Mary Bucci Bush
EnglishOffice: E&T A634
Phone: 323-343-4174
E-mail: mbush@calstatela.edu
INTRODUCTION
When I started at CSULA after positions as visiting professor at Hamilton College and Hobart & William Smith Colleges in New York State, and then the University of Memphis (then Memphis State) in their newly formed MFA Program in Creative Writing, I felt like I had “come home.” I was and still am impressed by the vibrant writing life in the city and on campus, and by the inquisitiveness, creativeness, and enthusiasm of the students here. I have probably learned as much from my students as they have from me.
TEACHING INTERESTS
Teaching creative writing in general, and fiction writing in particular (primarily the short story, but also the novel), are my passions. While one of my doctoral areas of concentration was Modern British literature, my recent literature interests include modern and contemporary American literature, ethnic literature, popular culture, screenwriting, and stories and novels adapted to film. I am particularly interested in the constructions of gender identities and race and how concepts of sexuality, masculinity and femininity, and race (if such a term can be used today) are manifested in literature and in so many aspects of our culture. In all my classes, I see the teacher as a facilitator or guide to what all of us—myself included—will experience and learn in the classroom. I expect and encourage students to take a proactive role in their education. Those students who bring to class an exciting new idea or discovery to share with us shine a light on all of us. My vision of the perfect classroom is one in which every student, along with the professor, takes the initiative to read and explore ideas outside the classroom, make connections between the individual’s scholarly or life experiences and the subject at hand, and brings to class those fresh ideas and insights. As a longtime past faculty advisor for our student literary and art journal, Statement, I am committed to supporting the magazine, the students who work on it, and those who are published in it. After 60 years of publishing on our campus, Statement magazine is still going strong.
RESEARCH
I spent a long time researching the illegal importation of Italians to the Mississippi Delta 1898-1910 in order to write my novel Sweet Hope inspired by my grandmother’s childhood experiences. “It was a hell,” she used to tell me. “A wild, wild place. Why you gotta make me remember?” Italians were held in peonage while the few remaining African American sharecroppers on Sunnyside Plantation appeared to the Italians—who nothing of color or race in America—simply as darker-skinned Americans. The novel looks at the friendship between one Italian and one African American family and the bitter truths they learn about race relations in America. Sweet Hope is under contract with Guernica Editions, Toronto, with a 2011 publication date. Chapters from this novel have been published in several literary journals and anthologies and have won awards. Currently I am researching African American experiences during WW II in Italy and then, post-war, in the Mississippi Delta and Los Angeles. The WW II research is preparation for the new novel I am working on, Chall, a sequel to my novel, Sweet Hope. I continue to explore African American and Italian relationships, 1900 to the present, in an attempt to understand the constructions of race and “color” in America—and how some interracial friendships or love relationships endured in the face of segregation and racisim. Connected to this topic is my ongoing interest in how Italians, at first considered a “third race” in this country (as were some other European immigrants), “became white.”
PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS
| Title | Date |
|---|---|
| Read "Drowned Edward Tug" (winner of The Missouri Review's
William Peden "best of the year" award and now available at: http://www.missourireview.com/anthology |
2011 |
| SWEET HOPE, a novel; Guernica Editions, Toronto, Canada | Summer 2011 |
| “Grandma’s House”; short story. Italian Americana | January 2011 |
| ”Drowned Edward Tug”; short story. The Missouri Review on-line anthology of the best work published in the journal in the past fifteen years. | December 2010 |
 |
2007 |
| A Place of Light, story collection. Guernica Editions, Toronto, Canada Originally published 1990, William Morrow, New York. | 2007 |
| “Planting” from the novel Sweet Hope, in The Voices We Carry: Recent Italian American Women’s Fiction republished by Guernica Editions, Toronto | 2007; original 1994 |
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND
Doctor of Arts (D.A.) English & Creative Writing (Fiction) 1984
- Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York
Master of Arts (M.A.) English & Creative Writing (Fiction) 1980
- Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) English 1972
- State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York