Novelist and English professor Dionne Irving Bremyer on empathy, creative writing, and climate change's impact on culture
Reading stories about people who are like us, and not like us, develops an appreciation of what it means to be human, said Notre Dame faculty member Dionne Irving Bremyer, who authored The Islands, one of 10 books longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. “We still read Hamlet, right? And we get something out of it, not necessarily because we are Danish princes, but because we can have the experience of understanding what it means to have difficult family situations.”