Bittersweet Ending

Bittersweet Ending

By Jackie LaFrance

Sitting in her office, Professor Randon Noble frequently brushes her short brown hair from her large, soft, doe-colored eyes. Surrounded by books and paperwork, she looks perfectly at ease.

Noble has made her career in books and writing and has been a College Writing Professor in the Literature Department at American University since 2001. But now she’s leaving.

“It’s happy and sad at the same time,” she said, comparing her present teaching to her partially uncertain future. “I know I’ll miss it but I know that I’m going on to, not necessarily better things, but different things and equally as important things.”

Noble will depart AU at the end of the spring semester to focus more on her writing, and she got an agent for her first book. Her work is a compilation of essays where she uses her experiences to “figure things out about” the larger world. “I thought it was finished, but now it’s not, which is sort of the way it works,” she said. “And, we’ll be submitting to publishers when we think it’s the best it can be.”

Noble didn’t plan to become a teacher but after finding that she needed a way to pay for her graduate degree at New York University, she interviewed for and received a position as an Expository Writing Fellow teaching freshmen writing classes. She had what she described as a horrible first semester. “I was incredibly shy and it was very difficult for me to do, but the way NYU taught writing -- there was this value on experience and using experience as evidence in essay writing -- in addition to research, in addition to interviews,” she said. “The way it valued human experience was very appealing to me. Almost despite myself, despite my shyness, I really fell in love with teaching.”

She still encourages students to value memory in their work, a genre called creative non-fiction.

While interviewing at AU for a job after graduation, “the smell of fresh cut grass just knocked me over,” she said, describing the large expanse of lawn at AU, whose grounds are an arboretum.

“You know, you don’t smell it that much in New York City, unless you spend a lot of time in Central Park, ”she recalled. “It was springtime and the campus just seemed so alive, so vibrant.”

Outside of the classroom, Noble can be the stereotype of a traditional literature professor.

“I don’t remember a time where I wasn’t reading or writing,” she said. Authors she likes include Tolstoy, Andre Aciman, Jane Austin, and Richard McCann, a fellow AU Professor. She is currently reading books by Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight saga. A student saw her reading Twilight a few weeks back, and asked if she was ‘that’ kind of person, apparently meaning someone who liked popular fiction. After some thought, she answered yes, she was.

“I like to read fun things,” she said. “I like to read modern things.”

There are authors she doesn’t like, such as Sir Thomas Hardy, British author of Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Return of the Native, but, “I try to give authors a second and third chance, and I try to encourage my students to do this, too.”

One of Noble’s favorite pastimes is reading, of course, but with a twist. She likes to “make a big bowl of popcorn and balance it on my stomach and lie on my couch in my living room and read a book straight through,” she said. She recently did this with Eclipse, the third book in the Twilight Saga.

Noble also plays violin, and likes to get together with people who push her creative boundaries.

“I go to an artist’s colony in North Carolina once or twice a year for gatherings with other artists and writers, and potters and musicians, and so we play a lot of music that’s totally out of my genre,” she said. “I was trained classically, and we play a lot of country, bluegrass, folk and old-timey music.”

Noble also takes a lot of walks, especially to and from work. She likes to “just be out in the world noticing things,” she said in an email, showing a side of her that is not just “insular and literary.”

Noble is well liked by friends and students who describe her as thoughtful, quirky, cerebral, genuine, spunky and personable.

“She keeps things interesting,” said Whitney Enright, a senior in the School of International Service, who had Noble for College Writing and is currently enrolled in her Honors Colloquium. “She doesn’t want to make you feel like you have to do things. She actually makes things fun and makes you want to go to them.” One thing Enright mentioned was that Noble once held office hours in Starbucks.

“She likes to ask lots of questions,” says friend and fellow professor, Karen Askarinam “If you don’t know her well you might wonder, why is she asking that?”

“She’s kind of a rough grader, if that’s a downfall,” said Seth Goldman, a freshman student athlete in the Kogod School of Business who has Noble for College Writing. But, Goldman said Noble inspires enthusiasm among students that is unusual for a college Literature class.

As for her work, Noble said, “Writing and my life are always intertwined.”

Creative non-fiction, the genre in which she writes, allows the author to “claim not to know things, claim to be trying to figure something out,” she said. “The genre allows you to think, wonder, be wrong, stumble, guess, be corrected, all in the same piece of writing” -- a concept, she said, that she applies to her life.

Noble said she is confident she will return to teaching. In the meantime, her students will take her lessons with them.

Whitney Enright, for example, recalled a story Noble told her about getting into colleges: “It was kind of like the next door neighbor that you’re in love with and know that your suppose to marry but then a really attractive foreign exchange student comes along and you fall for him temporarily, but when he breaks up with you, you realize you were always supposed to marry your next door neighbor,” she recalled. “I think about that sometimes. It’s a really good analogy. She makes true life sound interesting.”