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Dave Denny, Professor of English
I guess I must love school. Actually, I love it and I hate it. But the love must be stronger than the hate because for most of my life I've either sat in classes as a student or stood in front of them as a teacher. The part I hate (and hate may be too strong a word) is the bureaucratic part--attending meetings, giving grades, shuffling papers. The part I love is learning. I love learning new and intriguing things and I love passing on my knowledge to others who are interested. I don't much care about the other stuff, though I'm old enough to be used to doing things I have to do. The key to happiness in your professional life is to find a job that allows you to follow your passion even though it may also involve some bureaucratic gobbledy-goop (most jobs do). Minimize the gobbledy-goop in any way you can; maximize the passion and the joy. That's my advice, for what it's worth.
Because I was such a mediocre high school student, I had neither the grades nor the inclination to enter college. In fact, if it hadn't been for the love and encouragement of my family and a small circle of dedicated friends, I would have dropped out of high school and perhaps been doomed to a life of low-wage jobs and even lower personal satisfaction. Thank God for the state of California's community college system. For people like me, a late-bloomer and a slow learner, the community college served as the perfect transition between the dreary world of compulsory public education and the comparatively rich world of higher education. My two and a half years at Golden West College in Huntington Beach boosted my confidence and opened a window into a world I had not known existed--a world of ideas, culture, and art.
With a community college degree under my belt, I transferred to Cal State Long Beach to study theatre and literature and creative writing. I was lucky to have zero parental pressure on what to study. My parents were just happy I was going to college and they encouraged me to study whatever interested me. I acted in several plays at Long Beach and began writing seriously, mostly stories and poems, a personal discipline and a creative outlet I maintain to this day. I also met the woman who would become my wife at Long Beach, and we began to dream about a life together after college. It was my interest in writing, as well as the encouragement of my professors at Long Beach, that prompted me to apply to graduate school. With the exception of an optometrist uncle, no one in my family had ever been to college, much less graduate school.
Accepted by the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Oregon, I moved north and continued to study and to write, winning creative writing awards and teaching fellowships in my two years there. After graduation, I married and moved with my wife back to California where we both began teaching--she in music, me in English. We made a life together, had children, built satisfying careers in jobs we enjoyed. Life was far from perfect, but we were blessed with supportive parents, success in our chosen work, and enough money to relieve us of the sort of survival-based anxiety that has occupied most of the human race throughout most of human history.
Along the way I experienced a religious conversion and, true to form, began attending classes at Fuller Theological Seminary, eventually earning a second graduate degree after six years of dedicated part-time study. And now here it is twenty-two years that I've been teaching in the English Department at De Anza College. Time, as the old cliche would have it, indeed flies. It's a supersonic jet. There's an old song by John Lennon in which he sings, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." That sums it up well. I still haven't really decided what I want to do when I grow up. And here I am gray around the temples, with teenage children, beginning to imagine what retirement might look and feel like. What with global warming and all, it might be a good time to move north again--back to Oregon or further on to Washington, the state my grandfather left during the Great Depression to look for work in the livelier economy of California.
What follows is a three-category summary of my career to date. Kind of a shabby and inhuman activity reducing a career to bullet-points, but here it is:
Academic Degrees:
- Associate in Arts, Golden West College
- Bachelor of Arts, California State University, Long Beach
- Master of Fine Arts, University of Oregon
- Master of Arts in Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary
Areas of Specialization:
Recent Publications: poems in
- Atlanta Review
- Blue Unicorn
- California Quarterly
- Pearl
While there is much more to be said about me beyond my academic degrees, areas of special knowledge and interest, and publications, these are the three things we in higher education are judged by in our respective disciplines. In shopping for a teacher of any kind, these sort of credentials are important things to look for because they help describe that teacher's training, intellectual interests, and professional achievements. If you have a choice in the matter--and here at De Anza, students do--you want to make an informed choice. This page and the others on my web site should give you some idea of who I am and what's important to me. It doesn't (can't) tell it all, but perhaps it is a beginning.
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