W. Stephen Hathaway, professor emeritus of English, taught creative writing and American literature at WSU from 1974-2012. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant, he spent a sabbatical year in Cambridge, England, in 1982. His collection of short stories, A Kind of Redemption, was published by the Louisiana State Press in 1991.
Raised in Mt. Clemens, Mich., he attended Michigan State University, served in the Peace Corps in Trinidad and as a translator in Vietnam before earning his MFA at Bowling Green State University. There he met his former wife, Jeanine, a poet, and the couple moved to Wichita, where they joined the English department.
In a 1991 interview, Hathaway explained that the 11 stories in Redemption are simultaneously about and not about the Vietnam War: "Vietnam can be like the setting, or metaphor, well, for the kinds of resiliency of the human spirit." Some of the stories reflect his own experience; one is particularly autobiographical. "Freedom Bird," written in 1977, deals with the death of the protagonist's father, which resulted in his ticket home from the war.
In 2002, Hathaway again creatively focused on the complexities of the human spirit in "The Incredible Vastness of Things," an essay on the aftermath of 9/11 that served as Coda in The Shocker's summer issue.
A staunch Democrat and enthusiastic outdoorsman, Steve Hathaway died Dec. 26, 2013, in Gray, Maine.
