UWG News Archive

Professor Publishes Poetry

November 11, 2003

CARROLLTON, GA - The study of disability literature has a new resource with the recent publication of a book of poems by Dr. Gregory Fraser, assistant professor of English at the University of West Georgia.

UWG News Photo Strange Pietà is Fraser’s examination of his relationship with his brother Jonathan, who was born with spina bifida, a congenital disorder that left him physically and mentally disabled.

“Jonathan was a ghost in our family – an unspoken and difficult truth,” Fraser explained. “On a personal level, this was a story that needed to told.”

The fact that Jonathan was institutionalized had profound repercussions for Fraser’s family, and he felt that he needed to write the poems to address not only the marginalized place of the disabled in American culture, but also to explore the psychological struggles that many families experience after the birth of a disabled child.

Writing poems is not a new experience for Fraser. It is something he has done since his college days.

“Like other 18-year-olds, I wrote poems having had no training, no classes. I dabbled in it and shared my attempts with a professor who introduced me to other writers,” Fraser said.

An English major in college, Fraser went into advertising but felt he was “drying up in corporate America.” He began to write poems again, quit his job and was accepted into graduate school at Columbia University.

“My mentors started to guide me stylistically. They didn’t put a ‘stamp of approval’ on my work, but pointed me toward writers whose styles appealed to me,” he explained. “Writers don’t mimic other writers but other works become your own foundation.”

As he searched for a subject matter that he could make his own, Fraser wrote his first poem about Jonathan. This work led Fraser into the arena of disability literature, a scholarly exploration of the ways in which we conceive of the “normal” versus the “abnormal.”

What emerges from Fraser’s examination of cultural standards of normalcy and those aspects of the self and others that are often considered freakish, unnatural or monstrous is a poetry of poignancy and intellectual rigor, of private discoveries and larger questions about faith, beauty and the redemptive power of art.

Robert Phillips, professor of English at the University of Houston and one of Fraser’s mentors, writes, “His subject matter is often painful, but Fraser reminds us how the painful and the beautiful can coexist in something called poetry.”

“I challenge the Western assumptions of beauty on the grounds of Jonathan’s disability and I continue to do that in my scholarship,” Fraser noted.

As a teacher of literature and creative writing at UWG, Fraser talks about the fun part of his job.

“We don’t write like Edgar Allan Poe any more,” he noted. “I love introducing students to the writings of the contemporaries.”

Fraser is the winner of several literary awards including the Walt McDonald Prize from Texas Tech University Press, which published Strange Pietà earlier this year. The book was also a two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.

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