The Aetna Celebration of Creative Nonfiction took place at Barnes and Noble in Downtown Storrs on Thursday, March 7. This year’s featured writer was UConn professor Gina Barecca. The Aetna Chair of Writing was established in the 1980s and draws from the Aetna Life and Casualty Foundation’s Aetna Endowment to initiate, enhance and otherwise further the University of Connecticut’s writing programs. This year’s winner of the Aetna Creative Nonfiction award is Gabrielle Wincherhern, a fourth-semester ecology and evolutionary biology major with a minor in psychology. Her prize-winning essay was titled “Little Bones.”
Barecca is a UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of English at UConn. She teaches creative writing as well as a popular literature class. She’s an author of an array of books mostly focused on women, gender and humor.
She said she learned about gender differences and humor from a young age living in Brooklyn, New York. Her recent books are part of a series called “Fast Women.” She’s the editor and said that “it’s [her] job to get everyone’s stories.” Each book has 75 essays by different female authors. Some are former students, others are acclaimed authors like Jane Smiley who won a Pulitzer Prize.
Barecca also writes in these books, the introduction as well as a piece of her own. She read from “Fast Funny Women” which tells about a trip she and her husband went on in which they ended up having to stay in a motel. This motel had clown prints bolted to the wall and no cups. Her husband was in charge of finding food for them and came back with potato salad but not cutlery. He said to her “I have a shoehorn.” So, they continued to spend the night eating potato salad and passing a wine bottle back and forth from their beds, opening it using a shoehorn.
The book explains how in the morning the couple drove past fields of orchids which they wouldn’t have been able to see had they continued their drive through the night. She read this story and emphasized writing based on one moment in your life and expanding on it.
While talking about writing humor she said, “Humor works by approaching topics that nobody else wants to touch. It embraces taboo subjects. What’s taboo for women is different than what’s taboo for men, therefore women’s humor exists in a different world from men’s.”
Barecca is known for being hilarious while also making her students think. She holds them to high standards because she knows what they’re capable of. Her way of writing has readers captivated from beginning to end.
It’s important for teachers to be personable and want to form relationships with their students. During her talk, Barecca said, “My students are always my students.”
The next Campus Author Event will take place on March 27 at 6 p.m. in the Dodd Center for Human Rights in the Konover Auditorium. National Book Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes will visit UConn as the 58th Wallace Stevens Poet.