Gene Farrington
Professor of English
[profile]

I started teaching at Notre Dame in 1993. Even though I’ve always taught English, my degree is in the dramatic arts.

Teaches classes in: creative writing, including playwriting and screenwriting, fiction, Jane Austen, Shakespeare romances and tragedies. I also enjoy teaching Japanese literature.

Favorite authors: A.S. Byatt and Patricia Duncker

Favorite book: Hallucinating Foucault by Duncker

The book on his nightstand right now: Death Trick, a murder mystery by Richard Stevenson

Movies he recommends: "The Hours," "Stranger than Fiction," "Tristram Shandy, a Cock and Bull Story"

Music: I am a classical music-only freak. Give me Mozart and Brahms.

Facebook or Myspace? Despite being constantly on the computer, I’m running behind the times. Haven’t really explored Facebook yet.

How about teaching online? I didn’t think I was going to like it, but I really do. You don’t have to shave. You don’t have to get all dressed up.

How does he find student actors for campus plays? I latch onto them when they’re freshmen.

Lives in Baltimore City: I have a terrible commute. It’s about four and a half minutes on a good day, five minutes on a bad day.

While teaching Jane Austen last fall... My class looked at films and movies of the Austen novels.

On Austen’s earliest writing: It’s Austen but it’s a different kind of Austen. It’s more biting in some ways.

A favorite film to use in class: There is a new version of Titus with Anthony Hopkins that is so accessible to students and still has all the Shakespearean language.

Before he became a professor, he pursued a career in advertising for 16 years. I was so good at what I did—or so bad at what I did—that it took me two or three hours a day to do my job. So I went to school to get my master’s degree.

Family: Daughter and three grandchildren. I’m one of three people in the world who was born in North Dakota. My father, grandfather and all my brothers ran small newspapers in Iowa and Minnesota. I said, "I will never do anything like that," and I end up in advertising. Now my daughter is a features editor at the Los Angeles Valley News.

Author of: Breath of Kings (1982); The Blue Heron (at the publisher now); The Accoucher Comes (accepted by Doubleday and then turned down); the first two in a series of four detective novels—Colonel Lamatte in the Library with the Cleaver and Hamlet’s Dead—have been accepted for publication.

I like to write historical fiction, but I write more marketable post-modern fiction instead. Good fiction’s really hard to sell, period.

Why teach? Teaching is wonderful because it keeps you young.

If he weren’t a professor... I would like to be a novelist full time. If I could go back 50 years and start over, I would study architecture and interior design, or I would try to become a Hollywood actor. I was in Los Angeles at the right time; just didn't take advantage of it.