Before Mary Karr sold her first book, she was a poor, single mother, working and raising her son on an adjunct professor’s salary.

Karr recalled not being able to afford a car as one of her biggest challenges because she struggled to transport her son or drop him off at day-care when she needed to.

“Anybody who tells you that’s not important has never been as broke as I was,” Karr said.

Within the frame of just a few years, however, Karr would receive national acclaim and success for her bold, personal works as a memoirist and poet.

Karr, now the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University, will deliver this year’s commencement address in the Carrier Dome on Sunday. She will also receive an honorary degree as a Doctor of Humane Letters from SU.

Though Karr said she starts to sweat when thinking about speaking in front of so many of her close, personal friends and colleagues, she is touched, surprised and honored to be giving the address.

Before coming to SU, Karr worked at several other colleges and universities, including Tufts, Emerson, Harvard and Sarah Lawrence. Karr joined the Master of Fine Arts program at SU in 1991.

Karr said she is first and foremost a poet. She has published four volumes of poetry, was a poetry columnist for the Washington Post and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Karr published her first memoir “The Liar’s Club,” which details her troubled childhood in a small Texas town in the early 1960s, in 1995. She was a New York Times best-selling author for over a year. She went on to publish “Cherry” and “Lit,” both memoirs of her dealings with adolescence, sexuality, adulthood and addiction.

Though Karr said the desire to write came before the desire to teach, she has discovered teaching to be a satisfying “spiritual pursuit.”

“When you’re a young writer you have these delusions of grandeur, that you’ll grow up and become this big fancy writer,” Karr said. “But you realize it’s more gratifying to help others’ dreams come true.”

Karr is a trustee professor teaching one semester per year. She balances her time between Syracuse and New York City. When she’s not teaching, Karr said she focuses her time on big projects and books.

Grady Chambers, a graduate student in the MFA program, said one of the most outstanding things about working with Karr is her attention to students and their work.

Chambers recalled being in a poetry workshop taught by Karr, and feeling deeply anxious about his work and the direction it was taking. He expressed this in class, and Karr held him after to sit down and talk through it. Chambers said she then took him out to dinner and continued helping him outside of class throughout the next few weeks.

“You make a decision to love your students,” Karr said. “They have to be people you choose to care about personally, or else you may resent them because they take away time from your writing.”

Chambers said because Karr spends so much time with her students, she’s not afraid to look at their work closely, question it and push back.

“I’ve probably received more rigorous written feedback from Mary on my poetry than I have from anybody else,” Chambers said. “It’s indicative of the degree to which she holds students, and certainly held me, accountable for the writing we’re putting on the page.”

Adam Bright, a graduate student in the MFA program who worked with Karr as his thesis adviser, recalls advice Karr gave which struck him: Saying the things that you’re scared to say is not a source of weakness; it’s a source of power.

Bright said Karr, whose work is known to be brutally honest and vulnerable, expects the same from her students.

“She really makes people cough up their vulnerabilities, give up their defenses and get to the heart of what is interesting about their story,” he said.

Bright said if you speak up in Karr’s class, you can expect her to take your comment seriously enough to challenge it or ask you to back it up. There are no abstract conversations about poetry in Karr’s class, only real, personal stakes and exposed emotions, he said.

“She won’t let you hide, which can be easy for young poets to do,” Bright said. “She’ll smoke you out into the open, and that’s an incredibly viable thing.”

Cathryn Newton, who worked with Karr when Newton was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 2000-2008, said Karr is a magnificent recruiter and has been crucial in the growth of the creative writing program at SU.

“She has a stunning ability to identify exceptionally talented faculty, and she also has an unerring eye for talent in students,” Newton said.

Newton said Karr is known for her ability to frame things with directness and sensitivity. Newton added that Karr brings “unsparing honesty combined with compassion” to the classroom.

In her time working with Karr, Newton said, she has not only been a valued colleague, but also a close friend.

“Mary has a sparkle, pizazz, directness and amazing way with language that is with her whether she is in a one-on-one conversation or with 2,000 of her friends in the Carrier Dome,” Newton said. “I think people will love her.”

Karr’s teaching experiences helped inspire her newest piece, “The Art of Memoir,” which will be released next fall. The piece discusses “how we kid ourselves and about who we are and how we remember things,” Karr said.

Karr added that she has also begun work on a project with Showtime, a television series about her life, starring Mary-Louise Parker.

Karr said most of her favorite discussions about literature and poetry have happened within the walls of SU.

“We’re all part of this really important conversation about love, suffering, survival and what it is to be a human being,” she said.

Published on May 7, 2015 at 8:00 am

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