by Ashley Lorraine Wiesner
Ulrick Casimir jokes that he is just a failed poet.
But it's what he did with that realization that has made him not only the writer but the teacher that he is today. He took this failure and turned it into a successful fiction career by utilizing themes of poetry in his stories.
It was at age of 12 that Casimir got The Great Gatsby from his local library and read it in one afternoon. This experience was so transformative that by the next morning, Casimir realized that he himself was a writer.
“I could sense some of what [Fitzgerald] was doing with language,” Casimir remarks. “And I desperately wanted to try it too.”
Since that moment, Casimir has been trying and succeeding; his love for creative writing has become a pillar of his life. He was published in Plainsongs, a literary journal, and his collection of short stories, Children of the Night, was published by Corpus Callosum Press in 2018. He now teaches with the English department at the University of Oregon and is an affiliated faculty member with Clark Honors College. His passion for teaching comes from an adulthood spent learning about English. Casimir has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in English, an additional master’s degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. focused on literature and film. This fall he is combining these areas of study and his love of writing into a CHC fiction writing course titled “Lie to Me.”
One of the themes he often focuses on is perspective, noting that perspective isn’t just the technical issue of who is telling a story but it is constant thematic concern in his writing. He combines a specific perspective with topics like crime, alienation, family, time and subjectivity to make a statement—often a political one.
Casimir isn’t making political statements in his stories just for the sake of making a statement. Instead, he views his statements as a deliberate act of sympathy. “After all,” he says, “the willingness to tell stories is itself an act of sympathy. It takes a lot of sympathy, empathy and dedication to write convincing stories from diverse perspectives” .
“Truly good and affecting fiction imparts to its readers that sympathy, or even empathy, is the way forward from where we are to where we want to be, or ought to be, as human being,” Casimir says.
Him empathetic nature is not just reserved for his writing. Empathy and connection are at the core of his teaching style. Casimir calls this strategy, “teaching from behind,” an approach that allows students to master the assigned work in a way that works for them and in a way that will serve them even once the term is over.
Casimir says he prefers not to lecture and instead opts to guide his students through conversations and their work. He refers to his classes as a free and open environment to explore and write. Students are active participants in his classes. They dictate the direction of their work; they reflect on their own life and dissect what influences their writing. Often times, Casimir says his students teach him just as much as he teaches them.
“So many seemingly disparate things can affect us as writers,” Casimir comments. “Simply talking as openly as possible with students about their lives as students can go a long way toward resolving issues in their writing process.”
Casimir encourages his students to not only analyze their personal lives but to analyze the creative works of others. He blends sources in his classes, relying not only fictional books but also on music, movies, visual art and poetry. He pulls from classics to pulp fiction. He strives to turn stories upside down and inside out. And he encourages his students to do the same. Casmir believes writing is interdisciplinary. He notes that, learning the craft is not enough, students must also learn to interpret others’ narratives.
“I’m a fiction writer with the training to think like an academic,” Casimir says. “I’m kind of an interdisciplinary person at heart.”
As he settles into teaching at CHC, Casimir hopes to enlighten his students in the same way Fitzgerald enlightened him. He hopes they find their passion—in writing or otherwise. As for his own passions, there is no end in sight. “Writing is who he is,” he says, making it to the end of The Great Gatsby was just the beginning of a life-long pursuit.
“I’ve been 'chasing story' ever since,” he remarks.