Judging by his work, one might not expect College of Arts and Sciences professor Richard McCann to be the funny, sarcastic person he is in real life.
"His personality is much different than the voice of his book ['Mother of Sorrows']," said Glenn Moomau, a professor in the College of Arts and Sciences' literature department and McCann's colleague. "In person, he's very funny, and comical and self-deprecating."
McCann teaches in AU's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.
"McCann is definitely one of the best professors I've had so far at AU," said Shannon McMahon, a sophomore in CAS. "His class was incredible. Not only did my writing improve immensely, but I feel that I grew as a person as well."
McCann is the author of "Mother of Sorrows," a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories in which the narrator deals with the loss of his brother and living with AIDS. Although McCann is not living with AIDS, this disease mirrors Hepatitis C, the disease that caused him to get a liver transplant in 1996.
He also wrote a collection of poems called "Ghost Letters" and "Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic."
McCann's path to becoming a professor and author may not be typical for an academic environment. He grew up in a working-class family in the D.C. suburb of Silver Spring, Md. He decided at age 27 to pack his bags and travel to Europe, having been deprived of the international travel some of his classmates experienced at an early age.
"Where I went to school - the kinds of people I went to school with were all people who, you know, their parents would have taken them to Europe or you know they would have gone as part of a college trip or something," McCann said. "[My family thought] 'Europe? That's crazy!'"
He stayed in Europe, getting a job in Germany and then moving to other countries as soon as he had enough money.
"I traveled a lot in Europe because I took a lot of different jobs and then eventually I saved up money and didn't work. I just traveled around a lot and then took another job and so forth," McCann said. "I was jealous of [my classmates' experiences]. I thought it'd be kind of romantic. In my mind it was more romantic than it was."
McCann, who has a master's degree in creative writing and modern literature from Hollins University, a liberal arts college in Virginia's Roanoke Valley, and a doctorate in American studies from the University of Iowa, said he did not intend to become a writer. He wanted to be an actor.
"I didn't decide I wanted to become a writer," he said. "One day this person who was a fashion designer asked, 'What do you do?' and I was so embarrassed that I had nothing ... I mean, 'I vegetate ...?' I just said, 'I write.' I lied. Then I thought, 'Oh.' And so I decided to take a creative writing class."
McCann said he still has the first piece he wrote.
"It's [a poem] called 'Heights,'" he said. "It wasn't all that bad, but the funny thing was that I really am afraid of heights. And this was probably the first time ever in my life that I wrote about something I had experienced in the world."
McCann has received many awards during his career, including the 1994 Beatrice Hawley Award and the 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award, for "Ghost Letters," and the 2005 John C. Zacharis First Book Award, for "Mother of Sorrows."
Most of his work, though fictional, has an autobiographical element to it, like "Mother of Sorrows."
Toward the end of the book, the reader learns that the narrator has AIDS. McCann said that he decided to give the character AIDS because he thought Hepatitis C, his own disease, was not big or important enough. This was before he got so ill he needed a liver transplant and almost died. He said he feels differently about the disease now.
"[When we met] he was just getting ready to get his liver transplant," Moomau said. "He was very ill. He doesn't even remember our conversation."
McCann is currently working on a memoir that focuses on his transplant, called "The Resurrectionist."
"I write about things that make me uncomfortable," he said. "[My liver transplant] was a very difficult and traumatic experience. It's hard to write about, so I understand, because it is, it's what I should write about. I'm curious. I want to know how I actually feel about something and what something actually meant."
McCann said writing on the memoir is going "badly."
"Right now I'm not working on much," he said. "I've had a lot of resistance to writing it. It takes me back to being - it's like you're very, very sick and you get out of the hospital and [writing about it] is like thinking, 'Okay now I'm going to go back into that hospital.' It's hard."
You can reach this staff writer at rgonzalez@theeagleonline.com.
