Dr. Laura Garrison is a professor in the School of Communication, Culture, and the Arts in her eleventh year with Roanoke College. Hailing from Erie, Pennsylvania, Dr. Garrison teaches classes on literature and creative writing, with some INQs sprinkled in there. Before moving to Salem in 2014, Dr. Garrison lived in Washington, D.C. for ten years while she attended grad school at Catholic University. “I came here thanks to my husband; he got a job here teaching political philosophy, so I came with him and got the job I have now. The reasons I chose to accept this job are the same as why I chose to stay: the beautiful campus, the size, and especially my students and colleagues. It’s been a really creative, intellectually stimulating, and supportive environment. I love to walk into a classroom and hear students already talking about the reading.”
“When it comes to teaching, one challenge I have faced since I started is trying to take the humongous pile of readings that I want to assign, or films I want to assign, in some cases, and both scale it down to a manageable amount for a semester and then find a meaningful way to organize it. Truthfully, when I started teaching, which was back in graduate school, nothing about it came easily to me. I am an extremely shy and introverted person, and so having the responsibility of conveying something important and not just stumbling through a presentation that everyone could immediately forget as soon as it was over was a huge amount of pressure, and it was only through time and repetition that I sort of got used to it.”
“One of my favorite scents is dill because my grandmother used to make homemade pickles, and she would let us help with that, though she wasn’t super great at canning. I have really clear memories of playing at her house, and you’d hear these explosions coming from the basement because improperly packed pickles had escaped and shattered their jars. They were just all over the room! Glass, pickle, brine, all over everything, and it didn’t seem to dampen her enthusiasm. In retrospect, we’re lucky we didn’t get botulism.”
“I’m always coming up with new classes when the opportunity presents itself. One I haven’t done yet but look forward to doing is an author study focusing on Edgar Allan Poe, whom I feel everybody knows. Still, I think sometimes he is not regarded as significant in the same way as some of the other writers from the same time period. I think that there’s a lot there, and it’s worth a deep dive. Another class that I’ve been sort of researching in my free time would be the mad scientist trope. Obviously starting with Frankenstein, but there’s been so much since then, and a lot of the newer ones that are coming out incorporate technology in really interesting ways.”
Now, to answer a question that has been on the mind of every student of Dr. Garrison, why doesn’t she wear shoes in class? “I guess I just don’t like wearing shoes. I’m always teaching on the floor where my office is, so most of the time I don’t need to put on shoes to walk a few feet. I do wear shoes almost always when I leave the building, or if I’m gonna go into a bathroom, I’m not a monster. I always wear socks, so I feel at least I am offering the world a thin cotton layer of protection from my actual feet. For me, not wearing shoes is just a comfort choice.”
“I want to thank my parents, my kids, for helping with my teaching style, my husband, Justin, for inspiring me in so many ways, all of my colleagues for giving me advice, and my students!”
Juniper Rogers
Folks at ‘Noke Section Editor
