Professor Cori Winrock
Please join the WWU English community in welcoming Cori Winrock and getting to know her through this series of icebreaker questions.
Where did you live/work before coming to Western?
Before coming to Western I lived in Cleveland, OH where I taught at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Before that I was in a PhD program in Salt Lake City where I marveled at the sea monkeys and the strangeness of being surrounded by mountains. And before that I was in the fairytale woods of Western New York, where I was raised.
What is your area of specialty?
My area of specialty is the line and how to break it. Though I work across genres and am always ransacking the museum of craft as I am writing—underneath everything I do is my training in poetry, its attention to the tiniest piece of punctuation as a way of communicating.
What do you like so far about being at Western?
The students! Wow, what a fantastic set of minds at work on the world. I run my classes as inquiries and the students have shown up so fully for these conversations. Every class is unpredictable in the best way. And also, the sculptures on campus—look at all this art we get to walk through each day. On the way to and from my office I walk through a Noguchi and up and down Stadium Piece. I love to sit in the circular windows of Nancy Holt’s Stone Enclosure and am so glad it’s finally reopened.
What stirs joy within you outside of your work?
Curiosity and the unexpected. Even when I can’t find joy, I can find curiosity. My kids childsplain how things work to me all the time—and it’s such a great balance to so much destructive explaining going on in the world. Taking careful care of things—having my shoes resoled, finding new ways to reuse a material.
What is your secret “superpower”? Tell us something that others may not know about you.
I have two superpowers. The first is time—I know exactly how much time something will take to do or how long it will take to get somewhere. I can break it down backwards or imagine it forwards. This is not as useful as you would think. The other is having a snapshot-like memory for details. I’m like Sean Spencer in that mid-aughts show Psych. I could totally have been a fake psychic detective. Instead, I am a writer obsessed with the gorgeous nonlinearity of lyric time and how specificity of detail can translate into an image-based narrative.
