While Professor J. Robert Lennon’s advice, “Symbolism is for pussies. You read it here first,” may seem a little bit unconventional, it is this entertaining yet flowing unconventionality that resonated within the readings of Lennon, Prof. Ernesto Quinonez, and Prof. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon. The three accomplished writers and Cornell creative writing professors shared samples of their work in the packed Hollis E. Auditorium in Goldwin Smith Hall last Thursday for the Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading.

Director of creative writing Stephanie Vaughn introduced the event, followed by Charles J. Ferris ’74, a friend of Cleaveland ’74, who passed away in 1999 and for whom the reading is named.

George McCormick then introduced Lennon. McCormick advised the audience, “Steal everything you can from the masters, but don’t get caught.” He added, “John [Lennon] will understand [if you steal].”

Lennon explained how glad he was that his colleagues were not stereotypical academia: “hiding behind walls” and disliking each other. “Having you guys as colleagues has been awesome,” he stated simply. Before reading his work, he explained that he thought about reading something serious, but then said to himself, “serious, smerious.”

So serious smerious it was. Lennon read a series of extremely short parody-type stories. One involved a “what if” situation of a man standing on line at Starbucks while using his Blackberry. He begins to receive anonymous messages to kill people who wronged his deceased mother. He is okay with this order until he is told that he will also die because he married a woman of whom his mother disapproved. He then gets so angry that he slams his Blackberry on the floor and dies after slipping on the glass.

It was a lot funnier when Lennon read it.

Next, Jon Hickey introduced Quiñonez. After Quiñonez spent hours helping him with his own writing, Hickey often wondered why Quiñonez would waste his time “on a poor short story.” Hickey’s ultimate conclusion was that Quiñonez “lives for the moments when he can tell a student ‘this is a story.’” Who could ask for more in an English professor?

Quiñonez justified his time and effort in helping Hickey: “There was always beer in your house, so…”

Quiñonez stated that the story he would read was his own “re-writing of a universal myth … every culture has one.” This one was set in Spanish Harlem. It is about a girl who claims, along with her mother, that she is pregnant without ever having had sex. Their church does not believe them, however, and so they are kicked out, resulting in their isolation from the rest of the community. The rest of Quiñonez’s story details the pain his narrator takes to become part of the women’s isolation. He says, “They were protecting something good, something wonderful, and I wanted in.”

Stephanie Gehring introduced the last reader, Van Clief-Stefanon, whom she said “challenges us to ask our questions boldly.” Her statement that “her mother had it right when she named her daughter Lyrae,” after the musical instrument the lyre, could not have rang more true after hearing Van Clief-Stefanon’s unique poetry and lyrical voice.

In Van Clief-Stefanon’s “Lost,” she details getting lost in a swamp with her best friend --“the closest to dying I ever came in my life…” Her vivid description causes the listeners to forget that they are sitting in an auditorium and not where they can see “gators…weary of their hunger.”

Lennon’s assertion that “symbolism is for pussies” essentially urges us to appreciate writing in its most simple and expressive form, just as the entire Richard Cleaveland Memorial Reading encouraged the audience to do. Lennon jabbed, “Guess what Harvard? It’s just a story.” Evidently, Cornell knows this already.