Hardin-Simmons University Creative Writing

Hi, I'm Bob Fink. I'm not sure how you got here, but I'm glad you've come. If you have a minute, I'd like to say a few words about creative writing at Hardin-Simmons.  We're not the University of Iowa or Stanford or Syracuse or Massachusetts or Alabama or Houston. We're not a supermarket. We're the mom-and-pop grocery around the corner. Actually we're not around the corner unless you're from West Texas where driving three-and-a-half hours to Dallas is a Sunday afternoon jaunt. We're that mirage off I-20 you swung past on your way to El Paso. We're smack dab in the heart of the "Big Country," just down the road a piece from Clyde, Merkel, View, Post, and Sweetwater. You may not have come here on purpose, but if you're a writer it's not a bad place to be.  I can't guarantee you'll be published in the best literary journals and magazines. The odds are against your manuscript winning a university press competition, and I don't recall any National Book Award or Nobel Prize In Literature recipients from Abilene. What I can promise is a lot of space. What you may have been lacking is horizon. When confronted with the infinite, writers generally hunker down. They have to know what is figure, what ground. Here, more often than not, the figure is a well. I'm thinking you can't help being a writer: the sentence, the line, the word, the syllable for you contain the beauty, the integrity of a well-turned double play. For you, the process of poetry and fiction is like hitching a ride for L. A. with a trucker at the Tye Truck Stop and being dropped off just this side of Big Spring. You lift your thumb for whoever will stop, and answer "Okay by me" when she says, "How about we go by way of Montana?" When she lets you out in Salt Lake City, you sing and pray. When the retired school superintendent parks his travel trailer at the Last Chance Stop-And-Go convenience store in Reno, you bet your bankroll (ten dollars and a quarter) and lose and win. The Yuma corporate lawyer on a Harley gets you to Los Angeles. You find yourself at Pacific Palisades running down the stone steps cut into what's left of the cliffs slumping to Will Rogers Beach where you dive into the coldest water you've ever entered and make sounds a sea lion cruising over from Catalina hears, and laughs, and offers delicacies he's caught just for you.             Updated: August 8, 2006