Lecturer Spotlight: Dennis Doherty, English
First published in January/February 2013 edition of The Bullhorn. The original publication can be found here.

During the Spring 2010 semester, contemplating a future college education, I sat in on a Short Story course at SUNY New Paltz as part of the Spend the Day program through Undergraduate Admissions. From the back of the classroom, I noticed the professor’s engagement with both the students and Albert Camus’ “The Guest,” serving as my first and lasting impression of college instruction. A year later, I took Creative Writing I with Dennis Doherty, fairly certain he was the same man at the front of the Van den Berg classroom. Last semester, I relived the Short Story class on Albert Camus’ “The Guest,” this time in the first row, vividly recollecting the day I decided to attend SUNY New Paltz. Each class with Doherty delightfully interweaves literary examination with personal anecdotes. His transparency, his humanness, at the front of the classroom, shed light on just how much five courses strains a Creative Writing lecturer long before our interview. Dennis Doherty not only provided my first glimpse of the college-level English class, influencing my decision to attend SUNY New Paltz, but opened my eyes to the immense workload burden that weighs down contingents, motivating my interests as Chapter Intern.
Like a previous interviewee, Doherty grew up in lower Westchester County, specifically New Rochelle, which he coincidentally stated was near Ed Felton’s hometown, Pelham. After dropping out of high school, he hitched across the country, doing odd jobs and hanging out with “older people who were turning into bums and druggies.” Apple picking was one of these many quirky jobs, while he lived on an apple orchard in Yorktown, approximately fifteen minutes from my home in upper Westchester. Excited to take his Creative Writing class, I would tell fellow students that Doherty knew where I lived because he steered “pick your own” customers away from the fruitful trees with low-hanging branches, although many years before I would be one of his victims. I never knew that detail was a very small piece of his young-adult experience.
Struggling with plans for the future, Doherty “turned to the bold romantic move of joining the Navy.” He was first stationed in New London for two years, extended his enlistment six months, and spent another two-years on the forward deployed frigate Lockwood out of Yokosuka, Japan. On Lockwood, the naval recruits “travelled all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, doing mock battle with the Soviets, saving Vietnamese boat people, and finally cruising Gonzo Station near Iran during the Hostage Crisis.” This experience fostered his physical and mental strength, enforced a responsible workmanship, and formed his “nascent moral conscience.” Other than his novel manuscript Subic, based on his experiences in the Philippines, he has numerous poems on his time in the Navy scattered across his collections. “The experience will always be there in my memory, so I’m sure I’ll always draw from it.”
After his mother’s death, Dennis entered an existential crisis, suddenly seized with the necessity of doing something important and meaningful, rather than working as a clerk on Wall Street. Attending college was his answer. SUNY New Paltz was mere coincidence, as one of his friends, a graduate of the school, convinced him to attend. Surrounded by literature and writing since youth, because his parents were writers, Dennis Doherty initially wished to stay clear from the literary path, but background inevitably won over young adult rebellion and he dove into an English degree.
When Doherty says, “I have been here ever since,” he means it; he never left. At the end of his undergraduate education, he was offered a TA position if he pursued a Master’s in English at New Paltz. Afterwards, he continued teaching as an adjunct. “An adjunct position is really good for people who have free time and really love doing what they’re doing,” and although he loved teaching, a low-paid, part-time career is not sustainable, especially for a father of a young family. In an effort to support his wife and baby girl, he acquired adjunct positions at three different universities, culminating in five courses per semester. In the school’s Migrant Education Program, he obtained a full-time position teaching GED English and social studies, but still held onto his adjunct position in the English Department.
Such loyalty helped the Creative Writing instructor when, in 1999, the GED program lost their grant and Doherty lost his full-time employment. After confessing to Professor Kempton, then the English Department Chair, his need to leave SUNY New Paltz to seek full-time employment elsewhere, Dennis was offered a lecturer position. The next year, he had to reapply for the same position, with a formal letter explaining his personal qualities, as if the faculty did not already know him for nearly a decade, and a group interview. “It was weird, having to reapply for my own job. I was given an interview in one of my friend’s classrooms by my previous professors and current colleagues.” Like all lecturers, he has to continuously reapply for his position every year or two.
While workload has increased for faculty and staff across campus, Doherty recounts exponential increases. One seemingly consistent rule across campus is a five-course workload per semester, but waivers for either advising or committee involvement hope to balance out the intense demands. He served as Director of the Creative Writing program and the Poetry Board for seven years, and advised Creative Writing students, in exchange for two course waivers: a workload comparable to his tenure-track colleagues.
Unfortunately, the workload only increased from there. One course waiver was removed because he supposedly was not working hard enough. After the economic collapse in 2008, waivers disappeared for all English lecturers, and Creative Writing advisees were reassigned to English Literature professors. However, no one relieved Dennis Doherty from his Director positions. Although he offered to step down from the roles immediately after losing his waivers, no one would take his place. He fused the Poetry Board with the Creative Writing program in an effort to ease the workload, but he still had to organize Creative Writing events and administer the program, on top of his five courses, until last semester.
Unlike other full-time colleagues, at least in the English department, lecturers are not required to publish. Doherty remains skeptical about how the non-requirement contributes to pay raises. “It seems I only get a major merit raise every year I publish a book. Early on, I raised that concern and did not receive a very definitive answer. Recently, I brought up the concern again, so we’ll see where that goes.” Also, the published poet fails to see the benefit of deterring lecturers from improving their instructional quality with an excessive course load. “As a creative writing professor, I am supposed to be an example to the Creative Writing students in my courses; I am supposed to be an expert in my field. However, I have absolutely no time to write. I have not written anything at all this Fall semester.” In exchange for aiding budding writers in their craft, the poet sacrifices his personal work. Still, he continues to manage and merge his roles as a writer and a teacher. Over the winter break, he worked on a contracted novel, Why We Should Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He teaches American Literature I every semester.
Dennis Doherty’s reputation as the “poetry professor” and aficionado only blossomed later on in his post-graduate experience. He did not mainly write poetry until working on his first novel, realizing his tendency to focus on distinct images and abstract thoughts in a lyric fashion towards the end of his work. Subsequently, he took on the challenge of poetry, identifying the difficulty of the literary craft in his effort to master it. However, “once I found success—or what I consider success—I realized that no one reads poetry because it is so hard.”
After publishing three volumes of poetry--The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), and Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010)—Doherty enjoys local readings. He entertains audience members with relatable anecdotes, placing his poetry within his individual experience and a collective identity probing at life’s complex, overarching questions and themes. His work exercises descriptive imagery, explores abstract thoughts, revisits familiar topics of “love, life, death, and sex,” and recollects events in a personal and communal context.
One of his frequent topics, fatherhood, serves as a testament to his devotion to family and his private life. Doherty has three daughters. The oldest is twenty-two, attending SUNY Stony Brook, and the others are seventeen and fifteen. As the only guy in the family, he will admit they are a bit closer with their mother, but he loves his quality time and relationship with his daughters. “We’ll be driving in the car and they’ll ask me how I was like at their age and about my opinions on certain issues. They’re interested in me, and that’s really nice.” To say he takes pride in his daughters is an understatement. Most of his in-class anecdotes revolve around the girls, tying in their curiosities about life to the fundamental explorations of creative work and famous literature. “They are really good kids. They have great morals, and even though they are teenagers, they do the right thing.”
Like a previous interviewee, Doherty grew up in lower Westchester County, specifically New Rochelle, which he coincidentally stated was near Ed Felton’s hometown, Pelham. After dropping out of high school, he hitched across the country, doing odd jobs and hanging out with “older people who were turning into bums and druggies.” Apple picking was one of these many quirky jobs, while he lived on an apple orchard in Yorktown, approximately fifteen minutes from my home in upper Westchester. Excited to take his Creative Writing class, I would tell fellow students that Doherty knew where I lived because he steered “pick your own” customers away from the fruitful trees with low-hanging branches, although many years before I would be one of his victims. I never knew that detail was a very small piece of his young-adult experience.
Struggling with plans for the future, Doherty “turned to the bold romantic move of joining the Navy.” He was first stationed in New London for two years, extended his enlistment six months, and spent another two-years on the forward deployed frigate Lockwood out of Yokosuka, Japan. On Lockwood, the naval recruits “travelled all over the Pacific and Indian Oceans, doing mock battle with the Soviets, saving Vietnamese boat people, and finally cruising Gonzo Station near Iran during the Hostage Crisis.” This experience fostered his physical and mental strength, enforced a responsible workmanship, and formed his “nascent moral conscience.” Other than his novel manuscript Subic, based on his experiences in the Philippines, he has numerous poems on his time in the Navy scattered across his collections. “The experience will always be there in my memory, so I’m sure I’ll always draw from it.”
After his mother’s death, Dennis entered an existential crisis, suddenly seized with the necessity of doing something important and meaningful, rather than working as a clerk on Wall Street. Attending college was his answer. SUNY New Paltz was mere coincidence, as one of his friends, a graduate of the school, convinced him to attend. Surrounded by literature and writing since youth, because his parents were writers, Dennis Doherty initially wished to stay clear from the literary path, but background inevitably won over young adult rebellion and he dove into an English degree.
When Doherty says, “I have been here ever since,” he means it; he never left. At the end of his undergraduate education, he was offered a TA position if he pursued a Master’s in English at New Paltz. Afterwards, he continued teaching as an adjunct. “An adjunct position is really good for people who have free time and really love doing what they’re doing,” and although he loved teaching, a low-paid, part-time career is not sustainable, especially for a father of a young family. In an effort to support his wife and baby girl, he acquired adjunct positions at three different universities, culminating in five courses per semester. In the school’s Migrant Education Program, he obtained a full-time position teaching GED English and social studies, but still held onto his adjunct position in the English Department.
Such loyalty helped the Creative Writing instructor when, in 1999, the GED program lost their grant and Doherty lost his full-time employment. After confessing to Professor Kempton, then the English Department Chair, his need to leave SUNY New Paltz to seek full-time employment elsewhere, Dennis was offered a lecturer position. The next year, he had to reapply for the same position, with a formal letter explaining his personal qualities, as if the faculty did not already know him for nearly a decade, and a group interview. “It was weird, having to reapply for my own job. I was given an interview in one of my friend’s classrooms by my previous professors and current colleagues.” Like all lecturers, he has to continuously reapply for his position every year or two.
While workload has increased for faculty and staff across campus, Doherty recounts exponential increases. One seemingly consistent rule across campus is a five-course workload per semester, but waivers for either advising or committee involvement hope to balance out the intense demands. He served as Director of the Creative Writing program and the Poetry Board for seven years, and advised Creative Writing students, in exchange for two course waivers: a workload comparable to his tenure-track colleagues.
Unfortunately, the workload only increased from there. One course waiver was removed because he supposedly was not working hard enough. After the economic collapse in 2008, waivers disappeared for all English lecturers, and Creative Writing advisees were reassigned to English Literature professors. However, no one relieved Dennis Doherty from his Director positions. Although he offered to step down from the roles immediately after losing his waivers, no one would take his place. He fused the Poetry Board with the Creative Writing program in an effort to ease the workload, but he still had to organize Creative Writing events and administer the program, on top of his five courses, until last semester.
Unlike other full-time colleagues, at least in the English department, lecturers are not required to publish. Doherty remains skeptical about how the non-requirement contributes to pay raises. “It seems I only get a major merit raise every year I publish a book. Early on, I raised that concern and did not receive a very definitive answer. Recently, I brought up the concern again, so we’ll see where that goes.” Also, the published poet fails to see the benefit of deterring lecturers from improving their instructional quality with an excessive course load. “As a creative writing professor, I am supposed to be an example to the Creative Writing students in my courses; I am supposed to be an expert in my field. However, I have absolutely no time to write. I have not written anything at all this Fall semester.” In exchange for aiding budding writers in their craft, the poet sacrifices his personal work. Still, he continues to manage and merge his roles as a writer and a teacher. Over the winter break, he worked on a contracted novel, Why We Should Read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He teaches American Literature I every semester.
Dennis Doherty’s reputation as the “poetry professor” and aficionado only blossomed later on in his post-graduate experience. He did not mainly write poetry until working on his first novel, realizing his tendency to focus on distinct images and abstract thoughts in a lyric fashion towards the end of his work. Subsequently, he took on the challenge of poetry, identifying the difficulty of the literary craft in his effort to master it. However, “once I found success—or what I consider success—I realized that no one reads poetry because it is so hard.”
After publishing three volumes of poetry--The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), and Crush Test (Codhill Press, 2010)—Doherty enjoys local readings. He entertains audience members with relatable anecdotes, placing his poetry within his individual experience and a collective identity probing at life’s complex, overarching questions and themes. His work exercises descriptive imagery, explores abstract thoughts, revisits familiar topics of “love, life, death, and sex,” and recollects events in a personal and communal context.
One of his frequent topics, fatherhood, serves as a testament to his devotion to family and his private life. Doherty has three daughters. The oldest is twenty-two, attending SUNY Stony Brook, and the others are seventeen and fifteen. As the only guy in the family, he will admit they are a bit closer with their mother, but he loves his quality time and relationship with his daughters. “We’ll be driving in the car and they’ll ask me how I was like at their age and about my opinions on certain issues. They’re interested in me, and that’s really nice.” To say he takes pride in his daughters is an understatement. Most of his in-class anecdotes revolve around the girls, tying in their curiosities about life to the fundamental explorations of creative work and famous literature. “They are really good kids. They have great morals, and even though they are teenagers, they do the right thing.”