Novel Dickinsonia

Jonathan Price ’04 cites Southern gothic writer Flannery O’Connor as his role model for crafting fiction.

TRUTH AS FICTION
Student writers endeavor to enlighten as well as entertain

One gains universal applause who mingles the useful with the agreeable, at once delighting and instructing the reader. —Horace

Though most readers are drawn to fiction to escape reality, Jonathan Price ’04, a philosophy major, and George Gerstein ’04, a policy-studies major, have pursued fiction as writers because of its less-recognized value: as a means of portraying truths.

While he had written newspaper articles, short stories and a play during his high-school years, Gerstein’s novel, The Spokesman, represents a welcome challenge.

“I hope to expand my horizons to see what I can do with my writing,” he explains. “Ever since I was very young, I would write small stories, simply because I enjoyed it. The chance to create a world, which you have total control over—the people or creatures that inhabit it—and to be the sole controller of its future events, is unlike any other thing I could do, and that’s a reason why I partake in this.”

Inspired thematically and structurally by J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Gerstein’s published novel was born out of a late-winter-night inspiration. He quickly committed a 30-page chunk to paper then finished writing the book during the spring semester.

Though the direction for The Spokesman was not immediately clear, Gerstein knew he would have to draw on personal experience and observation in crafting his tale. He developed the first-person narrative of protagonist Aaron Dreifert, a young man of upper-middle-class origins whose story exposes the sinister side of the American dream.

“A few things about me seeped into the character,” Gerstein says. “What Aaron experiences is what I imagined; what Aaron thinks is what I know of complex personalities; and what Aaron is, I hope I’m not.”

And through this narrative, Gerstein enjoys the opportunity to speak to an audience, potentially wider than he has ever before encountered.

“Whether making a speech, hosting a high-school awards show or debate, writing numerous newspaper articles or a high-school play or a book, the intent is the same—and that is to create an audience who, hopefully, will appreciate your effort,” he observes.

Price’s interest in storytelling also began at a young age. He was exposed to many parables in his Christian household, and he learned the value of stories as a key to understanding his life and its relationship to the wider world. Price sought a means by which he could tell his own stories, as well as those of others.

George Gerstein ’04 found the classic coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye worthy of emulation.

While Gerstein has enjoyed the escape from the constraints of academic writing, Price turned to scholarly prose to discover the key to fiction—the narrative. He opted to study philosophy in order to “make sense” of the stories he had been told and the ones he hopes to tell.

“I think understanding oneself, others and history is essential to telling [the] good and true stories that are worth telling,” observes Price.

Price enjoyed an opportunity to explore truths while at Oriel College of Oxford University in August. One of 50 students chosen from more than 1,000 applicants, he attended seminars and began a yearlong long-distance tutorial with an Oxford professor through the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

And through Dickinson’s religion department and the John Newton Center for Christian Studies, Price will travel to Cambridge, England, and Geneva, Switzerland, in November for the Tyndale Conference on 16th-century Marian exiles and persecutions.

Rigorous academic pursuits aside, Price has found the time to blend his passion for fiction with his computing abilities—which he honed this summer as a software-assessment intern with AOL—in the form of an exclusively online literary journal. He intends his Clarion Review to feature nonfiction and fiction with Dickinson professors among the contributors.

As with his literary review, Price hopes his fictional works will be beneficial to his readers. And while he points out that all good fiction ought to be instructive, good fiction cannot be intentionally designed to be so. A conscious effort to instruct the reader by saturating a story with morals will ultimately prove counterproductive, he suggests.

Though their respective career goals differ—Gerstein plans to continue writing as a hobby while attending law school, and Price hopes to make a career out of publishing short stories and novels—both men are determined to have their stories heard, pondered and, of course, enjoyed. And they do not believe in delaying their efforts.

As Gerstein says, “I think the most valuable thing I’ve learned over the course of my 21 years is that life is simply too short to put the goals and aspirations, which you rely on for motivation and happiness, on hold.” •

—Todd Derkacz ’04

To order a copy of George Gerstein’s novel, The Spokesman, visit his publisher on the Web at www.1stbooks.com. To visit Jonathan Price’s online literary journal, visit www.clarionreview.com or www.clarionreview.org.

Dickinson College, PO Box 1773, Carlisle, PA 17013, 717-243-5121