Casual New Professor Teaches Fiction with less Friction

Richard Price, award-winning novelist, screenplay writer and all around casual guy, took the stage of the William and Anita Newman Conference Center at Baruch College to talk about and read passages from his work. He arrived wearing a plaid button-down shirt over a t-shirt and bright yellow socks, quietly taking a seat in the front row to pore through one of his books just a few minutes before he was supposed to address the crowd. He said he was looking for what he wanted to read.

“They told me to read for one minute and open it up to questions for 59,” he said to the audience.

Close to 200 people filed into the room, lining up against the walls when seats became scarce. Students and faculty members alike, some dressed in business attire and some in a shirt and jeans, listened attentively to Price’s words which sometimes inspired anxiety, and sometimes laughter.

After reading a couple of passages, one from his novel “Lush Life” and one from something new he is working on, he took questions from the listeners: some were about his books, some were about his method, some were about his history. “The only thing a teacher ever did for me was tell me ‘you’re really good, keep going’,” he said.

Over the years, he has had the opportunity to offer that same support to his students at universities such as Yale, Columbia, and thanks to the Harman Program offering writers a visiting semester, at Baruch College, CUNY. “I haven’t done it in a long time,” he said.

Though he said he could at times describe his position as “frantic,” he still enjoyed the experience with his students. “I really like my class,” he said.

Peter Panousopoulos, a sophomore at Baruch majoring in Audio Engineering, and Rachel Vincent, a senior participating in the Ad Hoc major program, are students of his who expressed similar sentiments after the reading. “He’s a very positive guy,” Panousopoulos said.

The way Price interacts with life is about as casual as the yellow socks he wore to the event, and Panousopoulos and Vincent said it helped to create a great atmosphere for writing and improvement in the classroom. “He knows he doesn’t have to be right all of the time,” Panousopoulos said.

The class is run like a workshop where each week one of the students’ writing pieces is examined as part of the classroom discussion and everyone gets the opportunity to comment on how to make the work better, including the professor. “He’ll tell you what he thinks, but is not offended if you don’t like it,” Vincent said. Vincent said that there was amazing progress in everyone’s writing from the beginning of the class.

It’s an attitude that comes effortlessly to Price. A down-to-Earth, streetwise sense of being is one thing that helps the students, and his fans, relate to him. “I feel like I click; it’s city humor,” Panousopoulos said.