Author Bret Lott Featured on College of Charleston Podcast
On this episode of "Speaking of ... College of Charleston," Bret Lott talks with former student and podcast sound engineer, Jesse Kunze '19 about his latest book and why he loves teaching.
On this episode of Speaking of … College of Charleston, we talk to to English professor and New York Times best-selling author Bret Lott, who is retiring this spring after nearly 40 years of teaching College of Charleston students how to tell a story.
Lott will spend his free time doing what he loves, writing and traveling, activities that are at the heart of his latest book, Gather the Olives, on Food and Hope and the Holy Land.
It’s a book about the kind of hope that’s often found when breaking bread and sharing meals. Lott is a foodie. He loves to cook and he loves to eat and Gather the Olives is true to it’s title. The pages are filled with mouthwatering descriptions of Jerusalem bagels and coffee and spices like Za’atar, which he describes as tasting “dark green, a little bitter, a forest lemon, an old taste, as in a taste past time, a harkening back to some other place, the earth.” With descriptions like that, it’s hard to believe that writing about food was new to him.
Lott has a long history of writing in genres that are new to him. When he was a student he studied with the writer James Baldwin, who advised him to approach writing with curiosity. Baldwin said, “Once you’ve learned one thing, move onto the next.” Lott took that advice to heart.
“It’s been a great piece of advice, a foundational piece of advice that I received from Mr. Baldwin all those years ago, because it’s allowed me to start over with every book,” says Lott, who has written fiction and nonfiction and now is at work on a science fiction novel.
For nearly 40 years, he has passed that advice onto his students at the College. He encourages them to “make a brand-new thing every time they write and not just repeat the thing that you already know how to do.”
He’ll miss being in the classroom with his students: “Seeing the look on a student’s face when they understand what you’re talking about and they’re seeing the world in a different in a different way because of something you might have said, but also listening to them and understanding them is the best part of teaching.”
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