SARINA DAHLAN : There ’ s a phenomenon of UC San Diego having produced so many notable writers in the speculative realm . How did this place play a role in you becoming a writer ?
DAVID BRIN , MS ’ 78 , PHD ’ 81 : UCSD typifies the notion of training broadminded citizens with breadth requirements . Those who go into STEM fields are asked to taste from far-afield realms like literature , art , history and law . It is breadth that engenders true innovation .
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON ’ 74 , PHD ’ 82 :
I ’ d agree with that . I was an English major , but UCSD was a scientific school and Muir College wanted you to take a year of science and a year of math as a requirement to graduate . Also , my professors were instrumental . Patrick Ledden was my geometry teacher , and he would also do a literary seminar . I had literature professor Donald Wesling who took my writing very seriously . He would read my stuff the same way he would read James Joyce and make the same level of comments . Also , I had Fredric R . Jameson , who is the most famous living Marxist literary scholar . He ’ s a winner of the Holberg Prize , which is the Nobel Prize for cultural criticism . I was also in Ursula K . Le Guin ’ s classes . I bothered her during her office hours all the time . So , for me , UCSD could not have been more perfect for an education for a science fiction writer .
DAVID : I also attended a class taught by Ursula K . Le Guin . She was famous in literary circles as being one of the doyens of science fiction . Author Luis Alberto Urrea ’ 77 had her as a professor as well .
CATHERYNNE M . VALENTE ’ 02 : I had great relationships with all my professors and they were really wonderful people who were incredibly supportive of me . Leslie Edwards , Tony Edwards , Page duBois . I wrote my first fiction ever for a writing class at UCSD with Rae Armantrout whom I had no idea is insanely famous in literary poetry circles . Though I was working in science fiction and it ’ s not her genre , she gave me useful feedback on how to be better in my genre . From her , I learned to fight against clichés in writing .
AIMEE BENDER ’ 91 : It was in my second half of my time at UCSD that I started taking writing workshops and had a bunch of amazing professors like Fannie Howe , Deborah Small , and William Murray . Fanny Howe was so encouraging and delighted by the strangeness in my stories . Deborah Small was bringing in current events that were happening in the world , and showing how that was affecting her and affecting writing . That was a mind-opener for me .
SARINA : There ’ s something to learning science alongside art . I studied psychology and visual arts . From my art professors , I learned to look at life
36 FALL 2022