Creative thinking

Peter Fernbach’s love of reading and writing is centered on an innate desire to create meaningful dialogue. 

The associate professor of English at SUNY Adirondack is conducting work on a Ph.D. at University of Albany about complexity theory in writing. 

“I want to open the conduits for ways of arguing, getting beyond black-and-white thinking, and into thinking in spectrums and solutions,” he said. 

As a teenager, he learned to play bass guitar and, by the time he was a college student at University of Buffalo, played regular gigs. “That shaped my life and thinking about the arts and life, and what it means to be human,” he said. 

That reflection led him to writing poetry, plays and a book (“The Blooming Void,” published in 2010), and diving into research. He originally thought he wanted to focus on Charles Dickens. “That was too small of a field, so I continued with my interests in reading and writing, and followed them to where there was work and productive things to do.” 

He taught high school and, later, as an adjunct at community colleges before being hired as a full-time professor at SUNY Adirondack in 2008. “I’ve continued my education in the classroom. I’ve had a lot of good conversations and situations to work out ideas,” he said. “In a classroom in a community college, you can have real interactions with real and interesting people who provoke you to think more and beyond the boundaries of what you had previously thought, and open possibilities for new ways of thinking and living.” 

“Creative thought is definitely important. If we’re going to maximize our lives and make the world better, we really need creative thinkers, and the kinds of thinking we do in creative writing can stretch the ways we think, and that can spill over in good ways to how we approach the world.” 

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