Susan Sink '86
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- Susan SinkSusan: So are you gonna talk to me, or I can just talk, and then you’ll ask me questions?
- Brenna RossBrenna: Well, we can go back and forth. How about you start with your name?
- Susan SinkSusan: OK. My name is Susan Sink. I currently live in St. Joseph, Minnesota, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of 1986. So, in the spring of 1986, which was my last semester of my senior year, I did an internship with the Grinnell Herald Register, which is definitely a major introduction to the town of Grinnell. I was an English major, so I was thinking maybe that I really would like to be a journalist after I graduated. My father always wrote sports as a stringer, just kind of an extra suburban newspaper. I grew up in a suburb outside Chicago, Park Forest.
- Susan SinkSusan: So I, and I just liked writing more than anything else so that’s what I wanted to do, so I went. John Brahmer was the news editor and he was in charge of my internship, and the paper at that time was run by the Pinders, and I can’t remember their first names but Martha Pinder who’s class of ’83? Or ’84, was their daughter and I knew her from some theater things. So, it was very very old school. They printed the paper once a week, and so each week I was assigned to write a story of a different type. So, one week I did a home and garden story and went to someone’s house and toured it.
- Susan SinkSusan: And one week I wrote an editorial so I had an opinion on something. One week, John Brahmer kind of set me up a little bit on some things, like, he wanted me to write a story about organic farm practices, which was kind of controversial in Grinnell and so he couldn’t write the story but he sent me out to do it and I talked to, I know part of the interviewing was with Voertman, an Economics professor on campus and he was very well versed in the subject and so we did that. And just, we also, so the first day that I came, and I had my assignment, he told me,
- Susan SinkSusan: “Well, write a story about this,” or “adapt this press release,” or something. So, I sat down with my yellow legal pad and start writing. He said, “No, no, no, we don’t write, we go straight- This is a newspaper, we go straight to the typewriter.” So, no writing on legal pads. We don’t have time for that kind of editing or whatever. It was all manual typewriters. So this was . It was the dawn of the computer age so there were computers on campus but there were, but I would always get too intimidated when I went into the computer center and saw that little blinking cursor, “c prompt” with nothing else and had no idea what to do. But, we certainly were using electric typewriters,
- Susan SinkSusan: so I sat down at the typewriter and then they had a newsprint that we typed our stories on so they were just cut into 8 ½ by 11 sheets, so I scrolled it in and I said, “But I make a lot of errors typing, is there any white-out or anything?” and he said, “Oh, no, no, we don’t have time for that. You just x through the mistake and keep typing, so don’t worry about errors. You can just change anything as you go along.” So, it was just one draft and you wrote your story and it took you as long as it took you and that was it. This was kind of ironic because we only printed once a week, and we were actually not on any kind of deadline at all as far as I could tell.
- Susan SinkSusan: Another thing we would do is, whenever the police scanner came in that there was a fire somewhere, we would jump in the car and drive off to the location of the fire, and it was always a false alarm. So, we did that probably eight or nine times during the semester and we’d always pass the fire engine coming back the other direction. So we’d turn around and come back. Also, in- that semester was when the Challenger exploded. So, we were- I came in for my internship
- Susan SinkSusan: and one of the Pinder children, I think it was Marie, worked for the New York Times. So we were just in the office, and as soon as she saw the breaking news that the Challenger had exploded, she called her parents. So we got out a little black and white TV and we were sitting there watching it and they were showing the footage over and over again as it exploded and exploded, and then we turned it off and John Brahmer said, “Well, that’s enough for one day. We can’t possibly work with this going on.” So I kind of like, “Aren’t we the news? Shouldn’t we do something?” So we left for the day, that was it. So I came back to campus and it was weird ‘cause I was the first one to know, no one knew that it happened. It was kind of eerie walking around and going, “Well, the space shuttle exploded. Did you hear?” I was- I had a scoop in that regard.
- Susan SinkSusan: And then, the other thing that happened was, right at the end of the year I, a little bit probably, one week or ten days before graduation I did some babysitting at one of the local churches just for childcare, and I knew I had to get to class right after I was done so even though it wasn’t very far away I drove my car, and I had this giant- it was a 1975 Ford Elite, which they only made for two years. It was- my grandparents gave me this car and it burned more oil than gas.
- Susan SinkSusan: So I had been lending it out for people to take trips to the airport and not really checking the oil very closely, and so I drove it, this like, six blocks to the church and parked it and all the smoke was coming out from under the hood. So, the car, by the time I got inside the building the car was totally in flames. So I was standing there. People were running to move their cars away and the fire truck came and here comes John Brahmer and he’s going, “Whose car is this? Whose car is this?” and I said, “Hi John, it’s my car,” and he said, “You set this fire on purpose, didn’t you. You just really wanted us to have a fire.” “No, I really didn’t.”
- Susan SinkSusan: So he took my picture, he took pictures of the four firemen putting out the fire on the car, and it was on the front page of the Grinnell Herald Register. So, I didn’t actually see the paper with it on there but when I, I met with them for like, my lunch, my final thank you lunch or whatever, they gave me a black-and-white copy of the photo. But, in true Grinnell Herald Register style, they didn’t run it through the fixer, they just developed it and gave it to me, so I put it in a scrapbook and it like, faded and the chemicals ran all over and ruined everything in that book. So, it’s not for perpetuity. The other thing, oh, and then a really important thing was why I decided not to be a reporter, also happened during that semester.
- Susan SinkSusan: I really enjoyed everything that I was doing, and then one story, I had to do a news story. So, he said I’m sending you over to the Grinnell courthouse ‘cause they have an arraignment of this guy today and I want you to just write that story. So I went over and actually, Sigmund, what’s his name, it was the husband of the German professor, Michaels was her name, and I can’t, I think he might have had a different last name but he was the judge. So, the husband of my German professor was the judge, so it was kind of that small town thing, too,
- Susan SinkSusan: and then the case was that a fourteen-year-old girl had been sexually molested by kind of a family friend. It was a guy who was working with her father. So, I remember absolutely everything about the case and about this guy, so I went and wrote, was taking notes and it was really clear to me that even though we weren’t going to say her name there was no way to protect her identity if this went on the front page of the paper because she was fourteen, she had a step-father, y’know, and she lived on a certain side of town and I thought, there just can’t be that many in the town of Grinnell.
- Susan SinkSusan: I really didn’t want her exposed in that way. It was really brave of her to press charges. So John Brahmer and I argued about it and I said, “Can’t we just say her parents or her guardians, do we have to say her step-father testified?” and he said “No, you have to give the exact truth, blah, blah, blah.” So I really felt like this is not, having that experience was like, I never want to be in this position again. I don’t want to do this. That was really a major turning point for me. I did end up working for newspapers. I moved to Atlanta after graduation and I had no idea what I would do and just an English degree from a liberal arts college, so...
- Susan SinkSusan: I had to start making money immediately. I had no buffer zone at all so I did get a job with the Journal Constitution, which is Atlanta’s big paper, just doing classified advertisements, and I did that for about 9 months while I looked for other things. And I ended up being the public relations person, kind of marketing person for a local newspaper group that was a suburban newspaper group. So it was kind of the exact atmosphere that I had pictured myself in but a different role. So I did all the in-house advertisements for, read the classifieds and do this ad and, I made all the flyers for the sales team for selling special issues and I did the employee newsletter and-
- Susan SinkSusan: So I got to really use my skills and be in that environment but I never really had to write any crime stories or anything like that. It was just a- It was such a cool place and I hear it’s still fairly maintaining that old world environment. Now Martha Pinder, the daughter who was class of ’83 is running the paper for her parents and taking care of them. But they also, in the basement, they had an old types, the old presses that they used to use when they set type by hand
- Susan SinkSusan: and so there was a guy, and old typesetter who used to come and just hang out down there and he would set his own type and I have no idea what he was printing down there but he just wanted to keep his hand in, and, so that was kind of cool, too.
- Brenna RossBrenna: That’s very cool. Do they still have the newspaper out in the window, whenever they printed a new one?
- Susan SinkSusan: Yeah, yeah, they put it, and also they ran, like notices of who was visiting home. So, Dorothy, it was, Dorothy Pinder was the mom and she was like the social editor, so people would call her, y’know, “My sister and brother-in-law are visiting from Des Moines,” and that would be in the paper. There was a whole page of who was visiting whom, basically. I saw Dorothy yesterday and I asked her about that and she said, “Y’know people don’t really call that stuff in anymore, or where they’re going or who they’re visiting and they kind of, there’s more of a privacy idea, now.” But it was very much, the social register was, and Dorothy was just wonderful because she had endless interest in whatever people were doing.
- Brenna RossBrenna: I can picture it.
- Susan SinkSusan: Yeah. Everything was special.
- Brenna RossBrenna: So, something I’m always curious about is how did you initially find Grinnell?
- Susan SinkSusan: Yeah, I’m from Park Forest Illinois, and my parents are not, my father did graduate from college but as kind of a commuter student on the fly in New Jersey and then my mother went to community college much later in life. So, in a lot of ways I was a first generation. I mean, no one in my extended family except my father had a degree at all. So college, and going away to college, was not really part of their, y’know, understanding or plan. But, I was a really good student in high school and so obviously I was kind of on the college track in my high school,
- Susan SinkSusan: and Jeanie Hughes was a senior, a year ahead of me, and she went to my high school and she was very very popular and very, it’s kind of an odd Grinnell story ‘cause she was like the beauty queen and the prom queen and she came to Grinnell. Then, she came back and visited when I was a senior in high school and says, “Susan, you should go to Grinnell. You would love Grinnell. Grinnell is totally the place for you. Come visit me.” My parents had told me there was no way I could cross state lines to go to college. I had to go to college in Illinois, and they didn’t really understand the public/private difference, so we were actually visiting private colleges in Illinois and I would say, “But this is gonna be just as expensive as if I go to Grinnell,”
- Susan SinkSusan: but, of course, in larger part I realized they just didn’t want me to leave home. But, so I went to visit Jeanie. I took the Greyhound bus and I came out for, and it was Waltz weekend, and it was so much fun. I mean, I just loved it and I met with an admissions person, had a really good talk with them, and so that was pretty much it. Then I like, just wanted to come here and so I only, I applied here and I applied to Dickenson in Pennsylvania just based on their materials. I was born in Pennsylvania so I had kind of a romantic idea about what Pennsylvania was like.
- Susan SinkSusan: And then I also sent my test scores to Berkley based solely on The Graduate, the movie The Graduate. So, I thought I would like to go there and then I found later that it’s not filmed at Berkley; it’s filmed at UCLA, so when I first went to Berkley to visit, actually a Grinnellian, I was like, “This is not Berkley. Where is the fountain? Why are the buildings white?” It was like, this is not my imagined... So I really was kind of, this is the only school I knew anything about or had any experience with, but it was very lucky for me ‘cause it was fantastic.
- Brenna RossBrenna: Sounds like a great experience.
- Susan SinkSusan: Yeah! I just, yeah, it was definitely the peak of, y’know, finding myself and being myself and I just had a great Grinnell experience. It was joy. It was all joy. It wasn’t all joy, but it was a lot of joy.
- Brenna RossBrenna: Excellent.
- Susan SinkSusan: Yeah.
- Brenna RossBrenna: Well, you mentioned you did some theater while you were here. Was that a big thing that you did, or..?
- Susan SinkSusan: Not- I didn’t do any. I never took a theater class and I didn’t... So, my freshman year I did room with Jeanie Hughes, so she was a sophomore and I was a freshman and she already had some connections. So there were some senior students that were doing a play that they wrote that was really weird, and actually they had a part and somebody dropped out and they gave it to me, and it was originally a male character and then it became this female character. It was a blast. It was so much fun. And it was with seniors so it was really exciting, and I got to go to off-campus parties because of it and stuff like that.
- Susan SinkSusan: And then, and I had done theater all through high school and I had been in all the school plays. So, I just did that. There were student-directed one acts every year, maybe even every semester, so just went and tried out for those and until my senior year I always did one act. So, it was kind of important to me but it wasn’t part of my like real, I don’t know. I had other things that were more, where I felt more hooked in or y’know linked in. So, ‘cause I was also a big part of Christian Fellowship while I was here. Which I was ambivalent about. I had a very, kind of extreme religious upbringing.
- Susan SinkSusan: That was another part about getting here was quite liberating for me, so I really felt like I got away with something by ending up being allowed to go to Grinnell. Thank God, my parents didn’t really know there were Christian colleges, so they had no idea that there were other options that they would’ve found more appropriate, so... So that was- that took up actually a lot, I was Bible study leader and then I was Christian Fellowship President my senior year, which was definitely kind of a mixed... I mean I had the leadership skills and the kind of background and maturity to do it,
- Susan SinkSusan: but I never really liked a lot of the kind of evangelical culture and that was, for some people that was a big part of it and so I knew I’d have to do things like, y’know goofy retreats and stuff that I didn’t really want to do but that’s part of being. So, it was good for me. It stretched me and it, it was very helpful for me to follow through on that. I never really felt like I had a choice. I felt like, yeah, obviously I need to do this, but it’s not what I would necessarily choose to identify with- the top of my list.
- Brenna RossBrenna: So did you have- how was the transition from home life to Grinnell, was that?
- Susan SinkSusan: It was so easy. I was just so ready to leave, y’know, and so, and in some ways, ‘cause my parents weren’t- well, my father doesn’t normally care. He was proud of me and he was really happy that I was going to a good school and stuff. But my mother was much more the religious figure and she has said, y’know at some point, not too shortly after I graduated, maybe a year or two after, she said, "If I had to do it all over again, I would not let you go to Grinnell. I think Grinnell was your downfall," kind of thing. And I said, "Mom, if you had not let me go to Grinnell, I would have gone to France or Germany." I mean, I was leaving whether you liked it or not, and this is who I am and I would’ve found a way to do that even without Grinnell
- Susan SinkSusan: -or y’know, whether Grinnell. So, it kind of made possible things for me that kind of, a wider world than had been offered but I knew that wider world was out there and I was gonna get to it one way or another. So in a way, it kind of probably was easier than some other paths might have been. ‘Cause I had been an exchange student for a summer in Germany and I probably, in high, in my senior year of high school, and I probably would have gone back to Germany and that would have been so much harder especially as an eighteen or nineteen year old, so this was very safe and I felt very well taken care of.
- Susan SinkSusan: It was kind of easy, and I loved, I just loved school so much. I just loved being in the Library and I loved reading the books and I just, I just loved learning, so it was all very rewarding and stimulating for me.
- Brenna RossBrenna: Good to know. Let’s see. Is there anything else you’d like to share?
- Susan SinkSusan: Well, I could talk about a professor in particular who- I did end up going eventually- I went, I got an MFA in poetry, so a Masters of Fine Arts in writing poetry and then went and had a, what’s called a Stegner Fellowship, which is a creative writing fellowship at Stanford for two years after that. So my train, my kind of professional training is in creative writing and poetry. So I ended up, after all that kind of grad school stuff, doing, teaching at community colleges for about eight years and I taught, and I realized, I didn’t actually realize this until he died but John Mullen, I knew John Mullen had a huge influence on me
- Susan SinkSusan: and was by far my favorite teacher and I just adored his classes, but particularly Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, those classes just. I had already been reading, I read Tolstoy when I was in high school and in the summer and stuff so I came in having already read Anna Karenina and War and Peace once. And, then went and read them again but he opened up and taught me how to find significance in a text and express it in a really great way and I found that in my teaching, when I was writing a reflection about him after he died, that he had had such a concrete influence that I did things in my classroom that I really learned to do from him.
- Susan SinkSusan: One was that, when he graded our papers he would use a blue and a red pen and he’d underline sentences that were insightful in blue and then he’d just underline or mark grammatical and sentences that were not structured well or sentences that were kind of empty or not saying anything, so kind of the bad was in red and the good as in blue. The best thing you could see was like, if you got an A on a paper and he’d say, “This paper is awash in blue,” and it felt good, and you could go back and read your own insights and read the things that were not and say, “Oh, yeah I can see the difference between those,” and say,
- Susan SinkSusan: “Oh, I see, that’s what I’m trying to get to- is the kind of sentence that is not just repeating what the text said but illuminating what the text said.” And for me, that was a very powerful tool and so I always did underline sentence, y’know insightful sentences and use little stars on the side for my own students to try to point out to them where they were getting it, or where they were having insight. The other thing was, he had this lecture that I’ll never forget in Dostoyevsky where he- he said, “I wanted to demonstrate for you the difference between how Dostoyevsky wrote and how the people before him wrote, and I’m going to do it using music because in the time of like, Tolstoy, Mozart was in fashion,”
- Susan SinkSusan: of Liechtenstein and modes oh, that was intense and you know when that earlier than most as they said you know first there is a man of the corollary like push him or something in the end at his time harry to be had you know handle or something and he said this is my sound like a penalty for clarity play any pretend to be an audience member in india and, ah, the the leader of the Sunday and i went to a human disease that night and then send men to also came along and Mozart was involved and audiences go in there waiting to hear the symphony in a heap first is hiring and it isn't too many notes not too many notes you that, ah, the bank in here on is no telling how does that it is
- Susan SinkSusan: and I think he even went back earlier than Mozart, so he said, “First, there,” and I don’t know who the corollary to like Pushkin or something, and his time period we had, y’know Handel or something and he said, “And this is what it sounded like,” and he had a little tape recorder and he’d play it and he’d pretend to be an audience member and he be like, “ah, that’s so lyrical, that so musical, ah, it’s one-two-three, one-two-three, it’s so nice,” and then Tolstoy came about and Mozart was in vogue. The audiences go in and they’re waiting to hear the symphony and they, he pushed his recorder and he was like, “Too many notes! Ah, too many notes, Mozart, ah, what are you doing? I can’t hear all these notes at one time! How am I supposed to?”
- Susan SinkSusan: And he just projected, and just like Tolstoy, it was like these big, wide, rambling novels and, "Why would you do that, can’t you tell a story and why can’t you keep it simple?" And then he said, “and then they got used to it and realized that Mozart was a masterpiece- and Tolstoy," and then came, I wanna say Beethoven was the next one, so then came Beethoven and Dostoyevsky. And so here’s the audience and they’re expecting Mozart and instead they hear Beethoven and he plays and he’s like, “No, it’s so dark, it’s so strong, we can’t! This is not entertainment, why should this entertain us?” and he just did this whole little play for us the visual and the audio and the, I mean this was not the time of smart screens or power point or anything and it just completely brought to life the point that he was making. I always tried to do that with my classes. I would always, I wanted them to hear the voices of the people they were reading and so, I did a lot of African American literature and even actually then, African literature. And, so what we did, and even in my rhetoric and composition classes we would analyze speeches for different rhetorical devices and I would always play them Malcolm X reading a speech live and I would always play them President George, the first George Bush and his Iraq, going to Iraq the first time speech, and we would analyze them
- Susan SinkSusan: but to hear the voices in the room was, I just think so much more powerful and good. And then when I taught a story called “Sunny’s Blues” that I loved to teach and it’s about jazz, and it’s a Harlem, African, and I would play some old standard jazz for them and then I would play the be-bop y’know, riffing jazz for them, Charlie Parker, and show them kind of what the safe, old world of jazz was and how simple it was and then when you did this they thought, “Oh, my God, they’re going to turn to heroin and die.” So it was the same kind of social progression and I just stole that totally from John Mullen but it was so effective for me,
- Susan SinkSusan: and I just loved that, I think also, the theater background, I think, that performative aspect in teaching. He just really did it wonderfully and I wanted to do that. So that’s all.
- Brenna RossBrenna: All right. Well, thank you very much.
- Susan SinkSusan: Sure.
Alumni oral history interview with Susan Sink '86. Recorded June 3, 2011.