head, the rest of the group ringing us in desks shoved against the wall, stacked in the corner. Continue reading →