Before he spoke at the Falvey Speaker’s corner on Thursday, Nov. 14, author Chris Offutt visited the Creative Writing programs class on Detective Fiction. Offutt has published a number of crime novels, and has written for Emmy-nominated television shows in the past. He now primarily spends his time teaching and writing in Iowa.
Alan Drew, the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Villanova, knows Offutt on a personal level. Offutt was Drew’s professor when he was in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa, where Offutt encouraged him to pursue writing. Now, Drew has published three novels and heads Villanova’s own creative writing department.
Drew brought Offutt to talk to his students in Detective Fiction, and even recruited two to introduce Offutt at the event in the Speaker’s Corner.
Offutt took to the podium in Falvey to read excerpts from two of his novels, the largest being from his novel Code of the Hills. This is the newest of his books in a series titled The Mick Harden Novels, and after reading portions he talked about his unique experience writing the series. He started the first novel in The Mick Harden Novels under lockdown, and said that by the time he was finished writing he “spent more time with these [imaginary] people than actual people.” This eventually led him to extending the single book into a series.
Writing during the pandemic, he took inspiration from his own hometown, a small town in the hills of Kentucky with a population of about 200. Much of his Kentucky town inspired the setting of his newest series, especially its heavy focus on the animals and nature of the surrounding area.
Drawing on his own personal experience, Offutt went into the writing process of the book with the goal to make people who live in especially rural areas seem more like whole characters, rather than the less complete way they are often characterized in modern media.
After speaking on his novel, Offutt took the time to answer students’ questions on writing, and when Professor Drew noted that a few of the students in the audience wanted to explore writing as a career, he had advice to share.
“It is hard, but it is worth it,” Offutt said.
Offutt also noted that he didn’t start publishing his writing until he was in his thirties, and that it took more than 60 rejections before one of his short stories was accepted to a small literary magazine.
The talk was a special one, as three generations of creative writing students sat to talk about the creative process and what it meant to them.
