Steve Weathers

Areas of scholarship or expertise: I’m a happy generalist, most fulfilled when pursuing  research irrelevant to the immediate and pressing task at hand.

Published works: I have published several short stories and non-fiction essays in obscure and under-funded literary journals, one of which went belly up immediately after publishing my work. I keep the last issue of that defunct journal to remind myself of the ephemeral nature of fame.

Originally from: Northwest Florida.

Work of literature you would recommend: I’m bully for an inexcusably under-appreciated novel, Home from the Hill (1958), by the Texas novelist William Humphrey. But I will always maintain (I think) that

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is the single greatest novel in the whole wide world.

Person who influenced your life: Tim White, a high-school wrestler and friend, who died tragically young. 

What you want to give your students: I’m concerned, of course, to provide my students with the skills and knowledge they have a right to expect after paying their tuition. Beyond that rather utilitarian/ethical impulse, however, I hope to reawaken them (or further awaken them) to the mysterious quality of human experience and to the spiritual dimension of that experience. I am an avowed and indefatigable nemesis of the bedtime sandman.

Why you do what you do: I want to spend time with persons who share

my enthusiasms: God, the human dilemma, life’s bewildering mix of beauty and horror, as well as literature. An English classroom on the campus of Abilene Christian University usually contains some of these persons. Not always but often.

What you expect from your students: I expect my students to treat our assigned subject matter with the appropriate seriousness, the necessary humor, and, occasionally, with the desirable irreverence.

Why you are at ACU: I have received lifelong benefits from having been a student at ACU. My hope is that I can “pay my dues”—i.e., repay some of my cosmic debt—by conveying those same benefits to others.