Child soldiers wage war in the African bush. Prep school boys cheat to win an hour alone with a literary idol. A family fresh from India grapples with life in New England.
These cultural snapshots offer a glimpse into what first-year Roger Williams University students have encountered through the University’s Common Reading Program. Adam Braver, a novelist and associate professor of creative writing, founded the program to start students off with something in common—a unified summer reading experience.
“Students arrive on campus with the idea that reading is what university life is about,” Professor Braver says. “Books are the weapons of a university. Reading is what we do here.”
In June, each incoming student receives a copy of the selection at Orientation. Selections to date have been two works of fiction—“Old School,” by Tobias Wolff, and “Interpreter of Maladies,” by Jhumpa Lahiri. This year’s nonfiction choice—“A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier,” by Ishmael Beah—offers an eyewitness account of a boy swept into a savage civil war in his country, Sierra Leone.
As an adviser at this year’s Orientation, junior Shashwat Baxi noticed that Mr. Beah’s riveting tale struck a cord with the first-year students:.
“It was my best read in years.” Shashwat said. “Some students were unsure whether it was real or fiction. They didn’t realize that this really happened and was still going on.”
Come the fall semester, students engage in classroom discussions about the Common Reading selection. And the program culminates with a campus visit by the chosen author; this fall, Mr. Beah will come to Roger Williams on Oct. 4.
When Mr. Wolff, author of “Old School,” spoke in 2005, junior Chelsea Quermer said meeting the author was an unexpected pleasure: “I remember thinking, if this is what literary readings are like, I’ll go to all of them.”
As a novelist, Professor Braver understands how books, like Mr. Beah’s memoir, expose students to lives and cultures beyond their own. His own novels take readers inside the personal lives of historical figures: Abraham Lincoln in “Mr. Lincoln’s Wars,” actress Sarah Bernhardt in “Divine Sarah,” and painter Vincent Van Gogh in “Crows Over the Wheatfield.”
In his upcoming book, Professor Braver recalls Nov. 22, 1963, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He says he is drawn to moments in history when “everything changes and nothing is going back to what it was.”
And that literature/real-world connection extends to his classroom, as well. Last fall, Chelsea took Professor Braver’s “Writers Reading Fiction” seminar. “We read 13 books by authors who were radically different from each other,” Chelsea says. “The course forced us out of our comfort zone.”
This semester, Professor Braver is taking real-world learning a step further with his new course, “Special Topics: PEN Collaborative,” a collaboration with PEN American Center, a human rights and literary organization. Students will manage the cases of two writers in China and Tibet imprisoned for their writing and will study their cultures, develop lobbying packets and work on the writers’ behalf, he says.
Just one more example of how students can mine the power of stories to move into lives beyond their own. “My motivation is to engage students in the real world,” Professor Braver says. “Literature does that.”