Amanda Platz

Dr. Britt Terry is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Wesleyan University, and she is the Coordinator of the Department. Terry received her Doctorate in 19th Century British Literature from the University of South Carolina. 

ME: Alright, so just, thank you again for taking the time to let me interview you. So, my first question would be, where did you grow up?

TERRY: I grew up Southern Greenville County, so about forty-five minutes from here, a really pretty rural, area. The closest think I think the town is found in is Simpsonville. So that’s kind of where I grew up.

ME: Cool! And what was your family like?

TERRY: Ah, so my parents live on the land that my dad grew up on. My dad grew up on a dairy farm, so my grandpa owned probably like 500 acres. And there used to be a bigger piece of land, after World War 2 they changed things around, sold of some of that stuff. So, my dad literally lives across the street from where he was born. And then my uncles live right in that same area too. My mom is—she’s definitely a city girl. So, she grew up in Greenville proper, downtown and so, I’m sure that one must’ve been a transition for her.

[Laughs}

And I think that my parent’s personalities kind of mirror that. My dad’s really very practical and stuff like that and my mom is more of the bookish reader person.  I have a brother, and he’s younger than me. He’s almost exactly three years younger than me. We’re like, 2 years and 364 days apart. His birthday is the day before mine. And he—now he lives next door to my parents. [laughs]. On that same piece of land.

ME: that’s cool! So where did you go to college?

TERRY: For my undergrad and my masters I went to Winthrop University. So that’s right south of Charlotte, in Rock Hill, South Carolina. And I loved that place. After I finished my undergrad—I did English Education, and when I student taught I thought “that is not what I want to do.”  But that was my, that was in my senior year, so that was probably the wrong time to be changing my major or having an identity crisis–But I stayed on for the masters, and then I worked there for probably, I guess four more years after I finished the master’s degree. And then I went to USC in Columbia for my PhD.

ME: So, what was your major?

TERRY: So, I was English Ed as an undergrad and I liked it. There were things that I didn’t love. I did like teaching, but I didn’t like all the other stuff that I had to do with high school, which I didn’t really realize until I student taught. And then my MA was just English Lit, and then at Carolina I did a specialty in 19^th century British Literature. And then 20^th century is the minor—you have to choose a secondary area, so.

Me: Cool! How did you choose your major? What drew you to English?

TERRY: So, I always liked to write. I always loved reading.  I knew I wanted to write, but I didn’t know exactly how that was going to work itself out. So, I guess it was in high school, maybe middle school, I worked for our literary magazine and our newspaper—or our yearbook, I’m sorry. And so, I couldn’t decide between Journalism and English. I also wrote for the Greenville news, which I guess is still around here, while I was in high school. So, I liked it, and I initially, this is a little weird but, this is how it got there. Between my Junior and Senior years of high school I went to an arts camp and I met all these cool people so I did a drama thing and I did journalism and I did creative writing. I thought “these are my people, I want to be with these people!” So, I applied to the school where the camp was held, and it was the only place I applied. And then when I went and visited it, it was totally different, because all the arty nerds weren’t there anymore. So, my parents kind of talked me into applying at Winthrop, which I was just like, “no, I don’t wanna go there. It’s too close to home.” Which was ridiculous because the other school was exactly the same distance away, except for like, in the opposite direction. So, I went and visited it and I had a relative who worked there and he introduced me to somebody in the English department and somebody in the Journalism department and it was just some kind of like, I like the English people more than I liked the journalism people. And it was just some kind of like, I like the English people more than I like the journalism people and that’s how I chose it—it was completely arbitrary and off some kind of like, whim I guess. So that’s how I chose the English major. And I chose secondary education because I was going to ‘fall back on teaching’ if my writing career didn’t work out.

[both laugh]

This is a familiar narrative

ME: I’ve heard that a lot.

TERRY: Yea. So that is how I did that. And then when I student taught I was thinking “what have I done? I hate—” it was like horr-well it wasn’t that bad, but was not great—

ME: Not ideal, yea.

TERRY: Yea.

ME: So you originally wanted to do writing?

TERRY: Yea that’s what I thought I did. Yea. I don’t think I understood what exactly English majors did. But I knew that they read and write, so I liked that. So that’s how I chose that.

ME: So, did you grow up enjoying English?

TERRY: Yea, so I was the person who read all the books and I had this–I don’t know, it’s hard to really actually remember instead of listening to narratives my family tells or what I think I remember. Because my brother is very opposite from me. He’s mechanically inclined, he builds and takes things apart, and he’s an outside kind of guy, and super outgoing, and completely even-tempered, and just—that guy. And I am not that person, so I know I read a lot, I do remember that. I remember reading just anything I could get my hands on. But I also think I spent a good bit of time outside. I always liked movies and things like that, so I was always interested in cultural stuff, I guess. But there was also a kind of a hands-on part of my personality too. But yea, I mean I can remember in elementary school I had notebooks where I’d write down little stories, or draw little pictures, things like that. I at some point wanted to be a naturalist. Until I took chemistry, and then I was like “oh no, I can’t do this. This is math that doesn’t make any sense. No”

ME: So, you talked about teaching, at High School, do you prefer teaching College to High School, and what are some of the differences there?

TERRY: Well, some of it is a difference in perception. But I do know that my sister-in-law, my brother’s wife, is a high school administrator, my husbands brother is a high school teacher, so now I have a bit of a better idea of what I would have done. I think the difference is in high school—teaching high school there are so many things that you have to do. And so, I guess I was 22, 23 when I graduated. I wasn’t ready for that! To tell people to “stop smoking” or whatever. I didn’t understand that there would have been bathroom duty involved and I just was like –“I don’t know that I  want to police people’s bathroom habits.”  Just stuff like that, and then  I was like “oh, I have to help with an extracurricular activity? I didn’t really do any of those in high school.” Which is also sort of not true, but like I just thought I would be the person who was talking about books, and my students would totally get into it, and things like that. So, I think, all the extra kind of things that a high school or really a secondary school teacher has to do are things I didn’t think about ‘till I actually started student teaching. I also was taken aback by the—I don’t know—I was just completely naïve, that I thought people would like the books I liked, because I liked them, which is sort of ridiculous. I also wasn’t prepared for students who really could not read, even though they were in 10^th grade. They had a very low reading level, and I didn’t know what to do, because my training hadn’t prepared me for things like that. I was not prepared to deal with people’s parents, which—I didn’t think that was going to be a thing either. I honestly had no idea. So, it was all those things coming together while I was student-teaching that made me kind of panic and go ‘this is not what I want to do.’ And I really didn’t come back to teaching until I was able to teach some classes as an adjunct at Winthrop. After I finished my masters I was an admissions counselor, and then I got to teach a couple adjunct classes. And that’s where I realized “oh, I like teaching, I like books, I don’t like all that other stuff,” and at that point I don’t think I was mature enough to do all that other stuff.

ME: So, what is involved in teaching a college class?

TERRY: Well, a lot of reading. You have to know your stuff. I think there is a lot of balance between having a plan and leaving room for what might come up. So, this kind of improvisation based on a theme. So, I’m gonna set up these parameters that I wanna do, but if the class doesn’t get it or if they don’t—they wanna learn something else—being able to play within those boundaries I guess. There’s a lot of that. So, I have to kinda think a few days ahead, and also “alright, what do we want to do in this class today? How are we gonna get there? What are the ways to do these things?” so I have to kinda have a –not a bag of tricks—a set of things, ingredients like it’s a recipe that I can use, then kinda pull in other parts depending on how the class works. There’s also some assessment peace to it if you’re a good teacher you’re reflecting on ‘okay, how did that work this time? What can I do better?” which is sometimes the beauty of teaching three sections of Comp, which can get a little repetitive, but it also lets me go “okay, this worked for this class, lemme try something different, or how can I incorporate another piece in this class?” so there’s a lot of experimentation I think. You gotta kinda know your stuff and have at least a loose plan and being flexible enough to let the students take hold of that.

ME: So as an English person, what drew you to the art of storytelling and how do you think that’s important for the human existence?

TERRY: You know, I think we are—I can remember there are stories I just love—I can recall—and I wish—I feel like I could find this book again. But as a kid there were books that I really just loved. And there’s this one about these bears that go to a Halloween party: like the parents go to a party and the baby bears pop all this popcorn and it fills the whole house and they’re like—they kinda panic when the mom and dad are going to come back so they eat all the popcorn. It’s just a beautifully illustrated book. I loved that thing. So that’s a book that I feel like I could probably search and find on Amazon, but I can remember stories that I really loved and being able to retell those kinds of things. I think my family are—they’re storytellers. Even when they give directions they’re like narratives. They’re not like “go three miles on this road and turn left on exit 42,” it’s more like “go past Mr. Johnson’s house—he was the guy who used to own the elementary school.” You know, that kind of thing is part of my upbringing. We also had some really good bible storybooks too, so knowing those stories, which, sometimes I’m surprised people don’t know some of the stories you need to know that are like—even if you don’t believe them or you’re not a Christian, you kinda need to know what happened in the Garden of Eden to understand Western Literature. Sorry, you just do—or a lot of western literature. So, I think that people in general are storytellers. I think that’s how we relate to each other. I think it builds empathy. So, my students, we’re reading in Comp right now “A Raisin in the Sun,” so just kinda thinking about okay, it’s obviously not 1959 right now, you don’t live in the south side of Chicago, but can you—how can you identify with these characters? How are they like us and not like us? I think storytelling gives us a way to empathize with other people but also create our own—well, not necessarily create, but like, I don’t know, narrate our own identities, to show people what we’re really like. And I do think that ultimately it is a part of the way that we participate in being image-bearers of God. It’s a way that of being creative. And its to the point that it’s so ingrained whether it’s cultural, natural or both of those things that we do it without thinking about it. So, I think that it’s really important for us to understand each other as people and then that way it’s also reflections of God as being creative entities.

ME: So, to follow that up, I have a friend, who doesn’t understand the value of stories. He doesn’t appreciate them he thinks that if you’re gonna read, why don’t you just read a non-fiction book? Because then you’ll get the information faster… So, my question is how would you argue with someone who doesn’t see the value in stories? How would you explain to them why stories are important?

TERRY: My first inclination is to give them a book to read. Like, read the beginning of Hard Times. Do you want to be Mr. Gradgrind, who is like, basically a robot? Is that what you want? That’s okay with you? I don’t think it’s okay. I don’t think people are tools. That is taking it to an extreme, obviously. I – this is a weird thing – after I finished my dissertation I read a couple of fiction texts but now I gravitate towards nonfiction. I read tons of nonfiction texts, and in fact I tried to make a little goal for myself to read at least two fictional texts before spring break. I don’t know if that’s gonna happen—like, fun, apart from school. The other thing I would say is that good nonfiction writing still is narrative. It is narrative. Unless you wanna read a list. Some of the really good—what am I reading now? I started reading this book called Game of Queens. It’s not the best title, but it’s about women rulers in the early modern period, but it is told like a story. So right now, I’m learning about Anne Boleyn being in the court of “Margaret something”—I can’t remember her name—in the Netherlands. But it’s told like a story. It’s not like “she went here at this time. Here’s a piece of a letter she wrote. The end.” So, I think that—and another part of me just doesn’t understand. Why does everything have to be so utilitarian?

ME: Good question.

TERRY: I would ask your friend, like, “okay, why–do you own more than two pairs of shoes? Like, you don’t really need—” I think storytelling and fiction pulls into our desire to be creative and yea. That’s not to say that nonfiction can’t do that, because it can. You know, something like Malcom Bywell—that guy is like, a great storyteller. That’s why I’m reading a book about Basketball that’s all about these little narrative vignettes, but it is a nonfiction text.

ME: So it kind of clicked into my head last night that God created language! I mean, I grew up knowing this, but what implications does this have on how we study language?

TERRY: So I think the two biblical things I think about when we think about language are Babel and Pentecost. And I think people live too much in Babel. They’re like “oh, language is corrupt. Communication is—“  whether you read that story literally or figuratively, that God confused people’s languages in the Babel story and that’s because of pride. Or direct communication was severed between Adam and Eve and God, so after the fall we can’t communicate in the same way that the first people did with God. And I think that’s true, obviously. We don’t—we can’t completely express what we mean and then we can’t absorb what other people say to us in the way that it’s intended, and sometimes you don’t even know what you intend. But I think that people forget that there is a restoration that has happened with Pentecost, and that is continuing to happen the closer we get to the second coming. Pentecost is a redo Babel. All the disciples are saying the same message, so Peter, just one guy, is saying the same thing but all those people from all those places with all these different languages all hear the same message in their own language. They don’t hear another Jesus language, they don’t hear it only in Aramaic or whatever Peter would’ve spoken. They don’t hear that, they hear it in their own language. So that, to me, shows this kind of grace that God gives us, that there is this restoration. That what was maybe scrambled before is being pulled back into this kind of unity; but unity does not mean uniformity. There is diversity and that is something that we should be seeking to preserve instead of assimilating. And so my other school, where I taught in their bridge program, so I had students who didn’t do very well with English, and that’s why they were taking an extra class, and lots of them were from really rural places, so they had accents and they spoke nonstandard English and so I’d get on my little soap-box and say “Okay, that’s fine. I understand you, all these other people understand you. You should be glad about where you come from and what you say. But also know that people are gonna judge you because you say the things you do. So you’ve got choices. You can start doing these things that it’s not going to hurt you to learn, standard written English. But that’s also to say that you don’t need to get rid of where you’re from or even how you talk, that’s totally fine. So yea, I get a little cranked up about that.

ME: Good thing to get fired up about. So I know we talk a lot about in Literary Criticism, about how to look at literature how to analyze it—how does our faith affect how we read and critique literature, and study it?

TERRY: So, I think that there are a bunch of different ways to do that, of course. But I personally have to kind of think about my loyalties, what I ultimately think is true when I read a text. So, for me that doesn’t necessarily mean like, not reading something with swearing or sexy time or something in it. I love pop culture, I love lots of things that probably—so I don’t feel like I need to censor myself that way, but as a teacher I need to understand that not everybody thinks the way I do and sort of thinking about how somebody else might perceive what I’ve written or what I think about. So that kind of thing. I also think that it’s important not to just –what I would call—I used to teach these faith integration classes where I’m using the analogy of a cupcake with sprinkles on top or the cupcake that has—like the funfetti cake—with the sprinkles baked into the cake. It should be the latter, not the former. You don’t need to just sprinkle Jesus on your criticism: “and that’s what Jesus would think.” You have to think about how your faith and your Christianity works through the lenses of these other things. For me that looks something like what we’re reading in the James K.A. Smith stuff, that like, he’s definitely a Christian but he’s also not like “oh, these godless heathens, let’s never read them, they’re horrible. Let’s throw the baby out with the bathwater.” How can we integrate these things? So that kind of perspective, thinking about that all truth is Gods truth, however we get to it.  I guess knowing what your loyalties and knowing too that you have blind spots that you can’t see, so also be open to a critique from someone else. And also, that looks like, I haven’t really run into this, disparaging you because you are looking through something from a Christian lens and being upfront about that. So, I’m thinking about the last paper I presented was about Prince, and I talked about the images of the apocalypse in his words, so I don’t think you can talk about the biblical apocalypse without talking about the Bible and Jesus, so my presentation did do a lot of that. Perhaps it wasn’t what people expected, but that’s what they got.

ME: So as Christians you don’t think we should avoid books because they don’t have content we like?

TERRY: Yea, I mean, I think that there are definitely things that I’ve been horrified by, you know or offended by. But you have to be able to articulate what that is, even if you’re just doing it for yourself. So like, one of my students from my comp class was joking—I think he was joking, he keeps saying it, so I’m assuming he’s joking—that he wants to read Fifty Shades of Grey. And I was like “gross, no. why do you want to—” and not because it has tons of sex in it (I mean, I haven’t read it, but I assume), but I don’t have time to read something that badly written. That’s what I’ve heard it was poorly written too, that like, that’s the plot, and it borders on being pornographic, and I don’t have time to read that. And that’s why. It’s treating these characters like they’re tools for your instinctual desire. So being able to articulate what you’re gonna read and what you’re not gonna read and why that is. Another student at a former school was doing a project and she was reading a semi-historical novel about a woman warrior who was fighting during the Norman conquest, and the student came up to me and said “yea, there’s like a sex scene.” And I was like “okay.” And she said “I can’t read it anymore.” “okay. Here’s another book. That’s fine, that’s your prerogative.” But I really wanted to say “you’re totally cool with the massive slaughter that was happening. Tell me the difference there?” I had a student—well, this was my colleague at CSU who was offended by swearing in an James Baldwin story, but not offended by the crazy racism in the same story, which is why the character was swearing. Its like, “this is not offensive to you, but two cuss word are, and they weren’t horrible cuss words?” so I think being able to articulate that, and then also to know that borrowing from Paul’s sort of admonitions that ‘causing another person to sin, or thinking about your brother or sister in Christ, what’s going to be damaging to them?” so just thinking through those things.

ME: So would you say that it’s a good idea to read books that we disagree with, and why?

TERRY: Oh, yea, I think you should read books you disagree with. I mean, A/1. How do you know you disagree with it to read it, 2. This is kind of a debate that I think I’m having prematurely with my husband. My child, she’s only 2, but she’s not going to be 2 forever. My husband went to Christian school, small things, I went to public school, and I’m like “she’s going to the public school! She needs to be—she’s not gonna live in our house for the rest of her life (at least I hope not).” So she’s gotta be able to interact with a world that is diverse and that is not necessarily safe, and it certainly isn’t sealed off. So even, and I think about my own experience, I grew up in church, never like, I guess I had small crises of faith, but nothing like abandoning the church or the faith or anything like that. But I really didn’t meet—I thought everybody sort of thought like I did until I went to grad school and then just being open to different perspectives and having to say, within Christianity. I came in my freshman year, I went to this, Alternative Faith Alliance thing on our campus, which was this—I didn’t know what it was, so I went, they had a drum circle, so I was like “okay, cool.” But then they had this Pagan altar and all this stuff, and I was like “oh my gosh, what am I doing?” but then I was like “okay. I mean, that’s not what I do, but okay.” But it wasn’t until grad school when I met people who were like—I was going to say ‘crazy’ but I don’t mean that pejoratively, super like, Calvinist or ‘holiness tradition,’ where they’re like ‘No pants for women, no makeup,” and I was like “do what?” and then like, I mean I really had never encountered—so it was more of that then people I went to college with who were for sure atheists. SO I do think that reading books that give us perspectives that are not ours are things that we should read. And we should be able to say “alright, here’s why I don’t like it” and not it being a matter of personal taste: “How does this interact with my loyalties to Christ? How does this work in my practices? What is this book even saying?” I think what we’ve been talking about in Literary Criticism, that sometimes authors write books that they don’t necessarily agree with or intend to be one way or another, so I think it’s important to read things that are not what we agree with?

ME: Final question, you went to a Christian school and a Non-Christian school. What were some of the differences between them, and what did you enjoy and get out of both of them?

TERRY: My inclination is to say I really—I mean, teaching at [Former School] (so that’s really the only Christian school I specifically dealt with before coming here) had me really think more carefully about my loyalties and my positions on –and I mean obviously these are, in the grand scheme of things, teeny little things, but it’s a Southern Baptist school, I grew up United Methodist, I have different theological perspectives than those. I feel I’m teachable but some things I’m sort of, I’m really very, I think I’m very moderate, but it was a very conservative school, so it had me think about a lot of things that I hadn’t before, and it felt restrictive there. I think I was fortunate enough to go to schools even like my public schools, my precollege stuff at Winthrop. Finding my professors at Winthrop, my mentor, they are Christians, but they are sort of the fusty Episcopalians. But we talked about that stuff, they knew I went to church all the time there, I had a good community, yea. I had the same thing at USC. But my dissertation director and I had—I wouldn’t say a confrontation—but arguments over those kinds of things. At some point, and I’m not sure that she respects my faith, but at that point I don’t care, can we just be grown-ups and do this thing? So it helped me think through a lot of things that way. But–this sounds kinda crazy—I felt freer at the state institutions than I did at Christian ones.  Feel like you’re more, you have to have a hot take on “what do you think about this? What do you think about that?” and I feel like we’re so siloed in social issues or things like that that ‘you have to think this way, there’s no outside’ or that‘s the way it felt at [former school], I haven’t really figured it out here yet. So, yea. That would be really, that sounds almost the opposite [of how you would think it would be].