Roy Anker: Cycler, Collector, Cultural Critic

“The sensible question is why anyone would venture to the sunny Riviera in so lovely a month as May to sit in the dark, hour after hour, day after day, days on end,” Professor Roy Anker wrote in his article about attending the Cannes Film Festival in France back in 2008. He was able to attend as a journalist and publish his impressions of the films he saw there for Books and Culture magazine. An avid lover of film, Anker has written several pieces about media, including Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (2004) and a piece on Calvin’s own filmmaking alumnus, “Deliver Us From Evil: The Films of Paul Schrader” (1999).

            Touring the famous film festival in France is hardly the only travel Professor Anker does. The map of places he’s lived is deceiving. Anker has indeed left the Midwest multiple times. With three kids to visit (and a “grand-dog, Jefferson”) when he can and other trips to England for fun, he has quite a busy summer travel schedule. Anker’s son is married to a Cuban woman, so the professor, with his family, has visited her parents in Cuba. Now Anker’s son works for Fuji Bicycles in Spain, though the international location is only temporary; usually the couple lives in Philadelphia. Roy and his wife have, of course, visited their son and daughter-in-law in both places. Both of Professor Anker’s daughters are teachers, one in Naperville and the other at Cornell. It is easy to see that his children inherited their father’s two biggest passions: teaching and biking.

            When he’s not traveling the world, Professor Anker is stuck here in good old Grand Rapids teaching literature, bicycling, and collecting vinyl records (“A couple of shops in Ann Arbor are as good as any I’ve found” for snatching up some good ones). I don’t think he would consider himself stuck however.

I went to visit him in his office one afternoon, and found some things I expected: books filling up every inch of shelf space, and one thing I did not: Professor Anker is extremely tall. And I don’t just mean tall compared to the rest of the world; tall compared to some other Dutch men, too. ID pictures on Knightvision do not convey this sort of thing, you see, so it was a little surprising. 

I asked Professor Anker if he’d always wanted to teach English. He replied that mainly, he had. When he was younger, he told me, he had a very romantic view of being an English professor: “What could be better than sitting around reading and talking about books all day?” He knows now that that’s not all being an English Professor is, but he still loves his job and isn’t disappointed with the truth of the career. “The literature is so rich,” he says, intermittently sipping a cup of coffee. He never gets sick of teaching it. His favorite book to teach is Moby Dick, and his least favorite author to teach is Alexander Pope. For some reason, Pope’s work is just hard to teach.

            One Calvin graduate, Anthony Terpstra, had Professor Anker for a semester. “I remember him being a very passionate speaker. His mid-lecture volume range was astounding.” Terpstra commented that Professor Anker really seemed to know what he was talking about, and was very friendly. During our short conversation, he also mentioned one other thing he still remembers about that class: “I believe he had a broken arm at the beginning of the semester that I had him. It was almost shocking once he was allowed to take the sling off because his wingspan was humongous.” Did I mention that he’s tall?

            Before Professor Anker graced Calvin with his knowledge and love of literature, he was a little boy growing up in South Holland, Illinois. He describes the town as a little Dutch farming community; much different than it is today. After attending public schools, he graduated from Hope (a school he holds is just as good as Calvin), where he met his wife. Anker then continued his education at University of Illinois, receiving a Masters degree in Victorian literature, and then at Michigan State University, where he also did some teaching until he earned his doctorate in American literature. His dissertation was entitled, “Doubt and Faith in Late Nineteenth Century Fiction.” Before he made it to Calvin, Professor Anker taught at Northwestern University in Iowa for ten years.

            When I was researching this professor of English, it struck me as a little out of the ordinary that most of his published pieces are about film and media. Most English professors, I thought, published novels or poetry or various nonfiction pieces, but Anker has stuck to the same topic of film and media. But then, of course, as a Media Production major and English minor, why should I think it odd? Don’t I, too, love both film and literature, and see an easy connection between the two? I asked Professor Anker about his thoughts on this, and he agreed that it isn’t really that much of a jump for a literature professor to be interested in film. They do both involve stories, really, only told through different media. We shared a little tangent conversation about books almost always being better than film adaptations. Some of Anker’s favorite and inspiring works for both his teaching and his writing are Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Godfather, and, recently, he has been interested in the director Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line).

            I asked Professor Anker about his writing process, and his immediate reply was, “Clumsy.” He laughed, and then continued. He tends to write in the morning, sometimes for three to six hours at a time. He has found that he needs to just get his thoughts out on the page, and then revise later. When he is frustrated, it is usually because he finds it hard to analyze art. There are many aspects to a film, but the artistic part is the hardest to break down. His choice of whether to listen to music – probably via vinyl record, not CD, if he’s at home - may vary. If he listens, it will be to just about any kind, but probably lyric-less. However, one thing that is consistent throughout his writing process is the cup of coffee beside him. He takes it “as black as the outer darkness.”

Anker will be returning to the Cannes Film Festival this spring, and is in the process of writing two more books. In the coming months, he plans to get caught up on his reading and, of course, continue to write. As the snow continues to melt away, I’m sure he’ll be getting out that road bike again as well.

Five Facts about Professor Roy Anker:

1. I have one wife and three children.  Or they have me, actually.

2. I am still on the all-time single game rebounding list at Hope College (23).
            3. The bike I ride is mostly made of titanium and carbon fibre.
            4. I am often taken for Brad Pitt.

5. I collect many kinds of vinyl records – classical, jazz, roots mostly.