I write stories for a living. This still seems slightly crazy to me: people actually pay me money to make things up. It’s a job I was afraid to even hope for back when I graduated from Birmingham-Southern.

I think of BSC as a crucial part of my path to becoming a novelist, although not in the ways you might think. I never took a single creative writing class, for instance. But I tend to think of a liberal arts education in terms of story. So many of us – and I am definitely talking about myself here – come to college knowing only our own limited world. We know one story, our own, and we barely understand that one. But in those four years at college, every class discussion, every novel read and underlined, every chat in a professor’s office or late-night conversation in a Waffle House offers up another story to add to our collection.

I left college with so many more stories than I started with. And – even better – I left with the sense that there were endless stories out there, and I wanted to learn them.

So. My story. I came to BSC knowing what it was like to be a girl growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, raised in a very traditional fashion by a family full of school teachers. I wanted to go far away for college. I would have gone across the country if my family had let me. Instead I wound up an hour and a half away from home.

But as I look back, it strikes me that I travelled an incredible distance. I had a contracted major of political journalism, which was a blend of English and political science. (Speaking of expanding your perspective, I’d never even heard of political science before I came to BSC.) I had entirely new worlds opened to me early on in Dr. Ed LaMonte’s Civil Rights and Justice. That class was a revelation. I was from Montgomery, for goodness’ sake, and I’d never heard a teacher say a single word about the Civil Rights Movement. It was one of the best lessons I ever learned – that not only were there other viewpoints out there different from my own, but they could be playing out right next to me and I’d never have any clue if I didn’t bother to pay attention. I think of Fred Ashe’s interim on Voices of Homelessness, where I read plenty and listened plenty and spent nights in homeless shelters and realized, once again, the power of trying to see through someone else’s eyes. I think of Sandra Sprayberry and Bill Nicholas’ Plural America, Abe Fawal’s Arabic Literature and Culture, Bob Wingard’s Religion and Society, Natalie Davis’ Contemporary Southern Politics and Comparative Politics. I think of interims spent in Guatemala for language study and in Washington, D.C., for an internship with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The world was so much bigger than I’d realized.

I haven’t even touched on the literature. To be a writer, sure, you have to write. But you also have to read. It’s the BSC English department that introduced me to Virginia Woolf and Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon and Charlotte Bronte and James Joyce and Toni Morrison, oh, Toni Morrison, who showed me how a sentence could make you lose your breath and how a novel could change you. Those books were all the more powerful because the classes were small enough that you could really get a good argument – sorry, discussion – going and it could stretch out down the hallway and back to the dorms and maybe even to the coffee shop later that night. I love the magic of those BSC overlaps: the classroom spilling into late nights, textbooks connecting with airplane tickets, professors who knew my parents’ names.

I love how all the stories came together, and, years later, they’re still coming together.

• • •

Gin Phillips ’97 has written six novels, and her work has been published in 29 countries. Her latest novel, “Family Law,” was released in May 2021. You can read more about her work at www.ginphillips.com or follow her on Instagram or Twitter.

This story was included in a special humanities edition of From the Hilltop, Birmingham-Southern’s alumni email newsletter.

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