Author Tobias Wolff is no stranger to Syracuse University.

A former SU professor, and now professional author, Tobias Wolff spoke last night in Gifford Auditorium about his latest novel ‘Old School,’ in hopes of providing words of insight to interested and forced listeners alike.

Wolff, the three-time winner of the O. Henry Award for his short stories, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography and the Ambassador Book Award for his 1989 memoir ‘The Boy’s Life,’ a book that was later turned into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro.

‘It was very disconcerting to watch someone else play me,’ Wolff said. ‘I’d get so into the story that, every once in a while, I would lose myself and then say something like ‘Hey, something like that happened to me.”

When a professorship spot opened in the SU’s English department in 1980, Wolff took the job. He taught creative writing and literature courses for 17 years, working beside other authors, like Raymond Carver. Wolff now works at Stanford University’s creative writing department, but jumped at the chance to come back and speak at SU.

‘I like being in Syracuse,’ Wolff said. ‘I raised my kids here. I taught here happily for many years.’

Wolff, who also received the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1985 for ‘The Barrack’s Thief,’ is part of a series of authors speaking through the Living Writers course, ETS 107. In this class, students read books by a number of selected authors, discuss them together, and then meet with the authors to ask them questions and hear them read their works.

Micha Boyeet Hohorst, a TA for the class and graduate student majoring in creative writing, thinks that the whole experience is very beneficial to all people.

‘In any English class we study all the dead white guys, and we don’t realize that people are alive now who are writing and could be studied 50 years from now,’ Hohorst said. ‘We all could be living in a historical moment.’

Wolff also talked about the benefits of meeting a writer in person.

‘When I was young, I was very sure I was going to be a writer,’ Wolff said. ‘Then, at my school, I was given the chance to meet poet Robert Frost. And just seeing and hearing and being in the presence of Frost did it for me. To see that writers were not from another planet, but actually walking among us-and that maybe we could walk among them-it was an amazing feeling.’

Donna Mobley, a student in the course and social studies education major, said she did not reciprocate the excitement of meeting a real live author, but changed her mind after the experience.

‘Through reading the book, I thought that he would be dry and kind of a stiff,’ Mobley said. ‘But in person it turns out that he had a great sense of humor. His work is much different than his personality.’

Caroline Ried, a undecided freshman in The College of Arts and Sciences, was also impressed with Wolff.

‘He had interesting insights and funny tangents that he would go off on when someone asked him a question,’ Ried said. ‘He got a real reaction out of the crowd.’

Wolff will be speaking again at SU on Oct. 7 to discuss the recent rise of plagiarism throughout education.

‘Tobias Wolff was spoken of by all my professors because they all knew him, so it was interesting to see him in person,’ Boyeet Hohorst said. ‘He seems like a kind, warm, funny and compassionate man, and it shows in all his work.’

Published on September 22, 2004 at 12:00 pm