Glen Retief

Glen Retief is a South African writer who won a Lambda Literary Award in 2012 for his memoir The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood.[2] The Jack Bank was also an Africa Book Club Book of 2011. Quotes Oh, well I love the library because, you know, I’m a book person, and the library always has a very peaceful atmosphere. Actually, the library is small for a university library, like it’s smaller than a lot of other really big ones, like a research university would be bigger, but its fantastic. The size is misleading. It’s a very, very good library, and the librarians are superb at looking things up and finding books. The library really benefits me in the research I’ve done, all my writing. Another favorite, oh, the Writer’s institute, I work there, but I think it’s such a lovely place. Do you like it? The building is very… it’s very cozy. Its like a community. It feels like a family, so I like that. Um, what is my other favorite? That’s a good question. I will say that I love the trees on campus. Maybe that’s my other favorite thing. I like going for walks at different times of the year and identifying the trees with apps. And there’s a week or two in which we have cherry blossoms, its like D.C, like an avenue, its right next to Smith? One of the residence halls, you wouldn’t know. Okay. But anyway, its in that area with the residence halls, and there’s this whole avenue of cherry blossoms for three weeks. All of the other campus is beautiful too. So, I’m the department of English and creative writing, and I’m in the creative writing program. So, we have a department that’s both English and creative writing, it’s a huge department, partly because the department is so gigantic, so many majors, so many professors and everything, we do a lot of our work kind of in the programs. So, people sometimes say, I even said it once this week, that the creative writing department isn’t really a department, it’s really an English and creative writing department. So, not every university has a major. So, at many places you would go and do a minor which is just a few courses, and you would major in something else, usually English, and you do a lot of like, reading courses. But here, there’s a lot of writing courses that you come here to study. But that’s the first thing, that we have those majors. Among universities that offer creative writing majors, one thing that we do that is very unique, I think, is to require a full semester-long introductory course in all of the genres in which we specialize. So, you do a full semester of fiction, a full semester of non-fiction, and a full semester of poetry. Most places have one little introductory course that give you a tiny little taste of all the genres, and then you kind of decided where you want to go from there External links Category: Living people