Jeff Bens '81: From Boston to the Bayou

There are days when nothing comes, but those times give way to moments of true inspiration,” he says. “The hard truth is that the secret to being a successful writer is to be working constantly.”

Bens knows from experience. A professor, English department chair, and director of creative writing at Manhattanville College in New York, he has had his short fiction published in magazines like The Oxford American and New England Review. He has also written a novel Albert, Himself and directed an award-winning documentary Fatman’s.

Such a path hasn’t always been clear-cut for Bens. After graduating from Brown University in 1985, he moved to Los Angeles to teach history. It wasn’t until friends from Cal-Arts saw his writing that it even occurred to him to pursue the profession. “I always read,” he says, “but my assumption was that [writing] was something that ‘other people’ do.”

After film school at UCLA, Bens helped design the curriculum of a new film school at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. As new as the school was, UNC was able to draw such impressive talent as David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, a director and actor who later helped make the 2008 comedy Pineapple Express a huge hit. "Their films, and plenty of others', were better than anything I could have done,” he says. “You could tell with some students that they were operating on another level.”

While he originally started a career in academia to support himself as a writer, he has grown to cherish his mentoring role. In recruiting faculty at Manhattanville, he maintains a belief that the best English professors also actively write. “I don’t think you should be teaching if you aren’t also doing your creative work,” he says. “It's good to show students that you can juggle those commitments.”

Bens’ debut novel stemmed from time spent in New Orleans during which he developed a connection to the city’s rich history, but also its pervading sense of fractured beauty. “Being a kid from Wellesley, I could never write ‘a New Orleans book,’ per se,” he says, “but I realized there was a small sliver of the city that I could capture.” Bens’ uniquely stylized voice in Albert, Himself features staccato bursts of lively description and an endearingly asymmetric rhythm. The novel received a featured review in New Orleans’ Times Picayune, with National Book Award-winning author Andrea Barrett calling it "skillful and delightful," and Margot Livesey describing it as "a vivid and enthralling debut."

His filmmaking background led him to direct Fatman’s, a documentary about a diner located in a graffiti-filled neighborhood near UNC. The film was shown at several international film festivals and on North Carolina’s PBS television station. “It took four years for me to break even,” Bens says. “But it was something I had to do – a labor of love.”

He credits Rivers for instilling in him a creative, curious intellectual spirit. “Seeing Harper Follansbee’s passion for literature was simply contagious,” he says of his former English teacher. “The faculty’s excitement for the material -- Jack Jarzavek, Melinda Ryan, Tom Siegel, Erik Suby, and others -- was something I hadn’t seen before.”

These days, Bens is pitching a second novel, Last Night When We Were Young, as well as a collection of short stories. He deems himself a “totally unbiographical writer,” creating protagonists ranging from an Irish-Catholic fish-market worker in blue-collar New Orleans to an Italian florist in Brooklyn. What remains constant throughout his work, however, is a sense of truth in feeling and atmosphere. “I don’t want to set my story in Wellesley, or make my protagonist a professor,” he says. “What engages me are the forms into which I can pour my own emotional biography."