Tanya Heflin
If you have a good story, Tanya Heflin would like to hear it. As a faculty member in the Department of Language, Literature, and Writing, she loves to share her stories and hear the ones around her, because that’s a great way to understand the people and the world around us. Learn more about her in the week’s Meet Our Faculty feature.
What is it about the English field that initially drew you in—and ultimately keeps you interested?
In short, I love stories. I love hearing people’s stories; I love telling stories; I love studying the ways that stories reflect the cultures and the deepest drives of the people who tell them. We human beings are narrative creatures, and in even the most seemingly non-literary arenas of human life—science, technology, business, economics, politics, governance, sports—we find again and again that it’s the stories we tell that help us make sense of our lives within the larger world.
Why do you enjoy teaching in this discipline?
First, I enjoy my students—from those just entering their first semester to those walking across the stage to be hooded for their doctoral degrees. I enjoy sharing my passion for writing and literature with them, and I especially enjoy when they share their excitement about their own quirky interests with me.
Second, I enjoy working with and learning from my talented colleagues both here in IUP’s Department of Language, Literature, and Writing and from around the world.
Finally, I feel fortunate that my discipline has such scope of study and significance to so many other fields.
What advice would you give students about how to succeed in college?
My main advice is to recognize that these college years make up a precious and privileged time in your lives, so I want you “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” as Thoreau exhorts us.
I encourage you to be as present as you can while you’re here. Dive in all the way. Go to class. Go to that special event. Join that club. Visit your professors’ office hours. Explore your interests widely now so that you have the best possible chance of finding your passion while you’re here. And when things feel hard, as they inevitably will some days, get a good night’s sleep and don’t ever feel shy about asking for help. Everyone here wants to see you happy and doing good things, and IUP has resources to help.
Tell us something most of your students may not know about you.
In class, my students may notice that I’m nerdy about learning new things, but they may not know that I also continue to take courses myself whenever I can. Right now I’m earning the Certificate in Photography and Digital Imaging through the amazingly talented faculty in our Department of Communications Media.
For me, learning about fields beyond my own is priceless, and it’s given me new insight into how my field’s literary focus on verbal modes of storytelling connects so profoundly to visual modes of storytelling—opening up a whole new vein of scholarship. My hope for students is that they tap into their own passions so that they can tell their own stories while they’re here at IUP and beyond.