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I stole a line of dialogue from some character I haven’t written yet

We were finishing our discussion of the Joe Sacco book Safe Area Gorazde in my First Year Seminar at Kalamazoo College the other day when the conversation got around to scapegoating—maybe in part because Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus was next up on the schedule.

I’m pretty sure the following thought is original—it came to me, at any rate, last year, when I was teaching the same two books back to back. I’d thought of saving it for a piece of fiction where it would become a bit of dialogue, but this time I told my seminar, “Almost everything you need to know about human nature you can learn from Shakespeare and the Three Stooges.”

I’m usually not the professing type of professor. But that I believe.

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By Glenn Deutsch

Glenn Deutsch’s writing has appeared in The Literary Review, Confrontation, Post Road Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Exposition Review, New Delta Review, River City (now The Pinch), and Fiction Southeast, among other literary publications; in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, and Poets & Writers; and in daily and alternative weekly newspapers including The Milwaukee Journal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Newsday, Orlando Sentinel, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Isthmus, and Shepherd Express. Glenn has been an editor at Third Coast, Men’s Health, The Milwaukee Journal, and other publications. He earned his PhD in English/creative writing at Western Michigan University, in 2006, after careers in journalism and other fields, and taught writing and literature at Kalamazoo College for six years as a visiting professor, followed by journalism at Albion College for six years as a visiting professor. In 2018, he left academia to write full time. He has completed a novel and is at work on a story collection and novella. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with his wife and son, and is also the proud father of an adult daughter.