Creative Writing and Time Spent Alone: Professor Axelrod on His Time in the Woods

In 1999, Loyola professor Howard Axelrod spent two years in the woods of Vermont, detached from society. Now teaching English and acting as the director of the university’s Creative Writing program, he has designed his classes to reflect his life experiences.

By encouraging thought provoking discussion about students’ personal experiences and global events, Axelrod said he aims to bring students together for a classroom environment you won’t find elsewhere.

Axelrod acts as the director of the university’s creative writing program, has written two books, had pieces published in The New York Times and, more recently, The Boston Globe. 

Axelrod said he grew up in Boston and graduated from Harvard University with an English degree in 1995. He moved to Chicago in 2016 and began working at Loyola. 

After losing vision in one of his eyes during a game of basketball his junior year of college, Axelrod said his view of the world changed both literally and metaphorically.

“Part of it was also questions that had been there before the eye accident, about what to value, what was important,” Axelrod said. 

In an attempt to become more connected with his surroundings after college, Axelrod said he moved to the woods of Vermont, getting rid of his TV, radio and computer, as well as rarely answering his phone when it rang. 

Axelrod said he had always been very focused on school and getting all A’s, but after his blinding incident he no longer felt fulfilled by that path. 

“I wanted to find something else to orient by, something that was not relative,” Axelrod said. “Not something small and local. My hope was that I would be able to find it in the woods.”

Although he found a “sort of” answer, Axelrod said he didn’t find exactly what he was expecting to find from the time he spent in solitude. 

Axelrod said when he left the woods and returned to Boston in 2001, he entered a strange world where people began paying more attention to the cellphones in their hands than to the people around them. 

“That was strange, that contrast,” Axelrod said. “I mean, you walk down the street and suddenly there were people yelling into their hands or talking into their hands in a way that never used to happen unless they were crazy.”

While he had spent time in the woods trying to become more connected with his surroundings, Axelrod said he felt the rest of the world had learned to do the opposite in his absence.

“That was disturbing, particularly for me, because I had spent those last two years learning how to be quiet, learning how to pay attention to then come back and walk into a Starbucks and there are all these people talking, but they’re not talking to each other,” Axelrod said. “It felt very strange.”

When it comes to students’ personal and academic lives, Axelrod said there is a culture of separation which isn’t always healthy. He said he was very used to this culture until he had a Harvard professor who taught him to think differently. 

Axelrod said this professor inspired him to recognize this separation as not always being the best course of action.

He said there is a lot of value in connecting with students about their personal lives but also knows it’s something that comes with teaching a creative writing class and understands not all professors have the same ability. 

“You never know what’s going on in someone’s life,” Axelrod said. “And you never know the weight they’re carrying. And when someone does start to share that, you realize that almost every student is carrying far more weight than I think most professors would expect.”

Kristen Beappler, a former student of Axelrod, said rather than making him less qualified to speak on pressure from social media, the time Axelrod has spent away from technology makes him more qualified since he has a perspective few others have. 

Axelrod’s introduction to creative writing class is designed to cover topics students may not encounter in their other classes, according to Axelrod, who said this could be anything from world politics to personal battles students may be fighting. 

The class, Introduction to Creative Writing, is once a week and only has 15 registration slots per semester. Axelrod said this small class setting is part of what makes the experience so different from other college classes being offered.

Axelrod’s creative writing class consists of reading and examining essays from authors about their personal lives, followed by students writing their own stories about their personal lives to discuss in class, according to Beappler.

Axelrod’s first book, “The Point of Vanishing,” was published in 2015 and provided an in-depth look at the time he spent in Vermont and what he learned during his time there. 

His second book, “The Stars in Our Pockets,” published in 2020, is about how digital media impacts the way people view the world, with the name itself being a metaphor for the cell phones most of us keep with us at all times.
Axelrod had a piece published in The Boston Globe Oct. 26 on students feeling pressured to take a political stance on conflict in the world after a discussion he had with the students in his creative writing class.

This article was written by Lilli Malone

Featured image courtesy of Howard Axelrod