Mary Jane Roach Masters Memoir - University of Illinois Springfield

Q. Did you gather up your old format or begin again with a fresh approach with so many years
away from teaching?
A. Both. Both new and old. I taught rhetoric at Washington University and I continued to do
that, but I also had a chance to teach literature at Springfield College to Sophomores, and that
was great fun. That was wonderful.
Q. Did you hone in on T.S.Eliot again?
A. Well, he was part of what we learned. We did poetry, we did fiction, we did some drama. It
was a General Lit. course, not the intensive History of English Lit. Course that I had as a college
student. We branched into Contemporary Literature. I shocked the nuns, I remember, when I
assigned Saul Bellow's Advemres of Aucie March, but they chuckled.
Q. Well of course he's one of the great, winning the Pulitzer Prize.
A. Yes he is. He hadn't won the Nobel Prize yet but he was on the way.
Q. Well he did win the Pulitzer Prize for Humbolts Gift.
A. Yes, but the Nobel Prize thing was so much more important. A very talented writer.
Q. Well I can't help but ask you if you ever wanted to write a book?
A. Mm. Not enough to do it. That's the only answer I can give.
Q. No passion for it?
A. I guess I was too scattered to settle down.
Q. And as you said before, poetry was not your thing.
A. Expository essay is what I do best.
Q. Journalism was also something that you were good at.
A. Yes, but Washington University had no journalism.
Q. Yes, but when you wrote for the paper and the column and that kind of writing.
A. I didn't do any kind of writing for the paper at Washington University. I did in my high
school years. Editor of The Chronicle at Mary Institute, but I didn't do any journalistic writing at
all at the University.