Alumni Spotlight: Timothy Laurence Marsh
B.A. 2002 — Administration of Justice, M.F.A. 2006 — Creative Writing; College of Liberal Arts
California native Timothy L. Marsh came to SIU Carbondale in 1999 as a scholarship tennis player majoring in Administrative Justice. In his senior year, needing one more liberal arts requirement to graduate, he took an Intro to Creative Writing course with Beth Lordan, who was the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the time.
Marsh said that he wrote a few stories that weren’t very good, but Lordan saw in him a “twinkling of potential,” and when the class was over, she physically walked him to the English Department office and handed him an application to the MFA program. That was in December, just before graduation. Eight months later, he was back in Carbondale as an MFA candidate.
When asked about his memories of SIU Carbondale, Marsh said there were almost too many to remember.
“They light and dim like fireflies. I remember fondly my first years away from home in Schneider Hall — all the self-important, Socratic loafing with dorm mates, not just meeting but actually making a life with people who’d come from all over the world. My first roommate was from Brazil. My next was from Philly,” Marsh said.
It was through these people, Marsh said, that he met the character of the nation. He was introduced to Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis, Louisville, Paducah; and it was with these same individuals that he explored and delighted in the regions “surrounding Shangri-Las” — Devil’s Kitchen, the Spillway, the Crab Orchard Preserve.
“Mostly I remember my summers there, when the campus emptied out and I had huge stately trees and shaded lawns to myself, or my own study lounge. The memory of the region’s mellowness (something any southern Californian can appreciate) is especially strong,” Marsh said.
Marsh said that his first post-Carbondale jobs were editorial: a short stint as an editor for a textbook pre-press in Boston, followed by an editorial position at the Yonsei University Foreign Language Institute in Seoul.
But it wasn’t until 2010 that he took his first teaching position, an English lectureship at Stenden University Bali in Indonesia.
“It was there that I began to actively publish my work, most of which was travelogue and culture commentary. In 2012 I left Bali (Island of the Gods) for Wales (God’s country) to pursue a doctorate in Creative Writing. I dropped anchor for the next five years at Aberystwyth University (Aber-wrist-with) and converted my experiences overseas into a creative dissertation that explored contemporary travel writing,” Marsh said.
During this time he also served as a Graduate Exchange Scholar at Auburn University and as a Writer-in-Residence at Hub City Press.
Marsh defended his Ph.D. in 2017, spent one year as a research assistant at Dartmouth, then accepted a full professorship in a joint degree program between the International College Beijing and Oklahoma State University, in Beijing, where he teaches literature and creative writing, and is the Director of the ICB-OSU Writing Center.
Marsh said he adapted to life overseas with relative ease.
“At this point in life I have no patience for being at the mercy of the job market. I want to work where I want to live, and often where I want to live is outside the U.S. Given my history in Asia, my research focus, my attraction to international opportunities, I was fairly confident in making the leap once a suitable position opened up,” Marsh said.
Marsh said it’s an exciting time to be in Asia.
“In China you have a country whose economic and material development is as mesmerizing as it is unprecedented — a country that’s using half the world’s concrete and one-third of the world’s steel to construct half of the world’s buildings. Some people find the presence of a tower crane in every neighborhood to be unpleasant; fair enough. I think it’s fascinating,” Marsh said.
As to adapting to speaking the language, Marsh said he is getting there ‘Slowly and embarrassingly.”
“The multi-tonal nature of Mandarin creates some difficulties. Right now my fluency level rivals that of a native three-year-old. I can call out random nouns with great enthusiasm,” he said.
“After so many years and adventures it becomes important to find the beginning, the alpha, that point, place, and time from which all your journeys and adventures sprung. For me, SIU is less an institution than a genesis. It is the place where the world first unveiled itself promising and diverse, a large grand thing worth entering,” Marsh said.
And for all his international travel, Marsh, who publishes under the name Timothy Laurence, is still publishing. He is the author of the essay collection, How to Make White People Happy (Alternative Book Press). His nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, The New Welsh Review, Fourth River, Barrelhouse, Ninth Letter, The Evansville Review, The North Dakota Quarterly and The New Quarterly among others.
Marsh’s other honors include residency fellowships from the CAMAC Center d’Arts, the Can Serrat International Arts Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and a 2009 Arts Jury Award from the City Council of St. John’s, Newfoundland. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Web.
He has been a Graduate Exchange Scholar at Auburn University, a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has been awarded scholarships from the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference and the CAMAC Centre d’Art.
In 2015 he served as Writer-in-Residence at Hub City Press and was longlisted for the World Wildlife Federation New Welsh Writing Award, honoring writing on nature and the environment. His current work can be found in “Grist,” and “Catapult”
“As of now the majority of my published work is personal essay and travel memoir. But I am slowly finding my way back to writing fiction — my first love,” he said.
Marsh said several faculty members influenced his career, but “the biggest shout-out” goes to Beth Lordan, who was his thesis advisor.
“Beth is a master of downplay, so she’d never be so dramatic, but the fact is that my life would’ve taken a very different trajectory had she managed that undergrad creative writing class — or her teaching approach in general — in a less attentive, impassioned manner. As a writing advisor she was a menace (in the most serviceable way), never placating, never faltering to lip service or giving credit where it wasn’t due. If you wrote something lousy, you heard about it directly and acutely. In a literary era of ornate and hollow advocacy, God bless her for that,” Marsh said.
As to what’s next? Marsh said that one nice thing about starting a new life is that it excuses you from having to answer that question comprehensively.
“In other words, I’m still in adaptation mode. Learning a new culture, new government, new language and education system, not to mention the ins and outs of a new university and department, doesn’t leave much mental energy to plan beyond the immediate future,” he said.
Marsh said that like a lot of writers, he tends to plan his life the way he plans his stories: page to page.
“That said, I’ve grown accustomed to making a life outside of the States, in Asia or elsewhere. I imagine I’ll keep the habit up if I can,” he said.
These days you can find Marsh on the trails.
“I’ve become a connoisseur of handsome coasts, forested mountains and urban footpaths. I did the Pembrokeshire Coast Path in Wales, several sections of the Appalachian in Vermont, and recently completed the 50-kilometer Hong Kong Trail. This summer I’ll be in Japan navigating the arduous (though hopefully not perilous) Kii Peninsula, specifically a network of pilgrimage routes called the Kumano Kodo,” he said.
You can touch base with Marsh via Facebook, or Twitter.
Alumni Spotlight celebrates our Saluki Alumni and their memories of their time at SIU Carbondale. We focus on a different Alumni each week, and publish the feature on Wednesday afternoons on our Facebook and Twitter pages.
If you’d like to be the focus of this weekly feature, or nominate someone to be featured, please email us at: alumni-socialmedia@alumni.siu.edu.
