New English professor publishes debut novel
Assistant Professor of English Salvatore Pane released his first novel on Nov. 6, entitled “Last Call in the City of the Bridges.”
The University of Indianapolis English department has many published writers. Department Chair and Professor of English William Dynes said that he hopes that students will find motivation in having published authors in the classroom.
“To be able to point to a couple of different writers on our faculty and to be able to say to the students, ‘They’re going through the same process you are. They know what it’s like to be rejects, they know what it’s like to submit without knowing what’s coming next, and they can help you at every step of the process.’ I think that’s tremendously helpful,” Dynes said.
Salvatore Pane joined the English department this fall to teach fiction. His first novel came out on Nov. 6. Photo contributed by Salvatore Pane
Dynes also said that having published writers in the department helps students learn the facets of the publishing process and supports the department’s goals.
“The fact that he [Pane] is a published author means he’s got that experience with the practical side of publishing,” Dynes said. “He knows what it’s like to go through working with an editor, working with publishing houses, doing the advertisement and the book tours.”
Pane said that while he rarely mentions his novel in class, he wants to show students how successful a writer can be.
“I think the students know immediately that I practice what I preach,” Pane said. “Where I’m always telling them they have to be writing every day, they have to be reading journals and submitting their work if they’re ready for that. I think that that wouldn’t work as well if I wasn’t doing that.”
Pane hopes to reach the different majors in the English department, specifically students in the creative writing and professional writing majors.
“When I was an undergrad, it was always helpful to me to work with a novelist, because you could look at their life and their trajectory and think, ‘OK, how did they get there and can I do that?’ And I hope that I am providing the same example where they can see I’m not that much older than them, and it doesn’t take 50 years to write a novel,” Pane said.
Pane said he started the novel after an interaction he had with a teacher during the second year of his master’s program at the University of Pittsburgh. The plot of the novel follows 20-something Michael Bishop as he makes and breaks relationships during the eve of the 2008 presidential election.
“I started doing it [the novel] in April 2009, and I really wanted it to be set during the Obama campaign because that felt like a big watershed moment for people around my age, younger and a little older, too,” Pane said. “And I just really wanted it to be about 20-somethings, kind of in an urban setting, and just getting at the idea of how all of your communications have been so altered by social networking, especially Facebook.”
Pane also said that the generation his novel focuses on has a hyper nostalgia for older things such as television shows and video games. The characters are fictional, but Pane said that interactions with friends in bars inspired him.
“One of the characters talks about how his dad has been dead for a decade or so, and he can’t remember his [dad’s] voice any more, but he can still remember the sound effects in super Mario Brothers, like it’s memorized in his brain,” Pane said. “That conversation never happened, but there are things I’ve noticed that people around my age talk about in bars. Just this weird nostalgia, kind of like a hyper nostalgia, for all the stuff we grew up with in the 80s.”
Pane attributes this hyper nostalgia to members of his generation and younger starting families later and having easier access to the things of their childhood.
“When my parents were my age, they had me. They didn’t really have time to go to bars and hang out and talk about the things they grew up with,” Pane said. “They were kind of already more adults than I am. I think that’s true of most people my age.”
He emphasizes that writing is still alive and students should be aware of the different media available.
“What I try and do is to get all my students to see that writing is not something that happened a hundred years ago. There are people who are young and who are doing it,” Pane said. “So I show them blogs and I show them magazines that are coming out now. And I try to show them a lot of writers now, so they start to see by osmosis that this is a real life that you could have. It’s not something that went extinct like a dinosaur.”
