One of the regrets I’ve carried forward from my college years was my failure to form personal relationships with any of my instructors. While friends of mine can talk of networking opportunities or outright friendships with their professors, I doubt my former teachers would even recognize my face these days. And things aren’t much better on my side of the equation, as a conversation with a co-worker and fellow U. of U. alum earlier today forcefully demonstrated: we were talking about the horrors of writing workshops, and she asked me who my teacher had been during a particular workshop experience. To my surprise and sincere discomfort, I couldn’t remember the man’s name. I could summon up his face reasonably well, but the name was a complete blank. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have the same problem with most of my professors.

The shame of this realization sent me scrambling across the Internet, compulsively searching for any mention I could find of the four or five names I can still recall. And lo and behold, I stumbled across this upcoming release from the University of Utah Press: Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma.

Bob Steensma, as it so happens, was one of my favorite professors, probably the only one I came close to becoming genuinely acquainted with (and that’s only because I took so many classes from him!). He was (and, I would presume, still is) an elegant, older gentleman who always wore dapper three-piece suits, the most formal of any of my instructors. As I recall, he was a Navy veteran with excellent posture and a trim white mustache who didn’t think much of the trendy critical theories that were then coming to dominate literature studies.

It’s wonderfully appropriate that the first mention I’d find of him after all this time is a book about Wallace Stegner, since it was in one of Dr. Steensma’s classes that I was first exposed to this amazing novelist and non-fiction writer. I don’t know how well-known Stegner is outside of the Intermountain West, but we Utahns have practically made him an honorary son, both for his insightful writing on the history and culture of this region and because of the fact that he actually lived here for a period of time when he was young. It is the latter fact that apparently drives Steensma’s book:

Robert Steensma has meticulously searched through archival photographs, quotations from Stegner’s writings, and interpretive essays in order to recreate the Salt Lake City of the 1920s and 1930s, the city of Stegner’s youth and young adulthood.

So, let’s see: my hometown as seen by a terrific novelist during a time period I find fascinating, all put together by one of my favorite professors. My checkbook is standing by! Too bad it doesn’t come out until August…