Recently, I spent the morning with Dr. Mark Bruhn, a professor of English who specializes in cognitive literary studies and has taught at Regis University since 1996. I was told by his colleagues that his story was an interesting one, and I quickly discovered the truth behind that statement.
“I wasn’t going to go to school,” Bruhn began. “My parents wanted me to, and that was my main motivation not to. I was a terrible English student through school—I just hated it.”
This rebellious attitude proved to be a theme in our conversation. “It just goes along with my character,” Bruhn said. “You can’t tell me what I should do—you tell me I have to research, I have to be Catholic, I have to go to high school, I’m gonna say, ‘I don’t want to do any of those things. Those things are for fools.’ But as soon as I don’t have to do any of those things, they become interesting to me. It’s gotta be my choice. I’m still like that, you know.”
Despite concerns about Bruhn graduating from high school at all, he completed high school and stayed in Connecticut. There, he spent a summer hitchhiking to his job in the produce department. After finding that position unsustainable, he joined his parents in Maine and got a job at a gas station.
“I had no way to meet anybody,” Bruhn explained. “I’m an eighteen-year-old man desperate for friends [with] no way to meet them, so I thought, ‘Well, I guess one way to meet people would be to take some classes at the University of Maine at Augusta.’ The University of Maine at Augusta is essentially a community college branch of the University of Maine. I signed up for a few classes and, lo and behold, they were remarkably powerful to me.”
Bruhn spoke highly of classes such as Creative Writing, Russian Literature, Adolescent Psychology, Theory of Personality, and Abnormal Personality. After spending three semesters of unprecedented academic engagement and inspiration at the University of Maine at Augusta, his professors recommended that Bruhn pursue a Bachelor of Arts. Bruhn took this advice and spent the next two and a half years completing an English major at the University of Southern Maine. His studies provided him with a new outlook on literature and faith.
“When I got to college, I started reading William Blake,” Bruhn began. “Blake had a very different understanding of Christian religion—almost the exact opposite of mine. I was persuaded by Blake that I’d been thrown to tyrant in my head. It was limiting my experience rather than making it good or orienting it in a positive way. And so, the kind of devotion I had given to the Bible and to books like Thomas Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, I now starting giving to people like William Blake and William Wordsworth and Coleridge. In a way, I exchanged a fundamentalist Christianity for a religion of poetry and the tradition of poetry in English literature. I guess I’m still very much centered there, in that kind of spirituality.”
However, Bruhn’s newfound love of English literature locked him into a somewhat intimidating fate. “[I] did realize that, ultimately, I would have to be a teacher,” Bruhn said. “That was a little daunting at first because I was really afraid of public speaking. My voice would get really tremulous, and I could feel the blood coming to my cheeks. [I] challenged myself to get over it by putting myself on the spot—I’d volunteer to do presentations first, all that kind of thing. And now I’m at the point where I just love to stand in front of an audience and hear myself talk, so obviously, there’s hope for the fearful.”
His public speaking was soon put to the test. “[My wife and I] found out that we were going to have a child,” Bruhn explained. “I was working at a deli at the time, and it didn’t sound like a deli was going to pay for three peoples’ existences. So I realized, yeah, I’m going to have to come up with something, so I started applying for high school teaching jobs.”
From there, Bruhn ended up teaching high school at Lincoln Academy, which did not go as well as he’d planned. As Bruhn explained, his love of literature seemed to outweigh his love for his students. “I was 23 years old,” Bruhn said. “I looked like I was about 12. I had senior high school students who were much broader and hairier than I was. They could threaten me, and it would work. I went optimistically with this great idea that, ‘Oh, I’m so into poetry and literature. I’m going to turn all these kids onto this.’ And they knew they were going to make a whole lot of money lobster fishing, so they weren’t really interested in literature.”
Luckily, Bruhn’s time at Lincoln Academy didn’t turn him away from teaching altogether. While at Lincoln Academy, he also taught introductory English classes at the University of Southern Maine. During this experience, he found himself valuing the motivated, respectful older students that he had in his evening classes. Most importantly, it allowed him to realize what he valued most in academia. “Of course I love my students,” clarified Bruhn. “But I really love helping them to love the thing I love. That made it clear that I needed to get a Ph. D.”
His graduate studies began at Duke University, but because of the program’s new emphasis on stardom through literary studies research, he left before the end of his first year. “I did [English] because it was feeding my soul,” explained Bruhn. “I wanted to share that with people, not self-glorifying self-promotion.” As a result, Bruhn and his family moved back to Maine, where he managed a law book and business directory publishing company. This, too, failed to feed his soul in the ways he wanted, but by this point, he was committed to holding a position for at least 3 years before trying something new.
“I had never held a job for a length of time,” Bruhn admitted. “I would quit a job because there was a Yes concert and my shift conflicted with it. I had a really terrible CV [curriculum vitae], and I’d now just quit graduate school as well.”
Bruhn gave graduate school a second try at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, which he spoke highly of. At age 33, he completed his Ph. D. This was followed by a year of teaching at Dalhousie before he came to Regis in 1996. “I guess, one of the messages I’d give to undergraduates is: You don’t need to know what you’re doing until you’re 35,” Bruhn laughed. “I think you should expect to play around with a bunch of different directions as you graduate. Get frustrated here and enthralled there and just negotiate a future over the next decade and a half, [don’t] chastise yourself or beat yourself up over the fact that you haven’t figured it out.”
When I asked Bruhn what he considered the most unexpected part of his journey, his answer was heartwarming. “I didn’t know I wanted kids until my girlfriend told me she was pregnant,” he smiled. “You have options when you hear that, and the couple needs to discuss those options, but for me, there was no option at all. I wanted that child. As soon as I heard about it, I wanted to be a dad. So one thing that’s been unexpected is just how much I’ve loved being a parent. It’s certainly the best part of my life.”
His advice to future graduates also brought a smile to my face. “Everyone is going to say to you, ‘What are you going to do now?’” Bruhn said. “You need to correct them immediately by saying, ‘You mean, what have I accomplished? I just finished my Bachelor’s degree and I’m so proud.’ Don’t get distracted by your future, right? Celebrate your present. It’s huge what you’ve accomplished. It will go where it needs to go and you can trust that. Tune out, turn off, and drop in.”
