Ashton Dickerson

Dr. Chisholm is a longtime fan of children’s literature, fantasy novels, science fiction, detective stories, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. He has been teaching for several years at various southeastern universities. Dr. Chisholm is currently an associate professor at Southern Wesleyan University in Central, South Carolina. He is Director for the Carolina Institute for Faith and Culture. 

ME: Okay, so where did you grow up?

CHISHOLM: Well, that’s interesting. I grew up mostly in the Jackson, Mississippi area. But my mom was from the West Coast; she was an Air Force brat and was born on the West Coast. So a lot my family, or that half of my family, lives primarily on the West Coast. So it was kind of weird.

I grew up in the Jackson Mississippi area, a suburb outside of the city. But as a kid it was weird for me: where did I actually belong? That was always kind of a complicated issue for me growing up.

Jackson is sort of a modern area, just like anywhere else, so growing up in the suburbs there wasn’t really much different than growing up in the suburb of Atlanta or Charlotte or any other kind of sizable area.

Now I don’t really know if I ever really fit in there, but then I went to California and I was sure that I didn’t fit in there either. [Laughs.] But, I guess my home was always with my family and books and other things I enjoy, and just my creative life: those kinds of things. So home…well, I guess home is here now. As long as you have books around you and people you enjoy being with and as long as you see family occasionally, home is wherever. You take it with you.

ME: So how was life in Mississippi and California different than where you live now, in this really small town? Is it different?

CHISHOLM: I also lived in a really small town for 7 years called Holly Springs, Mississippi, so not all small towns in Mississippi are alike. Central, South Carolina is a small town, kind of a bedroom community of the Clemson area.

Well, how are they different? In a lot of ways I guess they aren’t different at all really, as far as the part of Mississippi where I grew up in. Rural Mississippi is very different. But also California is rural in a lot of places too; it’s not just all Los Angeles and the Bay area. My mom’s family, a lot of them have settled in the Sacramento area. So I guess they’ve kind of gone to the cities. But they started off in, I think, the San Joaquin valley, which is really rural—and really poor, at least historically. I mean a lot of people that left for the West in the mid 30s settled there because there was work. It wasn’t easy work, but there was work. I guess that’s one thing.

California has changed because it’s not the same state today, but I think California (at that time) had lots of jobs there if you didn’t have anything else. It was a place where if you had some sense of mobility or some sense of adventure and were willing to do the kinds of jobs that people didn’t really want, then you could find work or you could start making a life for yourself.

Of course, Mississippi has been a very poor state for a very long time, since the end of the Civil War. You do have people who want to move into the state now, but that’s only been in the last twenty years because it’s like South Carolina: you can build manufacturing plants for cheaper costs. And a lot of Memphis today is moving into Mississippi, into De Soto County. So the “boom-let”, if you want to call it that, in Mississippi has kind of been more recent than California. In California the wealthy are still doing really well. They’re still building all kinds of new shopping centers in Newport Beach and Century City, but I would say that a lot of middle class mobility probably isn’t happening anymore.

But as far as living here, it’s a university town so it’s kind of neat. You get a lot of nice people, a lot of people who are well-informed. There are a lot of oddballs in a university town, of course. But you have those everywhere. When we lived in Holly Springs there was a lot of eccentrics in a fading rural town. But you know there are a lot of people there I miss, but here it is a good environment for the kids.

ME: Okay, that’s good. So did you always know that you wanted to teach?

[He laughs.]

ME: Or was there something that you kind of thought of before?

CHISHOLM: No, I didn’t know that I wanted to teach. It’s kind of interesting. I would not call myself an accidental professor because I’ve always enjoyed reading. I didn’t always enjoy school, which I suppose is ironic, but I find that a lot of professors didn’t really like school very much and couldn’t wait to get out.

I went to a community college for a couple of years. I think the moment where I thought that I wanted to become a professor—and I’m not exactly 100% sure about this—but I think that it was when I was at this community college. I still feel nostalgic about this place: the campus was not very modern because it is a campus of about 70 years old or something, and it still has the smaller buildings. The professors there, if they knew you were interested in things, if they knew you were interested and if you had some curiosity, they really took some time with you that they didn’t have to. They were busy people with their own lives, some of them teaching a pretty heavy load to support their families; but if they thought you were really interested and really had a sense of curiosity, then they didn’t view you as just some dumb 18 year old. They really took some interest in you, and that appealed to me at that age. I think that might have been the factor that led me to pursue higher education. I can’t be 100% certain, but I think that was it.

That’s good advice for any students reading this interview. If you feel like you’re not getting desired feedback from professors, or you’re not getting the interest from the professors that you feel you deserve, then ask yourselves, “Am I showing a sufficient interest in what they do?” If you take an interest then you might get a different reception.

I always try to remember that. And I know, I’m tired sometimes at the end of the day from teaching and meetings: frankly, I’m exhausted. However, if somebody comes by and is really interested in a certain thing, no matter how tired I am I try to take an interest in the student. I really try to listen to what they have to say because that was me at one time.

ME: Yeah, like somebody saw that spark in you, so you try to see that in them.

CHISHOLM: Yeah, well, they saw that potential and it led somewhere. You never know where a little spark will lead someone. So here I am. Where will you be?

ME: So who would you say influenced most growing up or recently or just in your life?

CHISHOLM: There was a number of people depending on the time of my life. I have to say growing up it would be my grandparents (my mother’s parents). Particularly my grandmother early on. They were from the West Coast, and they made a sacrifice: they moved to be closer to me. Maybe I didn’t clarify this but I was actually born on the West Coast; my parents were living out there when I was born. My dad was from the South, but my mom was from the West Coast. They met at a small bible institute, much smaller than SWU. And for a while my parents were living on the West Coast. My dad was kind of a youth minister or he had some other kind of position in the church, but I’m not really sure. But when I was about 3 or 4 years old, I was too young to remember, we moved from the West Coast back to the central Mississippi area where my dad’s family is from. And so my mom’s parents moved to be closer to me.

Looking back, I took for granted the sacrifice they made, leaving a lot of their family and leaving the roots that they had there. Leaving the West Coast to live nearer to their grandchildren, I didn’t really appreciate that sacrifice as I should have. My grandmother, her name is Joyce Clark, she took an interest in me because she understood what I was interested in. My parents are very important, but they had to raise me and that’s a very different job than getting inside of your son’s head and figuring out what he’s interested in. That’s a different task all together, and parents who are working jobs and trying to provide a middleclass lifestyle for the family, it’s kind of just, I’m learning how different that is now as I’m in that situation.

I remember, my grandmother took me to plays. One day I realized that I was different: not odd, or…well…maybe odd [laughs], but I knew I was different, and how I came to know that I was different had to do with the plays that Granny would take me to.

When I was 12, Granny took me and a cousin (who was visiting from California) to a couple of plays that were showing at the local colleges around the Jackson area. I really enjoyed it! I remember seeing the Diary of Anne Frank performed in a tiny theatre. I think we went to see The Merchant of Venice in that same theatre, performed by some of the same actors and so forth. I think we even saw Dracula even at one of these colleges, a little Baptist college that put on Dracula. That was weird.

But back to the time when I knew I was different. There was one time where my cousin said, “Hey, I want to tell Aunt Joyce that we don’t want to do this anymore. We want to go have fun. We want to be taken to a waterpark or do go-carts.” As you can imagine, I was taken back and I said, “No, I enjoy going to the plays. I enjoy going to these shows.” You see, I had always just assumed that all kids liked the theater, seeing the action unfold before my eyes in real time, and so forth.

I realized later that I had a knack for story-telling, and I think Granny saw that in me early on. So my grandmother was very important in that early period of my life. She took me to see Mel Gibson’s Hamlet when I was eleven. That was my first Shakespearean play, I think, but I’m not sure.

My grandmother had some issues. She was the baby of the family and was bipolar a little bit. When she lost her older brother and sister, really suddenly, she wasn’t really prepared. Eventually she did deal with it but for a while she as just kind of out. So there was a vacuum there in my life for a while. But another person kind of stepped in for a while. And you know, all of these people are dead now. [Silent for a moment, looking away.] Wow, it really just kind of hit me.

My grandmother passed away about 6 years ago. This next person who stepped in after Granny, he passed away in June [2015]. His name was Jon, and he was about 10 years older than me (if I was fifteen at the time, then he was twenty-five). But we were always kind of on the same level if that make sense. Not as far as intellect because he was very intelligent, but Jon had lost about 5 or 6 or 7 years to drugs before he got clean. And it was kind of weird how my parents let me run around with this guy who had just been a junkie for a little while. But Jon’s family had moved to Mississippi from the Midwest, and my family really respected and loved them, so they didn’t really mind me running around with Jon.

Jon and I had a lot in common. You know if I had hormones like a fifteen year old, so did he, so there were similar interests there. But Jon was also big on books and entertainment. We took a few road trips together when I was a teenager. One time we had a pact: we were going to try to read every book by Stephen King, and Jon said that since I was younger and hadn’t read some of King’s older books, then I could start at the earlier books. (I think it was Carrie.) Jon tried to start with the latest book that King had just published, and Jon and I would have a little celebration when we met in the middle of King’s chronological bibliography. At the time King had published about 50 or 60 books. Well, [laughing] one day Jon just told me that he had to quit because Stephen King was just cranking out a lot of books at the time, even if they were books of just stories that he had already published. I think King might have published maybe 5 or 6 that particular year, so Jon finally threw in the towel and said, “Man, he just put them out faster than I can read them!”

There were a lot of good things about Jon. He introduced me to some of the first non-Shakespearean literature that I ever read. One of the things about me: I like to read but I didn’t necessarily like children’s books when I was younger. I liked the Narnia books, but I like them now too. It wouldn’t be fair to mention some of the books that kids were reading then since all of this is on the record, but there’s a horror series for little kids that I was supposed to read but I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t enjoy those stories. And I found out later that that author writes all his books with one finger on the typewriter. Maybe he would have written better stories if he had learned to use his other fingers. [Laughs.]

But Jon introduced me to a lot of literature. He had moved with his family to Mississippi from the Midwest, but I think he had some West Coast roots as well, so nobody in our little suburban town ever mistook Jon for a Mississippi boy. They had their doubts about me but they knew he wasn’t. He was all “Dude” and “Man” and all those things. But Jon loved to travel, and he introduced me to a lot of travel literature like Jack Kerouac’s On The Road.

Are you familiar with that book?

ME: Yeah, just a little bit.

CHISHOLM: Yeah, it’s a wonderful book for summertime reading. The main character and his friend travel across the United States and Mexico. That was in a time where you could hitchhike to California without getting your throat cut. It’s a good story, but perhaps a little nostalgic today.

So there were a lot of books that Jon introduced me to that I liked: but not everything. Jon tried to get me to love Allen Ginsburg, and I tried hard for Jon’s sake, but I couldn’t quite get into it. But Jon liked that stuff: he loved Poe and Hawthorne as well, and so do I.

Granny and Jon: for the early years, they would be the two individuals.

Of course, there is my mom and my dad. I get my work ethic from my mom, definitely. Although my dad’s a hard worker as well, my dad is very focused and determined. Once Dad makes up his mind, he’s going to get something done you can bet he’s going to do it. Mom always tries to reach out to people: teaching is a service for her, or maybe it is a calling for Mom.

I guess my brother and sister, even though they’re younger than me, they’re still influential and we still talk. My brother’s bravery as a Marine is always an example to me, as is his service as a police officer now. My sister taught school for a while and now she’s a stay at home mom.

I guess there are just so many people who influenced me.

ME: So a lot. (laughs)

CHISHOLM: Yeah, well you meet people. Part of the tragedy of life, and you’ll learn this, is that you meet great people and then you have to move on. One person who has influenced me more recently is Father K. As far as my Christian faith goes, Father K (as I call him) is the kind of Christian that I’ve always wanted to be. Father K for me embodies the two sides of the Christian coin. On the one hand we have to realize that there is a judgment, there is a reckoning. We have a just God and we’re not living up to his expectations or his standards. But also this God is someone who we can know intimately, who we’re drawn to with one part of our being.

Father K is very influential, and I hated leaving his church in Texas. Part of me has never really left that church. But there are a lot of people who have been influential and I hate to leave anyone out.

ME: What are some of your hobbies?

CHISHOLM: Oh, hobbies.

ME: Do you have a guilty pleasure or anything?

CHISHOLM: Too many, and I cannot indulge them on a professor’s salary. [Laughs.]

I don’t really know if you would call it a hobby or not, (well, I guess it’s kind of a hobby), but I swim. I swim three days a week for an hour each time. It’s good physical activity. I’m a lap swimmer, so there’s that. I’m trying to think. Other hobbies and guilty pleasures?

I don’t know, my kids don’t really let me get into much. [Laughs.] Definitely reading, obviously. We’ve talked a lot about that. I guess one of my pleasures would be writing when I have time to do it. I have a novel that I’m going to write one day, I’m still working on it. I have to take a break from it. It’s sort of a vampire story. I read Twilight when I finished my dissertation and defended it. And I hated Twilight. I hated it. When I read Twilight and didn’t like it, I didn’t like it in a peculiar way. I was talking to friends of mine back in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and said to them, “Why didn’t the author do this? Why didn’t she make her main character more this way?” I felt like there were so many things that she didn’t do. So somebody suggested, “Why don’t you write Twilight the way you would have written it?”

That was an interesting idea, but I didn’t really do anything with it. But then I rewatched the movie Vertigo, and I took that idea and thought that I could switch the gender roles. I could make Jimmy Stewart’s character female and make Kim Novak’s character male and make this kind of mysterious vampire character, kind of a mysterious Edward figure. So I’ve started on that and it’s kind of my guilty pleasure. Christian professor at a Christian college working on a vampire novel.

I also like to travel some. I like to ride the rides at Disneyworld. That’s my confession there. I’m sure there are other things but it’s hard to think of them right now.

ME: So about your academic career, what has been your favorite course to teach so far?

CHISHOLM: I’ve got several, and they are all different. I like the English composition courses. Of course, sometimes it’s easy to let the work of that course overshadow the pleasure. There was one class that I had last year. This class had a lot of good minds in it, but it was balanced. There are different kinds of intelligence and the class was a nice mix. We had a couple of people who were going to be teachers and English majors on the one hand. We had athletes on the other who were bright and really interested. It was a good balance. I really enjoyed teaching that English composition class.

But as far as other classes, there are some that I really enjoy but are a lot of work, like Brit Lit. That was a lot of work for me. I loved it and I enjoyed it, but I needed a break. It’s not something I could do every semester. I enjoy the Advanced Comp class we’re doing now. I enjoy seeing what all of you are doing. I’m kind of sending you all into the world to be missionaries in a sense, so I’m enjoying it and it’s a little less work for me if that makes sense because it’s not going all the way from Gilgamesh up to Shakespeare and beyond.

One course that I did not enjoy teaching was Linguistics, and I try to avoid teaching any course that’s similar to it. I’m a contextualist, my background is in rhetoric and rhetoric is all about context. It’s not as simple as plugging in the right sentence, fitting cogs and gears, and so forth. Human beings are not machines. They’re unpredictable. A good rhetorician tries to figure out what is going on and figure out the appropriate response. That works for literature as well. So Linguistics was not my thing.

ME: Is there anything that you haven’t taught yet but would really like to? Like a specific subject or on a specific author?

CHISHOLM: Sure. I am teaching a modern Christian writers class. I developed the course, the AGS course, and I’m going to be teaching two sections of it if they both meet. So I’m teaching about modern Christian writers and it gives me a chance to look into the writers that were influential to me like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s going to be short. It’s going to be brief. I can’t really pack as much in as I’d like into a 7 week course.

I got to teach Early American Lit a few times at my previous college, and I really enjoyed teaching those texts. But I’m not the Americanist here, so I’m probably not going to teach that for a while. You know Poe. Do you like Edgar Allen Poe?

ME: I do.

CHISHOLM: Yeah. What’s your favorite story?

ME: Oh my, I don’t know.

CHISHOLM: There are a ton of them.

ME: Yeah there are a ton. I really like them all. Poe is one of my favorites.

CHISHOLM: Have you ever read The Woman in Black?

ME: Yes, I have.

CHISHOLM: See that reminds me of a kind of modern Poe story. Susan Hill, she’s really good. But yeah, there are a lot of things I could do. You’ve heard the saying, “If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life.” Being a professor you can easily put in a seventy-hour week. Easily. And early in the semester sometimes you do. But it’s fine as long as you love what you’re doing. See that’s why I don’t teach Linguistics because I would be putting in those kinds of hours and not love it.

ME: What would you consider the best part of your job?

CHISHOLM: The best part of my job? Well, this. Not getting interviewed. I don’t mean that.

ME: But just talking to the students?

CHISHOLM: Right. Talking about interests especially when there isn’t anything involved. Like a lot of conferences are about students worried about their grade or they’re worried about the transcript. And the transcript is important. But I definitely enjoy sitting back and just talking. And sometimes, like in Advanced Comp for example, we just kind of get into an issue that we don’t have to. It’s not like a classroom lecture anymore, it’s like a discussion. Those are my favorites parts of the job. Where we talk about ideas as if they count for their own sake. It’s not a means to a job. Talking about this idea is not about getting a job or getting an A on a quiz and so forth. When we talk about ideas like they matter, that is golden to me and I think our culture needs more of that.

ME: What do you like most about Southern Wesleyan as opposed to? Because I know you’ve taught other places. So is there something that really drew you here?

CHISHOLM: Well, it’s kind of interesting. You know the service ethos of Southern Wesleyan? Well, it’s kind of interesting because I like to challenge some of my students because when they think of service they think of going to Cambodia to do mission work or going to Detroit to hand out bottled water in Flint, Michigan. And that is important, but also, and what I’m hoping to achieve here is the idea of service that’s not just…I told you about my grandmother and how she nurtured creativity and how she nurtured by interest in storytelling. I told you about Jon and what he did. That was a service. Wasn’t it? For me. They helped to guide me, and I worry sometimes. How many bright people do we have on this campus or in this community who are very bright but they were never nourished? No one ever nourished them. That is a service in and of itself.

Sometimes it can be a service like teaching or a service like just taking interest in somebody where you see a potential there. But going back to your question, I think it’s the idea of service that’s very important. Not to say too much about other places where I’ve worked (there were some good things about all of them), but I don’t always find that to be the case at Christian institutions (people who care about Christian service). I don’t find that to be the case. So I like that about Southern Wesleyan.

SWU is also a better place to raise my family. It just worked out. But I love the service ethos of Southern Wesleyan and the people here, and the sense of community. They take community here very seriously. I’ll give you an example of somebody: Dr. Black who is sort of the dean of faculty because he’s been here the longest of all which is why he carries the mace. I thought he just carried the mace to play Wack-A-Mole with new upstarts like me who might get out of line. [Laughs]

Dr. Black always takes an interest in me when we talk, and he doesn’t have to. On a lot of campuses, the experienced faculty steer clear of the new faculty. So the fact that he took an interest in me when he didn’t need to, that really warmed my heart. Dr. Black is a wonderful embodiment of all that is best about SWU. We’ve had some conversations from time to time about the reverend Billy Graham and how he was influential to my grandparents. But those are things that just can’t be replicated. Those are the things that are just really important.

ME: Everyone here is really welcoming. And that’s what I got when I came here. That’s what drew me in.

CHISHOLM: Yeah, very welcoming. I feel like I need to pick up my game a little bit! Dr. Black is just a really good ambassador for SWU. It’s tough naming people because you leave people out, but just everyone is. It’s the people here at SWU.

And I feel needed here. There are some changes, as you know, that we are in the process of making, we want to be a university that has interests, produces research, sponsors institutes, advocates for public education, those sorts of things. Overall everyone has been supportive and understanding. After all, we need to all play a part in keeping a vision that can keep us on track so that we will be the great faith-based university that we envision ourselves as in the next couple of years.

ME: Okay so I just have one last question. What was the last book that you read for pleasure? It wasn’t for school or anything, just pleasure.

CHISHOLM: I’ll have to think…..Well, I’ll tell you but it’s not exactly an optimistic story. Andrew Klavin, have you ever heard of him?

ME: Nope.

CHISHOLM: Andrew Klavin: he’s a writer and sort of conservative Jewish guy. I think he lives in Los Angeles, but he writes crime novels. I’ve read one of his novels before called The Werewolf Cop and it was actually a really good novel. I like the supernatural genre, so I read his werewolf book and enjoyed it. It was a good read. It was for pleasure and didn’t really have anything to do academically or with class. It was during Christmas break. That’s kind of sad isn’t it? That it was during Christmas break that it was the last time I read a book for pleasure and not really for class.

We went to visit my family in the Jackson, Mississippi area and at the library there I picked up one of his books and I picked up a book for my wife (she likes Richard Matheson). I picked up one of Klavin’s novels that I don’t even remember the name of now. That’s terrible. But it was pretty good. I only got about a hundred pages into it and then of course I had to return the book to the library.

What happens with me is that I start off reading slowly and then I pick up steam as I go. Usually what I’ve learned is to give a book fifty pages at least and then if it doesn’t grab me then it is not going to grab me. Well, the book by Klavin had kind of started to grab me but it hadn’t grabbed me completely yet because I hadn’t sped up. So I only got through about a hundred pages in a week and sometimes I can go through a whole book in a week easily (if I don’t have any distractions). But it was still kind of developing.

It was about this psychologist who’s counselling all of these psychopaths and he’s got this one psychopath patient that he’s kind of physically attracted to. She’s this kind of platinum blonde, eighteen-year-old type but she’s insane, of course. It was kind of cliché with the unstable, attractive antagonist but Klavin was doing something a little different with it. But I didn’t have time to really get into it and of course we had to go back to South Carolina, so I had to dump the book at the library. And I don’t even remember the name of the book to go back to the library and find it to finish it.

ME: It sounds interesting though. I like a good cliché story sometimes.

CHISHOLM: Oh yeah, I agree. And there’s nothing wrong with that. One of the authors that I read for pleasure is Ira Levin. I like Rosemary’s Baby. Ever heard of it?

ME: Yes.

CHISHOLM: And The Boys From Brazil?

ME: No.

CHISHOLM: Well, Rosemary’s Baby is kind of cliché. You know the antichrist is being born and it’s not really good theology because Satan can’t produce anything, even if it’s his own offspring, he can’t produce anything. Satan just ruins what has already been created.

But when an author is a good author, he can take something cliché (these kind of motifs) and kind of use it in an interesting way. Bill Buckley, have you ever heard of him?

ME: Yeah I have heard of him.

CHISHOLM: Bill Buckley has a character named Blackford Oakes: he’s kind of like James Bond, but Oakes is American. But it’s a book and it’s deeper than that because it’s about faith as well. I mentioned Susan Hill didn’t I? That’s sort of my modern Edgar Allen Poe fix. I should probably point out that there’s a difference between just feeding my fix and reading something profound. The most profound book I have ever read, and I still pick it up every couple of years, is a book by C.S. Lewis, of course, but it’s not one I have ever really discussed in class. It’s Till We Have Faces. It’s the most Christian book I have ever read but it’s weird because it doesn’t take place in Christian times and there’s no obvious or overt Christian imagery in it. It takes place in Pagan times. It’s a myth about Cupid and Psyche. It embodies all of those elements of faith that are working through us and all of the contradictions.

That was one of my problems with Christianity for a while. I had to learn to trust God. It wasn’t so simple as just converting. I had to learn to trust God because if you think about it, in Scripture a lot of things sound contradictory to a nonbeliever.

Take Jesus. On the one hand he’s this guy that everyone loves to be around. He seems comforting. He seems calm. People are just drawn to him, but on the other hand he’s telling Peter to go arm himself with a sword to keep himself from being captured. Also, there’s no shortage of fire and brimstone. And also with the scriptures: on the one hand it says I’m supposed to fear God. On the other hand, the Scriptures say that with fear there can be no love.

So there are things that contradict. And that was always my problem and what it was is this: I didn’t trust God. I wanted something clear that made sense and that’s just not the way that real faith works. There are too many mysteries and contradictions that don’t make sense if you don’t trust God. But if you trust God, He works it out for you. He makes it make sense. So Till We Have Faces is one of those books where I’m reading what I want and I’m reading what I need. I pick that up occasionally for pleasure.