Elizabeth Buchanan

Suzanne Bryophyta Elizabeth Buchanan (December 23, 1872-February 10, 1906) was a groundbreaking American bryologist and hermit. Her homestead in Brazil, Indiana is the site of yearly pilgrimages by a small, confused group of Mennonites.

= Division III =

This article is part of a Climax Div III Issue. By Eric Peterson, Staff Writer.

If there’s one fact to begin a profile about Elizabeth Buchanan’s Div III it’s this one: her project is the only one taking the point-of-view of a stray dog. But wait, the follow-up’s even better: this stray dog lives outside an orphanage in Romania, and in order to write from his perspective Buchanan learned Romanian, did an independent study on Romanian history and then spent a summer at a Romania orphanage.

“Dog’s” first-person voice is actually just one of three that makes up the novella that is her Div III. And Why Romania you ask?

“First I was going to go to Ethiopia,” she says, “Then they went to war with Eritrea and my program was cancelled. Then I happened to read a book about Romanian communism, and thought, 'Well, this will work.' So, I signed myself up for Romanian language classes at the Five College Language Center at UMass. I’ve been writing my Div III retrospective, and it just hit me: “I learned Romanian for my Div III. I fucking learned Romanian.” In this way she started her Div III “with nothing but the idea that I wanted to approach a culture as an absolute newcomer and, through research and personal interaction with members of that culture, become close enough with it to write about it.”

While Buchanan had spent her Div II studying both fiction and non-fiction writing, she chose to concentrate in the former as: “fiction has such a capacity to create empathy.” At a discussion regarding the Multicultural Perspectives requirement, Buchanan was struck by one speaker, “(writing professor) Nell Arnold mentioned how she could never write about someone, no matter how despicable, without eventually coming to like that person… I feel that the act of reading is similar to this—you can’t finish a book, a well-written book, without some tiny seed of connection to the people it’s about. Without connection, we’re worthless.”