Patricia Lear

Biography

PATRICIA LEAR was born in Memphis, Tennessee and lives in Evanston, Illinois. She studied with Gordon Lish in New York City, and also with Mary Robison at Bennington College. Several of the stories from her short story collection Stardust, 7-Eleven, Route 57, A&W and So Forth (Alfred A. Knopf) have been anthologized in Prize Stories, The O’Henry Awards; New Stories From The South, The Year’s Best; In A Country of Her Own; Best of the South, From Ten Years of New Stories From The South, Selected and Introduced by Anne Tyler; and The Antioch Review 60th Anniversary Issue, The Best of the Decade. The New York Times Book Review included Stardust on their 1992 Summer Reading List, The Editor’s Choice, and also named Stardust as one of their Notable Books of the Year. Her stories have appeared in TriQuarterly, Chicago Works: a Collection of Chicago Authors' Best Works, Story Quarterly, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, and most recently The Alaska Quarterly Review. Lear has written for The New York Times Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Allure, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. Lear has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Finalist Award and received fellowships from Yaddo, Breadloaf, Virginia Center For The Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, and The MacDowell Colony. She was awarded a Tennessee Williams Fellowship at The University of The South. She was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Award for Literature. She is at work on a novel.

Teaching Philosophy

“I am ambitious for my students. The mark of a good teacher is how well her students do, and I take that to heart. I am most interested in what your goals are for yourself as a writer, and from there, we get to work. I seek to develop a strong relationship with my students, and from a place of mutual trust, I have seen amazing growth happen with the students I have been lucky to work with. You will have no greater cheerleader in your corner than I will be when you start having the breakthroughs we both want to see happen. 

"I am very interested in language, its beats and rhythms, on the sentence level, and especially in finding and writing the thing that only YOU could have written, not writing the thing that ANYBODY could have written. I guess you could call that finding your voice.

"Often I will ask a student what story they would have died happy to have written, and to me as a mentor, their answer is a quick way to get an idea of what it is that they love in literature, and usually what direction they want to take their own work.

"Writing is real work. I guess if it weren’t everybody would be writing novels and essays and stories. It is also one of the most incredibly satisfying things you can do with your life, hands down.”