New York Times Features Ohio Wesleyan Faculty Member’s ‘Modern Love’ Essay
Amy Butcher
DELAWARE, Ohio – An hour after meeting Sam camping in an Iowa state park, Amy Butcher was helping the handsome stranger to find shelter during a severe storm. A threatened tornado never arrived, but Butcher became caught up in a different kind of whirlwind.
The award-winning essayist and Ohio Wesleyan University assistant professor of English shares her “Modern Love” memory with The New York Times. “Modern Love” features reader-submitted essays that each week explore the joys and tribulations of love.
Butcher’s essay, “On the Road to ‘the One,’ Sometimes, a Rest Stop” appears Nov. 6 online and Nov. 9 in print. The online version includes a video narrated by Butcher. Her voice was recorded by a Columbus, Ohio-based sound engineer hired to capture the recording.
In Butcher’s essay, she talks of meeting Sam and spending a couple of weeks getting to know him before she moved to Alaska after completing graduate school.
“When I flew to Alaska to resume the life I had planned, I felt surprisingly devastated, and I feared the life I had always wanted now seemed to be in direct conflict with what seemed most right,” Butcher writes in her essay. “What if my life was best spent in Iowa? What if I was meant to marry the man who lived in a tent?”
A friend helped Butcher to sort out her conflicting feelings. “ ‘Isn’t it possible,’ she asked, ‘that the role he played in your life was to remind you how love is good?’ …
“It’s true, Sam wasn’t the one,” Butcher concludes. “But he helped me rediscover that there are hundreds or perhaps thousands of people we can choose, and that love is not a product of waiting, of being patient, but is instead a rest stop, perhaps one of many, where we decide, for however long, to stay.”
In addition to The New York Times, Butcher’s work has appeared in The Paris Review online, Tin House online, The Iowa Review, Salon, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and Brevity, among others. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa and is the recipient of awards and grants from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, the Stanley Foundation for International Research, the Academy of American Poets, and Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Creative Writing Fellowship. She also earned the 2014 Iowa Review award in nonfiction. Her first book, “Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Murder and Friendship,” is scheduled for publication in April 2015.
Learn more about Butcher at www.amyebutcher.com and more about Ohio Wesleyan’s Department of English at https://www.owu.edu/academics/departments-programs/department-of-english/.
Founded in 1842, Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier liberal arts universities. Located in Delaware, Ohio, the private university offers 86 undergraduate majors and competes in 23 NCAA Division III varsity sports. Ohio Wesleyan combines a challenging, internationally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities to connect classroom theory with real-world experience. OWU’s 1,750 students represent 46 U.S. states and territories and 43 countries. Ohio Wesleyan is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” listed on the latest President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction, and included in the U.S. News & World Report and Princeton Review “best colleges” lists. Learn more at www.owu.edu.