

In his Writing Wilderness course, Fink takes students to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, located on the United States and Canadian border in northern Minnesota. Joining the environmental studies faculty, I was able to think about writing and the outdoors as one part of my life, not separate,” says Fink. “I wouldn’t have called myself an environmental writer, but it’s always been there. He joined the environmental studies faculty in 2014. Through his teaching, Fink has also been able to give students practical life lessons and combine his two loves: writing and the outdoors. It gives them great tools to go out and work in publishing, but it also gives them great tools for publishing their own work.”

“They can see that the publication process is both collaborative and subjective. It’s not an exercise in a vacuum,” says Fink.
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“For most of my creative writing classes and this class, it’s writing toward publication and how can we move this toward a professional application. Less than 1.5 percent of submissions are included, a fact that Fink points out to students. Editorial teams of four comb through submissions before the entire class votes on whether or not each story gets accepted. As editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, a student-produced journal which receives more than 1,000 submissions from contemporary writers each fall, Fink helps students navigate the publishing process through a course that focuses on the publication. It’s this level of practicality that he hopes to impart to his creative writing students.
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“I think to myself, ‘I should be able to milk a story out of this,’” says Fink with a chuckle.Įven with the location set, he says the process of writing a story is to learn how to do the whole thing over again. And in his creative writing, any locale he visits for an extended period of time produces a story. Drawing from places he’s traveled, like Arizona, New Zealand, and Spain, Fink uses settings to his advantage and every new terrain becomes another character in each of the stories.Ī self-proclaimed “outdoorsman,” Fink spends any time he can hiking, backpacking, or canoeing. The English professor’s second book, Add This To The List Of Things That You Are, which was published in September by the University of Wisconsin Press, is a collection of short stories that span the globe, taking traditional Midwesterners and pushing them into testy, unfamiliar situations and lands. If you put Chris Fink in any location, he’ll write about it.
