{"id":1016,"date":"2016-06-17T19:46:08","date_gmt":"2016-06-17T19:46:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/?p=1016"},"modified":"2025-07-25T18:07:31","modified_gmt":"2025-07-25T22:07:31","slug":"andrew-ervin-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/andrew-ervin-93\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Ervin \u201993"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes when Andrew Ervin \u201993<\/strong> begins to read aloud from his novel, Burning Down George Orwell\u2019s House<\/em>, his listeners respond by tossing back shots of scotch.<\/p>\n

Ervin\u2019s OK with this. After all, his novel, which was published last year, is peppered with lyrical odes to the drink, such as:<\/p>\n

He passed over a flask that contained a whisky so delicious it might have come from the Virgin Mary\u2019s own tender nipples and been used to suckle the baby Jesus in his downy crib as mother and child were serenaded by a host of angels.<\/em><\/p>\n

Although the author, who this spring was Goucher\u2019s 2016 Kratz Center writerin- residence, swears he\u2019s not that<\/em> much of a connoisseur, references to scotch have become \u201ckind of a running joke\u201d among his fans. For example, during Ervin\u2019s reading at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., the bookstore\u2019s management passed around a bottle of single malt, and in a New York Times<\/em> review, the writer dubbed the book, \u201ca wee bonnie dram of a tale.\u201d<\/p>\n

Set on the same Scottish island where George Orwell wrote his seminal work Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em>, Ervin\u2019s novel is a meditation on how prescient Orwell\u2019s imaginings turned out to be. In it, Ervin tells the tale of Ray Welter, an ad executive who grows tired of the rat race and flees to an isolated village where he becomes embroiled in the lives of a cast of eccentric villagers.<\/p>\n

The idea came to Ervin when he noticed the prevalence of Orwellian references in pop culture. \u201cEvery day there were references to our browsing histories, our phone calls, the reality show called Big Brother<\/em>\u2014what is going on today is not precisely what he wrote about, but the principles are strangely accurate,\u201d says the author, whose first book, Extraordinary Renditions<\/em>, was listed in 2010 by Publishers\u2019 Weekly<\/em> as one of that year\u2019s best.<\/p>\n

At Goucher, Ervin, who grew up in Media, Pennsylvania, majored in religion and philosophy and took a creative writing class taught by author Madison Smartt Bell and poet Elizabeth Spires, who are co-directors of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing. (The first story Ervin ever had published was based upon a manuscript from that class.)<\/p>\n

\u201cI knew I wanted to be a writer, but I didn\u2019t know what that meant. I knew a lot of things that I was reading in the newspaper or magazines always sounded the same to me. I thought if I took philosophy and religion instead of English then I might have a different well to draw from,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

While an undergraduate, the author also met a flutist named Elivi Varga \u201994<\/strong> in a Gamble House dorm room. \u201cIt was a Friday night, and I was listening to John Coltrane, and I left the door open, and she liked the music and just walked into my room,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In 1994, Ervin followed Varga to Budapest where she was studying at the Liszt Academy of Music; while there, he worked as a writer for Budapest\u2019s Englishlanguage papers and as an English tutor. After returning to the United States, both Ervin and Varga, who were married in 1999, attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: Ervin holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing, and Varga holds a doctorate of musical arts in flute performance. The couple now lives in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Research on Ervin\u2019s current project \u2014 a nonfiction book on video games to be published next year by Basic Books \u2014 has taken him on the road. \u201cI have visited a government lab on Long Island and played the first video game made (it was in 1958). I\u2019ve talked to scholars and game makers. I\u2019ve played hundreds of hours of video games. And wherever I went, I could see this is no longer a subculture,\u201d he says. \u201cVideo games may be the new baseball \u2014 the great American pastime.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goucher\u2019s Spring 2016 Kratz Center Writer-in-Residence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":1017,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[54973],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87540],"class_list":["post-1016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight"],"yoast_head":"\nAndrew Ervin \u201993 | Goucher Magazine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/andrew-ervin-93\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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