Bauman, M. Garrett 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born August 7, 1948, in Paterson, NJ; married Carol Nobles, June 3, 1978; children: Cynthia, Amy, Diana, Jeremy. Education: Upsala College, B.A., 1969; State University of New York at Binghamton, M.A., 1971. Politics: Independent. Hobbies and other interests: Tennis, white-water canoeing, furniture building, nature exploration and adventure, travel.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Nunda, NY. Office—Monroe Community College, Rochester, NY 14623. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Monroe Community College, Rochester, NY, professor of English, 1971—, coordinator of human ecology, 1982-88. Member of Genesee Valley Greenway, 1996-98, and Genesee Valley Council on the Arts, 1997—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Leavey Award for teaching, Freedoms Foundation, 1988; creative nonfiction awards, New York State Foundation for the Arts, 1995, and New York State Council on the Arts, 1998; Saltonstall Award for creative nonfiction, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, 1997; award for nonfiction, New Letters magazine, 2004.

WRITINGS:

Out from Narraganset Bay (fiction), Yankee Books (Dublin, NH), 1986.

Ideas and Details: A Guide to College Writing, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1992, 6th edition, Thomson Wadsworth (Boston, MA), 2007.

The Shape of Ideas, Harcourt (New York, NY), 1995.

Contributor of articles and fiction to periodicals, including Yankee, Sierra, Greensboro Review, Chrysalis, Gettysburg Review, National Forum, Chronicle of Higher Education, Fine Homebuilding, and New York Times.

SIDELIGHTS:

M. Garrett Bauman once told CA: "I was raised amid the industrial decay, gangs, and race riots of Paterson, New Jersey—known for William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and Lou Costello. My life since then has been a steady ‘moving out’ into nature, and I now reside with my wife Carol on seventy-five acres of fields, woods, and waterfalls a mile from the nearest road. Yet my essays and fiction find the same poetry, comedy, and struggle in nature that existed in my life in the city.

"Forced to leave a doctoral program at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1971 to support my family, I have taught since then at Monroe Community College in Rochester, New York. Teaching—and a community-college position in particular—have both nurtured and held back my writing career. You don't face the cutthroat competition of a university, but you do teach five courses each semester, and you are left out of the university old-boy network that can boost writers.

"My essays and fiction connect humans and animals, and they strive to reflect on social institutions and the larger forces of nature. I write of walking the woods and stars by moonlight, Hurricane Marilyn's devastation of the Caribbean, animal and human perceptions of time, and anything from wasp galls to waterboatman beetles to great horned owls that reflect on man and nature. These short works have appeared in Sierra, the New York Times, and many magazines and books.

"Education has been another focus of my work. I write of the hard lives of my community-college students. My book on writing, Ideas and Details: A Guide to College Writing, is used in colleges worldwide and is known for its down-to-earth advice and stimulating writing suggestions.

"Writing a draft is taking an open canoe down class III rapids. Revision is walking back and pulling out every molecule of water, examining each one, and then reassembling an improved river."

Bauman later added: "I am currently writing an education memoir about teaching community-college students—about their ordinary miracles of success and the way they are a microcosm of the diversity and crises found in America in the twenty-first century."