UCI Names Grossman to Teaching Post : Education: English-born novelist will become graduate and undergraduate creative writing instructor in 1993.

A lengthy search for a writer to fill the second faculty teaching position in UC Irvine’s nationally acclaimed graduate Program in Writing has finally ended.

English-born novelist Judith Grossman has accepted the post and will begin teaching graduate and undergraduate creative writing in the 1993 winter quarter.

Grossman, author of the critically acclaimed 1988 novel “Her Own Terms,” has more than 25 years of experience teaching writing. She has conducted writing seminars at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Brandeis universities and is currently on the faculty at Warren Wilson College in Swammanoa, N.C.

“We are very fortunate that she is joining our program,” said James McMichael, professor of English and director of the Program in Writing. “Judith Grossman’s strengths as a teacher are unquestioned and her written work is incomparable. And it is her skill as a first-rate writer of fiction that will be of greatest benefit to our students.”

Born in London, Grossman worked as a journalist in Liverpool before arriving in the United States in 1961. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from Somerville College, Oxford, and her master’s and doctoral degrees in English and American literature from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

“Her Own Terms,” Grossman’s breakthrough novel about an aspiring female poet coming of age in London and at Oxford University in the late ‘50s, was named by the New York Times as one of the outstanding books of 1988. It also was nominated for a Hemingway award.

Grossman joins Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, a 1991 appointee, as one of two fiction writing teachers in the Program in Writing. The program’s poetry sequence is taught by McMichael and poet Michael Ryan.

Keneally and Grossman fill openings created by the retirement of longtime fiction writing teachers Donald Heiney and Oakley Hall. Among the nationally acclaimed writers spawned by the program are Michael Chabon (“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh”), Richard Ford (“Rock Springs”), Marti Leimbach (“Dying Young”) and Whitney Otto (“How to Make an American Quilt”).

Grossman was not available for comment, but in typically good-humored Aussie fashion, Keneally says of his new colleague’s impending arrival:

“She is of English descent, so we’ve got the situation where supposedly the best writing program west of the Mississippi and the first or second in the United States is in the hands of an Aussie and a Brit!”

Keneally, the award-wining author of “Schindler’s List” and 11 other novels, said he’s looking forward to Grossman’s arrival because it will put the fiction program “up to strength again.”

The void left by the retirements of Hall and Heiney led to reports last year that the fiction program was in a state of disarray and that some of the writing students were demoralized. The arrival of Keneally last fall helped allay concerns.

Noting that Bette Pesetsky, “a very distinguished novelist and short story writer,” is teaching the fiction workshop this quarter, Keneally said that “the morale is very high in the writing program, thank God. We’re right back on track morale-wise and morale for writers is tremendously important.”

Keneally, who devotes a lot of time working with the Australian Republican Movement to end Australia’s constitutional ties with Great Britain, said Grossman has agreed to handle most of the administrative details of the fiction program, which he and his assistant Shirley Cox have been doing since his arrival.

“Although we’re totally new,” he said, “we don’t want to negate the tone of the program, which was a pretty eclectic tone. Most genres were tolerated and people were permitted to shake the tree in a big way and write novels. That’s the tone I believe we want to maintain in the program, even though we’re all totally new to it.”

Keneally said there were “some magnificent candidates” for the second teaching position, but Grossman’s extensive experience teaching in graduate writing programs “was the determinant in her case.”

Keneally thinks he and the English-born Grossman will get along just fine.

“I don’t think we’ll have any problems,” he said. “I told her I was involved in the Australian movement to get rid of the attachment to Great Britain and she said, ‘What a sensible thing.’ So, I don’t think the Australian-English wars will be fought in the English Department!”