An Interview with Michael Dowdy

By Theo Campbell

I had the opportunity to sit down this week with Michael Dowdy, the newest full-time faculty member in the English department, and chat with him about his work and why he’s excited to be at Villanova. In addition to being a scholar of Latinx literature and poetry of the Americas, Professor Dowdy is also a poet and essayist, whose recent works include Urbilly, a poetry collections he describes on his website as “the anti-Hillbilly Elegy, as an autoethnography of the hipster-hillbilly,” and Broken Souths, the first book-length study of Latinx poetry.

 

TC: So, to start, what are you teaching this fall, and what are you excited to teach at Villanova in the future?

MD: This fall, I’m teaching two courses in  Latinx literature, one is  the required writing seminar for non-majors and one is an  upper level course. Both of these course look at how Latinx writers have written about work and play in American culture. So they’re focused on Latinx representations of lives of work, but also of play in its many instantiations, from the most obvious one—which is sports— to less obvious ones, which might involve art making art, such a graffiti, or the play that we might think is central to experiments with aesthetics and  language, like the play that comes from the collision of multiple languages and their many registers, say between Spanish and English, as in Spanglish, for examples. So really what I think I’m going to be doing here is teaching Latinx literature. And I’m excited to do that in part because it hasn’t been offered in the English department here before, and the undergraduate student body at Villanova now is over 10%  Latinx, which I think is a good milestone, we’re catching up—the state of Pennsylvania is about 15% Latinx.

 

TC: How did you become interested in Latinx poetry as a field of study?

MD: When I was studying in graduate school, one of my mentors was a scholar and artist named María DeGuzmán, and she was working with me on my reading lists in poetry. She started  suggesting many terrific Latinx poets, many of whom were in anthology called Aloud, which is an anthology that emerged from the  Nuyorican Poet’s café in NYC. So many of those iconic poets from the 60s and 70s and then into the 80s and 90s are the ones I started studying initially, and I was hooked—in part because I was interested really in the intersections  between poetics and politics. In the United States,  the relationship  between literature, particularly poetry, and politics in disavowed, I think—we want our poets to be apolitical. And the traditions that I was interested in were coming from Latin America, where poets are some of the foremost public intellectuals in their countries. So it’s a very different understanding of the role of the poet. And I was interested in tapping into and learning more about those traditions, many of which have been inherited and transformed by Latinx poets in the United States.

 

TC: What are you working on right now?

MD:  In the last 40 years or so, migration patterns in the United States have changed quite dramatically, and many Latinos have settled in Southern Appalachia  to work in timber, in animal processing, carpet factories and so on and so forth. So one thing that I’ve studied in the past is how Latinos in Appalachia have written about what it means to be Latino in Appalachia,  a historically marginalized, stereotyped  region in the United States. My new project is looking at white novelists’ representations of Latinos in Appalachia. So its turning the lens the other way, to think about how white writers in Appalachia have been thinking about migration to Appalachia of Latinxes and the changes they’re created, the challenges they face, and how they are reshaping the stories that Appalachians tell about themselves. So that’s a small project I’ve been working on and am sort of excited to do in part because I usually work on poetry and poetics and this a project that’s looking at prose, fiction in particular.  

 

TC: So I know you’re a poet, as well as a scholar, and I was wondering: how do your creative scholarly work feed into and influence each other?

MD: This is a question that’s always hard to answer. Because I could give you the  answer that I wish were true, which is that creative writing and critical writing are mutually beneficial and they influence each other positively, they provide energy to each other, but really the truth is that in some ways it’s a zero sum game. You don’t have time to do both. So what I really strive to do is to bring the scholar’s critical  eye to my creative writing,  and I want to bring the creative writer’s creativity—attention to language, to sound, to sense making— to my scholarly work. In part because I really do believe that scholarly writing can be sonorous and beautiful and invested in having lovely sentences and paragraphs. So in terms of the writing itself I see them being intimately connected. At the end of the day, I’m a writer, and it’s all writing.

 

TC: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the students of Villanova?

MD: Just that I’m excited to be here. It’s an exciting time to be a student, and a really stressful time to be a student, so I’m happy to be here to play my part in helping students to embrace the challenge of being a young person  in this really fraught moment in world history and in US history, and I think Latinx literature is a good place to do some of that thinking.