Author and USU English Department Alum Karin Anderson Speaks at USU Eastern

As part of the Smithsonian traveling exhibit, Crossroads: Change in Rural America, currently showing at USU Eastern, author and USU English Department alum Karin Anderson read from her work-in-progress Things I Didn’t Do. Things I Didn’t Do focuses on the life of Ryder, an adopted boy, as he grows up in Carbon County. It is a companion to Karin’s 2023 novel What Falls Away, set in Utah Valley.

Karin says of her decision to major in English at USU, “I floated through required general courses, anxious and martyr-ish but also intrigued by concepts I’d never been invited to consider. I learned that I had a first class memory for facts. I learned how to read increasingly difficult material, recall it, and to keep thinking. I learned to make connections and choke out awkward questions in class. I pondered comments professors made on my essays and tests and learned to welcome challenging feedback. These were English major skills, but it took a ridiculously long time for me to comprehend it. I kept taking lower division lit classes to kill time while I figured out what to major in. I felt a little guilty ‘wasting’ tuition on personal pleasure. After handing back midterm exams, one professor called my name and asked me to stay a minute after class. She asked me if I was majoring in English, and suddenly I realized that yes, I was.”

Of her time in the English Department, Karin reflects, “One of the best skills I learned as a professional came from my most feared (and ultimately revered) professors at USU, the legendary T.Y. Booth. He assigned more pages of dense reading than I imagined a class could require. He told us to ‘read for the details, the first time, and you’ll remember the whole thing forever.’ His classes changed the whole quality of my mind. They helped transform me into a professional. I learned to read the trees and the snow and the students in the bookstore and re-read the town I grew up in and the people who lived there, the distinct skylines of the mountains and the colors of the desert, because he taught me how to remember and express.”

Karin urges current English majors to “Do the reading. Do the thinking, do the remembering, find the words, earn your good living.”

Karin’s other works include Before Us Like a Land of Dreams as well as the co-edited anthologies Blossom as the Cliffrose: Mormon Legacies and the Beckoning Wild and Utah Lake Stories: Reflection on a Living Landmark. Her work has appeared in Dialogue, Quarter After Eight, Western Humanities Review, Sunstone, Saranac Review, American Literary Review, and Fiddleback.