Susanna Clemans

I am teaching English 101 for the first time in Spring 2009. In the past, I've enjoyed teaching Current Literature, Short Fiction, and Creative Writing.

I was a re-entry student having only one year at UCSB after high school and then marrying my high school sweetheart. Three children later, I resumed my education at Orange Coast College near my home. The community college non-threatening atmosphere was perfect to help alleviate my fears of feeling too old. It was there that I found my passion in my literature courses. I'd always thought I wanted to teach, and reading had been an obsession most of my life, so teaching English at a community college became my goal.

In between going to college, I managed to raise three active children and participate in their many activities. Once they were on their own, I began teaching full-time at Cerritos College in 1986. Soon after, I met my second husband, an artist who is now retired but still teaches part time at Golden West College. Between us, we have five grown children and thirteen grandchildren.

When we're not teaching or with family, we travel, go to movies, plays, museums and galleries, walk, bike ride, and entertain. I belong to two book groups and host a long-standing writing group. When I have time, I like to cook, garden, and decorate our house.

At Cerritos College, I've promoted literature as a focus in all the English department offerings. Several of us teach a novel-in-common each semester; this year it's The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. I co-host a Shakespeare's Birthday celebration each April, take English majors on "coffee breaks," share faculty reading on a hall bulletin board, and give students lists of my favorite reads. I've worked with Puente and Summer Bridge students; watching them and all my students get excited about reading and writing is the reason I hope to be teaching long past retirement age. I was honored last April with "The Most Outstanding Faculty" award, an award that I hope to live up to each day.

Inspired Writing:

"If we were not here, material events like the passage of the seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them. The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things. And that is why I went to the Galapagos Islands" (Dillard 73)

Almost everything Annie Dillard writes speaks to me and has for several decades. Her close attention to nature, the connections she makes, the unexpected perceptions of the human condition, and her sense of humor in showing readers her tilted world cause me to re-read her work. I was lucky enough to meet her many years ago at a small dinner party and lucky enough to go to the Galapagos a few years ago. I love to walk and though most of my daily walks are in my ordinary neighborhood, every day I find something simply extraordinary.

Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

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