Professor considers herself a ‘labor coach’ for aspiring writers

Lori Cornelius COURTESY PHOTO Some might find midwives and labor coaches an unlikely topic in a writing seminar, but not Lori Cornelius. An instructor in the Department of Language & Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University, Ms. Cornelius began the first day of her semester-long novella workshop with a metaphor illustrating the role of a writing mentor, who she says, is “not there to do the work, but to make delivery easier.”

She revisited the analogy mid-way through the semester, adding reference to an ugly baby and reminding her students that every story written is someone’s baby. “Focus on good things about the baby, even if all you can say is, ‘Hey, it’s clean,’” she says.

The coach, she adds, helps the writer get the baby ready to go out into the world.

Hers are not hollow words: Ms. Cornelius practices what she preaches. Just ask Rob Stevens, a senior at FGCU majoring in communications. He took the professor’s advanced fiction writing class last year.

“I’ve never had a teacher more willing to assist me both in and out of class,” he says. “Even after the class was over, she was willing to sit down with me and look for potential publishers to send my story to, essentially helping me with my story from start all the way to finish.”

What does Ms. Cornelius find most rewarding as an instructor? “When a student leaves my classroom a better writer,” she says, “believing they have something of value to say.” She strives for her students to feel more capable and confident — to shed any misconceptions that they can’t write.

Finding creative ideas stem from all interaction, she cherishes the inspired thinking fostered within the academic setting — which, by the way, for her is a “do-over” (the term Ms. Cornelius uses for reinventing herself later in life). Prior to teaching, she worked in radio and property development. Throughout the 1980s, she was a ghostwriter (no name dropping, though; Ms. Cornelius remains prohibited even today from revealing under whose name she penned).

As a child growing up on a farm in the foothills of the Ozarks in Hardy, Ark., the only thing she wanted in life was to have her own library. She began reading at age 4 and never stopped. Her mother constantly told her stories, and her father had more than 200 books on Napoleon Bonaparte. “He never read a one,” she says. But the family was nonetheless familiar with the story, seeing as one of her childhood games Ms. Cornelius recalls was playing Marie Antoinette.

The only girl in a family with three older brothers and 11 boy cousins, Ms. Cornelius cornered the female lead in all their playtime activities. “I still break out in a sweat every time I’m around an open flame,” she teases as she remembers make-believe Salem witch trials.

The town of Hardy — more commonly referred to as “Hardly,” she says — hardly lacked for a florist and a mortuary, both of which were run by Ms. Cornelius’ family members. Symbiotic, no doubt. She concedes her childhood was at times less than conventional, and even recalls one cousin who reveled in holding her over an open coffin, threatening to throw her in with the corpse. With life experiences like these, her attraction to story telling and fiction seems a natural progression.

She writes fiction, nonfiction and the occasional poem. She wrote her first (and only) play — which the teacher produced — in fourth grade.

“I always wanted to improve my writing,” she says. While at a writing conference in Maine, she decided she wanted to write and teach. So with three kids at home — and while helping her husband with his business, maintaining a fulltime job of her own and providing care for an aging parent — she sought admission into a low residency creative writing MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. The program required a 25-hour writing commitment each week, which she somehow managed to integrate into the mix of her many responsibilities at home in Naples.

In 2005, she responded to FGCU’s ad for an adjunct composition instructor, and left the interview “with an arm full of books.” She became a full-time instructor in 2007.

Her teaching schedule makes it challenging to find time to write, but the rewards of helping her students get their “babies” ready to push out into the world make it all worthwhile. 

— Ms. Cornelius serves as faculty

advisor to the FGCU Creative Writing

Club. For more information, call Ms.

Cornelius at 590-7713 or e-mail lcorneli@

fgcu.edu.