If you go
What: Meacham Writers’ Workshop
When: Thursday, Oct. 25-Saturday, Oct. 27
Where: Thursday at Chattanooga State Community College; Friday and Saturday at UTC University Center
Admission: Free
Information: https://www.meachamwriters.org/index.htm
Talking at the Table
Josh Mensch also will be part of the Honors College Alumni Table Talks. A reception is set for 4-7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25, in the University Center’s Chattanooga Rooms.
- Raquel Barlow ’12 — Talent & Leadership Development Specialist for Cracker Barrel Old Country Store’s corporate office.
- Christina Chavez ’09 — Eight years at Dell and Microsoft, including as mentor for 150 women in Kenya creating a tech startup.
- Stephen Craven ’99 — Assistant professor of electrical engineering at UTC from 2008-2013.
- Athena Davis ’00, ’01 — Teacher at Cleveland High School, created curriculum for the Holocaust Literature class.
- Kelly Jo Fulkerson-Dikuua ’06 — Worked in Namibia and Rwanda for WorldTeach, nonprofit that sends volunteer teachers abroad.
- Marvin Hall ’83 — Pediatric physician and Patient Safety Officer and Associate Medical Director for Patient Safety and Quality at Children’s Hospital.
- Jessica Ornsby ’11 — Founded A+O Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based civil litigation firm.
- Bradley Paul ’95 — Poet and television writer who has written for Better Call Saul, Lodge 49 and Animal Kingdom.
- Stacy Richardson ’10 — Chief of Staff for Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke.
Joshua Mensch is a 2001 graduate of UTC.
To get his debut book published, Josh Mensch went about it the hard way: He wrote a book-length poem.
A first-time writer of any kind has the odds stacked against him from the outset, acknowledges Mensch ’01, but poetry is “the only form in which I am truly comfortable as a writer.” Still, he kept his expectations low.
“I wasn’t terribly worried about its commercial viability since that wasn’t an assumption I had anyway. Poets don’t really tend to think about those things; there’s not much commercial viability in anything we do,” says Mensch, a UTC honors program student who graduated with a degree in humanities and concentrations in creative writing and international studies.
His book—Because: A Lyric Memoir—took about three years to sell, but eventually was purchased by W.W. Norton, a respected publishing house. Well-received, it’s now a finalist for Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, a prestigious prize in the country. A native of Nova Scotia, Mensch says he was “elated” when told about the nomination.
This week, Mensch will be one of the visiting writers at the Meacham Writers’ Workshop. Greg O’Dea, associate dean of the Honors College, notes that Mensch has been a visiting writer at previous Meacham Workshops, there is an added bonus this year.
“Having been nominated for the Governor General’s Prize for poetry, he brings an additional dimension with him: Evidence that UTC’s creative writing program really does help to develop world-class writers. Current students and writers in our community can see the possibilities for themselves,” O’Dea says.
Now living in Prague in the Czech Republic, working as marketing director for a technology firm, Mensch says he originally enrolled in UTC for a number of reasons.
“Like many young people, I had an intense desire to radically change my environment and going to Chattanooga seemed like a good way to accomplish that,” he says. “I was fascinated by the idea of the South, which I knew only from books and movies, and found the landscape around Chattanooga to be incredibly beautiful.
“But more than that, I was genuinely charmed by the faculty and students I met at UTC during my campus visit and realized pretty quickly that this was a place where I would get a great education — the kind of education I wanted.”
While the writing of Because was not difficult from a technical point of view, the subject was harder and more painful to express, he says. “In often uncomfortable detail,” the book relates his experiences at a summer camp/private school he attended from the ages of 10 to 15. The camp was run by a man named Don, who was trusted and respected by the parents who sent their kids to him each summer. Then he was arrested and convicted of molesting children.
“I was one of those children and my book, which is a memoir in verse, is my attempt to answer the many questions I’ve fielded over the years about what happened—and how, and why it happened, and why it lasted for as long as it did— by showing what the whole experience was like,” Mensch says.
“Our monsters rarely look like monsters, and people who are capable of monstrous acts can also be capable of great kindnesses and may even believe the harmful things they do are morally defensible, if not good.”
Mensch began by writing a novel, but that didn’t work, so he switched to a prose memoir, but that didn’t work, either. Finally, he realized that poetry “was the only way I could tell the story I wanted to tell in the way I needed to tell it. It took some trial and error and a number of years to figure this out.”
Proof that he was on the right track came quickly. Three days after starting, he had written 60 pages. “It was ungovernable, to say the least.”
