2008 Woodie Awards
Native Bloomsburg professor reads at Big Dog Reading Series
Tony Brino
Issue date: 11/1/07 Section: news
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Professor Wemple, who lived between Bloomsburg and Danville as a small child, read the autobiographical essay "The True and Complete Story of Orange." The essay is part of a series of connected essays and poems about the author growing up around the region. It is, as Wemple described it, "like an abstract painting about a girl who dies." It took the audience through a random yet rhythmical narrative of the author's life growing up in Florida and central Pennsylvania.
"My mind was clear and I was ready to die," read the English Professor as he described the feeling of riding a motorcycle around a wet curve overlooking a steep cliff.
BU senior Lynn Gibbons, described Prof. Wemple's story as "impressive, oddly beautiful yet saddening."
Wemple, in his reflective prose, felt the best part of America is the "reinvention of self," as he spoke of the several women of significance in his teenage years.
He described how he learned from his best friend's drunken father one night, that he was in fact the son of his best friend's mother and a black man. Wemple's birth mother asked her sister to raise and adopt him. Wemple described his experiences with racism, talking about how the fathers of girls he dated forbidding their daughters to be seen in public with a black man. A racist teacher, who was rumored to have made his suits out of old drapes, and expected Wemple to join the basketball team.
Wemple focused on his lasting affection for Orange, "the girl he met with her thumb and fore finger stuck together with crazy glue." A girl he would walk with and feel "the happiest he's ever been." His feelings for her were "intentional and thoughtful, but whom he would never be able to stay with because, as he would later learn from her brother, their father "beat her and refused to allow his daughter to go out with black man."
BU Senior Joe MacDonald described the reading as "a good story showing the conflicted nature of a region to where the Professor eventually returned."
Wemple closed his story with reflections about the Susquehanna River, how it changes on its own accord unlike towns, which are changed by humans. The river "will be low when it needs to be low, and rise when it needs to rise." The River reflects undeniable truths.
The Professor's essays, poems, and reviews have been featured in numerous publications including "The Connecticut Review" and "The Pittsburgh Quarterly."
The Big Dog reading Series was sponsored by the English Department and the College of Liberal Arts.