Anderson University Associate Professor of English Dr. Derek Updegraff has three poetry collections and two short story collections to his credit, and he recently ventured into a longer form of literature. As a result, he published his first novel—an exploration of relationships, one of which began quite by accident—more on that farther down in this article.
A creative writing class Updegraff took in high school sparked his interest initially. When he entered college, Updegraff set his sights on a writing career.
This fall, Dr. Updegraff is entering his fifth year at Anderson, leading the creative writing program in the English Department of the College of Arts and Sciences.
“I’ve been publishing poetry and short stories for many years now and it’s my sixth book, but my first novel,” he said. “As a fiction writer, I always kind of saw myself as a short story writer and didn’t really have any aspirations to write a novel. I just loved working in the short story form.”
The origin of his novel, titled Whole, started out as a short story he planned to include in his second short story collection. As he gave more thought to the story, he felt it needed more space to play out. But in what form? He thought about possibly expanding the story into a Novela at one point.
Dr. Updegraff continued, “I didn’t feel like it was quite done and so I pulled it out of that book and just kept it on the back burner. It’s the only short story I’ve ever worked on where I felt like I couldn’t get to an ending. I needed to spend more time with the characters, so I spent a few more years on it here and there… It just never went away.”
Described as a complex novel dealing with fable, romance, theology, life, death, love and heartbreak, Whole follows the life of Joe, a young man in his late 20s who lives in the Inland Empire of Southern California and works at a local café. Joe is an aimless, somewhat introspective poet who provides a first-person narrative in the story. He is dating Ashley, a writer and a poetry professor at a small Christian College. Distracted by a text from Ashley, Joe inadvertently runs his car into Ronnie, a homeless man on a bicycle. The bike is crushed and the aluminum cans he collected were scattered, but fortunately Ronnie’s injuries were minor. In the pages of the novel unfolds an unlikely relationship between Joe and Ronnie.
Throughout Whole, short vignettes pop up that are written in the third person—mini short stories within the story—what Updegraff refers to as flash fiction pieces.
Updegraff explains, “As the reader keeps reading the book, they’ll figure out that those short pieces were actually written by the narrator, so they give insight into his upbringing, past his psychology. It was really experimental—short, bizarre, almost fairytale like little mini stories that pop up throughout the book—that was really fun to do.”
For the novel’s setting, Updegraff, a native Californian, chose the San Bernadino-Riverside areas.
As for Joe and Ashley, Updegraff said, “Parts of me came out in these characters in the very beginning, but then I want to make it very clear that I allowed them to develop their own identities, and they become people very different from myself.”
What happens next? Updegraff said there’s one clear resolution at the ending, but some things are left open at the end.
“I think that’s what literary fiction wants to do—in a sense leave some stuff open for the reader to contribute meaning and predict things without closing every avenue off completely.”
Since the publication of Whole, Updegraff has started work on another novel. He also plans to publish his third collection of short stories.
Whole, published in 2024 by Slant Books, is available at Amazon and other major book outlets.