By Rick Peterson
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2006
Early in his teaching career, Professor of English Mark Dintenfass often kept
his students’ attention by means other than merely delivering an exceptionally
engaging lecture. Back in the day when it was still acceptable, if not fashionable,
to light up a cigarette in class, Dintenfass’ chain smoking often served
as a source of riveting student fascination. Engrossed in the subject matter
of the hour, he would be oblivious to the slowly growing ash at the end of
his Parliament until the inch- or more-long grayish residue would simply
succumb to gravity and drop from its own weight — a tobacco-based egg-timer
as it were, the silent crash often signaled that it was time for him to switch
topics.
Fresh from earning his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop,
Dintenfass hadn’t planned on sticking around all that long when he arrived
at Lawrence in the fall of 1968 to teach the English department’s fiction-writing
class.
“I was told Lawrence was a great place to start your career,” recalls
Dintenfass, a native New Yorker with enough accent left to prove it, who grew
up a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the shadow of famed Ebbets Field.
Thirty-eight years later, he admits it is not a bad place to end a career,
either. Dintenfass was recognized at June’s Commencement with an honorary
master’s degree and professor emeritus status.
Simple wisdom
“Writers write” is the mantra Dintenfass emphatically wrote on
the blackboard each year on the first day of his fiction-writing class. For
Dwight Allen, ’74, and many other wannabe writers, the three-syllable message at first seemed
like a joke disguised as a Zen koan, but eventually he came to understand and
appreciate its simple wisdom.
“Professor Dintenfass had a fairly advanced taste for irony. But he was
serious,” says
Allen, who spent eight years writing for The New Yorker and is the author of
two published novels, The Green Suit (Algonquin, 2000) and Judge (Algonquin,
2003). “He took his students seriously enough to say that, if we wanted
to be writers, we had to make a habit of writing, that writing was more hard
work than it was a calling, that the only way to make whatever gift we might
have come alive was by sweating it out at the typewriter daily.
“Embedded in that prescription was the notion that work could lead to joy,
pleasure, the Nabokovian frisson that we’d all read about and lusted after.
I think he hoped that we would throw off our chains and write like crazy. Some
of us
did, sort of. And to those of us who were afflicted with extreme cases of
self-consciousness, who believed you shouldn’t put a word on the page that
wasn’t artful,
he was always kind. Once when the fear of writing badly had paralyzed me,
he told me, ‘It’s OK to write junk. Just don’t sit there and
write nothing.’”
Writing and reading
“Taking a writing course isn’t about becoming a better writer; it’s
about becoming a better reader, and that’s what I’m proud of,” says
Dintenfass, who launched his teaching career in the mid-1960s at Ethiopia’s
Haile Sellassie University as a member of the Peace Corps.
“A writer looks at literature in a wholly different way, and I’d
like to think that difference is an important part of what I’ve accomplished.
My legacy is the students who are out there today not only writing, but reading,
too.”
The publishing landscape has changed dramatically since Dintenfass taught
his first fiction-writing course, making an already-tough field an even tougher
one to crack. He admits to becoming more critical of the aspiring authors
in
his class at the end of his career than he was at the beginning.
“That criticism doesn’t discourage the good writers,” he says, “but
anyone who gets to be a published writer today has to be a bit lucky. To
become a well-known writer, you have to be good — and lucky. Publishers
used to be interested in good writing. Now they’re all just looking for
the next Dan Brown. Good writing has taken a backseat to marketability.”
When cautioning his fiction-writing students about the perils and pitfalls
of writing as a career, Dintenfass does so with the experience of an author
who has penned six published novels of his own. Make Yourself an Earthquake was published by Little, Brown the year after he started at Lawrence. His
1982 work, Old World, New World (William Morrow) — which he sentimentally
labels his favorite because “that’s the one I put the most of myself
into” — was a Literary Guild Alternate Selection and came within
a few thousand copies of creeping on to the New York Times best-seller list.
Sandwiched between his four other novels — The Case Against Org (Little,
Brown, 1970), Figure 8 (Simon & Schuster, 1974), Montgomery
Street (Harper & Row,
1978) and A Loving Place (William Morrow, 1986) — were ten years spent
writing book reviews for the New York Times, the Philadelphia
Inquirer, and
the Milwaukee Journal. Along the way, he was honored by the Wisconsin Library
Association as a Notable Wisconsin Author and also received the WLA’s
Distinguished Achievement Award.
A Dintenfassian echo
Five years removed from his last class with him, Andrew Karre, ’02, admits
he uses the term “Dintenfassian” frequently — and with affection — in
conversations with former classmates. It is more than just nostalgia, though.
It’s also vocational. As an acquisitions editor for Llewellyn Worldwide
and FLUX, a Minnesota-based publisher that specializes in works for teens,
he evaluates manuscripts and works with writers to help them develop and
fine-tune their work.
“I’m certain I’ve never had a conversation with an author that
did not contain at least a faint echo of one of Professor Dintenfass’ gentle
but always absolutely precise critiques,” says Karre. “More often
than not, the ‘faint echo’ could be fairly described as wholesale
appropriation of one of his lectures. Authors are often a little quiet on
the other end of the phone when I tell them ‘sometimes you have to
kill your babies.’ It takes me a minute to realize they haven’t
taken Professor Dintenfass’ fiction-writing class, a class that showed
me how criticism could function effectively in a creative process.”
That same “faint echo” still resonates in the ears of Paul
McComas, ’83, who has carried Dintenfass’ admonishment that “life is messy;
it doesn’t play by the rules” with him into his writing career.
McComas, author of the novel Unplugged (John Daniel & Co., 2002)
and the anthology
Twenty Questions (Daniel & Daniel, 1998) and a fiction-writing
instructor in Northwestern University’s continuing-education program,
incorporates many other of his former professor’s lessons into his
work.
“I’ve modeled my own fiction-writing workshops largely on his,” McComas
says. “Often, while providing feedback to a struggling student, I
can hear his words within my own. Sometimes, I can almost feel myself sprouting
a brush moustache in mid-sentence! He has helped me become both the writer
and the educator that I am today.”
Understanding plays
In the two decades that have passed since his last novel was published,
Dintenfass has filled the void by focusing his attention on the theatre.
He has directed
nearly two dozen Lawrence and Attic Theatre productions during the past
25 years, and, while he’s not sure if there’s another novel
waiting to be written in retirement, he will continue to pursue his theatre
interests,
directing this summer’s Attic production of Lunch Hour.
“Writing is solitary, but one of the great things about theatre is you
get to work with lots of talented people,” Dintenfass says. “My strength
is, I’m good at understanding plays. I can’t teach actors
how to act, but I can tell them what’s going on in the play. I
don’t
know how good of a director I was, but I must have been okay because
a lot of those
talented people told me they enjoyed working with me.”
Larry Dalhke, ’91, started out as a music major until he was cast in
a production of The Cherry Orchard and fell under Dintenfass’ directorial
spell. At a year-end picnic, Dintenfass sat Dalhke down and in his cut-to-the-chase
style, asked, “Why are you studying music when what you want to
do is theatre?”
“It made me stop and think,” recalls Dalhke, an Actors’ Equity
member in his second season at Wayside Theatre just outside of Washington, D.C. “He
was right, and after considering it, I decided to change my major. I
loved doing shows with him, because he really enjoyed bringing literature
to
life. I am fortunate enough to make my living as an actor, but Professor
Dintenfass
never likes to admit that he had that kind of influence.”
The next chapter
Having stayed 38 years at a place that was originally supposed to be
merely a launching pad to bigger and better things, Dintenfass prepares
to write
the next chapter of his life with few regrets.
"The place has changed so much, but I’m really glad I stayed.
I was
able to direct plays. I got to create Lawrence’s first-ever film class.
And I got to play for more than 20 years on Lawrence’s summer softball
team. I
had opportunities to tackle a lot of roles that wouldn’t have happened
at a larger school.”
That sounds like a happy ending.