Professor Profile: Todd Pierce

English professor Todd Pierce isn’t hard to notice.

On any given day, you can find him dressed in khaki shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and sandals with his long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail.

“They stopped letting professors come to campus wearing their pajamas, so this is the closest I can do,” Pierce said.

But Pierce’s laid-back attitude doesn’t end with his appearance. From his slow, deep and lulling voice to his, as he says, “easygoing” teaching style, Pierce is as relaxed as his beach town community in Goleta was when he was growing up.

Although his mellowness might not make you think he’s a busy man, Pierce is a respected author, professor and, more recently, father who has his hands full.

As a creative writing professor, Pierce certainly has a strong connection with words. But he first fell in love with writing not by picking up a pen and paper but rather by simply reading.

“I love reading,” Pierce said. “When I graduated from college, all I really did was read. I would read everything I could get my hands on. I’d read books and put off math assignments to read.”

When Pierce graduated from college, however, he didn’t even become a writer. He became a bartender.

“While at my bartending job, I saw people 10 or 15 years older than me and thought, ‘Hmm, I really don’t want to end up there,'” Pierce said.

And so Pierce picked up his pen and paper and acquired a master’s degree from Oregon State University, a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of California, Irvine, and finally his Ph.D from Florida State University.

Pierce enjoys teaching fiction writing and also usually teaches contemporary literature and poetry.

“Short stories and novels are the things I most strongly relate to and involve myself most deeply in,” Pierce said. “It’s exciting to see other people get involved with fiction, too, and have that light turn on when they understand what they’re trying to do.”

Although Cal Poly isn’t regarded primarily as a liberal arts school, Pierce still finds his students to be good writers. And after teaching for 17 years, Pierce has even seen an increase in the quality of writing skills of his students.

“I’m starting to see the first wave of the Harry Potter generation show up at college . and (Harry Potter books) generally teach good reading skills, how to approach a novel and certain joys of reading,” Pierce said. “Both of those things are really positive in terms of what I’m teaching.”

And as Pierce points out, having good writing skills is even more important to college students now than it was 10 years ago, thanks to the emergence of online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

“People on Facebook are using elements of tone that no one was using 10 years ago,” Pierce said. “In college, if someone wants to come across as sarcastic or ironic or gripping with sincerity, people don’t want to have the subtext of their tone misinterpreted. Students now have a mature sensitivity to language and they want to make sure that their intended message and underlying tone of their message is understood as someone reads it.”

While Pierce spends most of his time either teaching or with his wife and newborn twins, he also likes to make time for his own writing. Pierce has published three books and has two more on the way.

His first book, titled “The Australia Stories,” was inspired by Pierce’s experience of living in Australia teaching high school for a year. The book’s collection of short stories is from the perspective of an American who moves to Australia and develops a strong connection with the country while reconciling with his past.

“I think the perspective of being outside of the country and having some distance on your roots is a pretty cool experience,” Pierce said. “It took me a while to shape it into something that looked like a book rather than rambling incoherent observations.”

After the personal experience of writing “The Australia Stories,” Pierce moved on to “Newsworld” to make a statement about the world at large and to have a meaningful commentary outside of himself.

“Newsworld” is also a collection of short stories that, through parody, tries to capture the media’s obsession with blurring the line between news and entertainment.

One of the stories, titled “Columbine the Musical,” is about a group of children that want to put on a musical production of the Columbine shooting as a way of talking about school violence.

“Columbine and other stories like OJ Simpson are this sort of TV miniseries, and in news the impulse is to report, reveal, investigate and analyze,” Pierce said. “But in entertainment, the primary motivation is to get people to see what happens next.”

“Newsworld” has also brought Pierce some of his most honorable awards, such as the Drue Heinz literature prize. The book was also a finalist for the Patterson Fiction Prize and the John Gardner Book Award. It was also reviewed in The New York Times.

Pierce even visited Columbine High School prior to writing “Newsworld” to develop a personal connection to what he was writing about.

“The story was something that had our national identity and how we treated the news, and being at the school provided a sense of the reality of it,” Pierce said.

Walking down the halls of the high school at midnight, Pierce could only describe the experience as “freaky.”

“I walked over to the cafeteria and I could look inside and all the tables were in perfectly neat rows,” Pierce said.

Pierce is currently working on a non-fiction novel about the men who designed spin-off Disneyland theme parks in the ’50s and ’60s.

After extensive research, Pierce came to find that Disneyland, with its western, sci-fi, adventure and animated areas, represented an opportunity for people to inhabit Hollywood sets and live inside the world of entertainment.

“It was an interactive world where people weren’t passively watching entertainment, but were suddenly inside the three-dimensional world of entertainment,” Pierce said.

Outside of teaching, Pierce likes to stay busy by doing research for his books and traveling at the same time. For example, Pierce traveled to seven states in the last year to research his upcoming book.

But Pierce prefers teaching rather than writing full time because he considers life as a writer to be “not practical” and “a very lonely life.”

Teaching is far from over for Pierce as he doesn’t see himself retiring until he’s 97. But perhaps teaching is where he belongs.

“My mom taught college for a while, and I’ve pretty much been in college all my life. It’s a very comfortable life for me,” Pierce said. “I like the world here and how it all works. I like being around students and other faculty members. It’s very homeish.”