“I said, ‘Of course you are. You’re part of the University.’ We were laughing, but it emphasized for me that perhaps there isn’t a [strong]  sense of belonging [among graduate school alumni], and we want to work on that.”

Hence her mission as the new chair of the Fordham University Alumni Association’s (FUAA) Advisory Board. Benner, who graduated from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 1984 and previously served as the board’s vice chair, will be taking over for John Pettenati, FCRH ’81, the FUAA’s founding chair, in January. And when she does, she wants to unite all University alumni, all around the world, during her four-year term.

During this year’s Homecoming celebration, members of the FUAA ­gathered for a toast to recognize the advisory board’s ongoing work and commitment to the University. During the event, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, recognized all that Benner has contributed to Fordham thus far. “You brought in grit, courage, determination, and you never lost it,” he said. “You brought it to Fordham. You endowed Fordham with your enthusiasm.”

Referencing Benner’s undergraduate involvement with Mimes and Mummers, the theater group at Rose Hill, Pettenati added, “I know how passionate she was about that organization: She’s going to bring that passion to the FUAA.”

Benner said she has been thinking about how to stay engaged with Fordham almost since she graduated, and her leadership role on the advisory board enables her to get involved on a deeper level.

A Buffalo, New York, native, Benner said that in the ’80s, she was one of relatively few students from outside the New York metropolitan area. In recent decades, Fordham has transformed itself from a strong regional institution to a prestigious national university.

As board president, Benner plans to offer FUAA programming and events designed to unite all University alumni, particularly those who tend to think only of their affiliation with a particular campus, or with an undergraduate or graduate school, or who live beyond the New York metro area. “The thing we have in common is Fordham University; that’s what’s printed on each of our degrees,” she said. “Once you’ve graduated, you are in the world, and you wear lots of hats. You’re not your major.”

Benner added that although many of us have Zoom fatigue after being in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic for nearly two years, online programming has afforded alumni who live outside the New York metropolitan area far more opportunities to get more involved with their alma mater. She’s optimistic that it will continue to be “a portal through which alumni can stay involved and feel that they have a role—that they can volunteer in some capacity from where they are.”

Benner’s first six months in office will put her mission to the test, with both virtual and in-person events planned for all alumni. The fifth annual FUAA Alumni Recognition Reception will be held on January 20 in the ballroom at the historic 583 Park Avenue. Created by the advisory board’s networking and engagement task force, the reception hasn’t been held in person since 2020. (Last year, it was held virtually.)

And Forever Learning Week, planned by the Forever Learning task force to offer alumni “master classes taught at Fordham,” will kick off on March 28. Last year, the programming was offered virtually throughout April. “Hundreds of alumni from around the world dialed in,” Benner said. “It was fascinating because it was the mosaic of all the parts that make up Fordham.”

In addition to uniting alumni across schools, Benner hopes that she’ll be able to unite alumni across experiences, too, recognizing that Fordham is a different university than the one she attended—but in the best possible ways.

“We’ll all have different experiences, increasingly diverse experiences, more cosmopolitan experiences,” she said. “But we are all from Fordham University, the Jesuit University of New York. We have New York in common. So, whatever our generation, whatever our school or campus, we’ve got that to open the door. That’s our calling card to have something in common.”

What are you most passionate about?
Doing all that I can to open doors to opportunity for others.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Some decisions make themselves.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
In New York, anyplace where the Chrysler Building is within view. In the world, in Paris, sitting on the Seine River’s stone embankment watching boats and people of the world glide by while imagining scenes from history play out in that setting.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (HarperTorch, 1974) by Robert M. Pirsig

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you remember most?
English professor Richard Giannone because his syllabus introduced me to the writing of the masterful author Joan Didion.

What are you optimistic about?
That whatever our troubles are in whatever our era, solutions can be forged by the handiwork of people coming together sincerely to find a common cause.

But how does one take creative license on characters that actually exist? Or embellish events that history has crystallized? Or brave the intellectual and emotional honesty that memoirs pledge?

Five Fordham professors and published memoirists took up these difficult questions during a reading and panel discussion, “The Art of the Memoir,” held May 1 at the Lincoln Center campus.

Moderated by Susan Kamil, publisher of Random House and Dial Press imprints, the panel featured:

•    Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor of English;
•    Richard Giannone, Ph.D., professor emeritus of English;
•    Eve Keller, Ph.D., professor of English and director of graduate studies;
•    Kim Dana Kupperman, writer-in-residence; and
•    Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., professor of English.

Several panelists admitted that they had no experience in the genre of memoir before attempting their own. Bly, who writes under the pseudonym Eloisa James, said her sole intention of writing Paris in Love (Random House, 2012), a memoir of her sabbatical year in Paris, was “not to remember, but be present.”

“My mother died of ovarian cancer and I was diagnosed with cancer two weeks later,” Bly said of her impetus to go abroad with her family. “So we left. We went to Paris. We sold our house, we sold our cars—we ran away from home. And what I wanted to do was not forget.”

According to Bly, the book, which is currently #26 on the New York Times bestseller nonfiction list, served to bring together her memories of the year and her reconciliation with the events leading up to it.

Giannone, whose recent retirement was celebrated at the event, had different reasons to write Hidden: Reflections on Gay Life, AIDS, and Spiritual Desire (Fordham University Press, 2012). The book chronicles his transformation from a solitary gay academic during the burgeoning AIDS crisis, to the primary caregiver of his dying mother and sister.

According to Giannone, the memoir represents the class of “ordinariness.”

“These reflections tell of northern New Jersey Italian-Americans,” Giannone said. “The world is not that of ‘The Jersey Shore’ or Rick Santorum, but of plain people plugging away in domestic obscurity, surely dullness to most—plugging their way out of immigrant, blue collar status.”

Primarily a scholar, Giannone said the memoir was a “radical upheaval.” While his scholarly articles and books have forced him to confront the limits of the mind, Hidden required him to confront the limits of the heart.

Two Rings: A Story of Love and War (PublicAffairs, 2012) was a collaboration between Keller and Millie Werber, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor. Werber was 16 when she married Heniek Greenspan, who was killed in Auschwitz soon after their marriage. Despite her own arrest and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Werber saved a single tattered photograph of her husband along with their two wedding rings.

Eve Keller (right) talks with Mary Bly (left) and moderater Susan Kamil. Photo by Chris Taggart

Keller said she spent a year with Werber before being able to imagine herself in Werber’s role and intuit her thoughts and feelings.

“The result of the imaging… made me think about my own life, too,” Keller said. “Trying to envision a small act of kindness for example… required me to think about kindness itself. What comprises it? What categorizes it? What is entailed in committing such an act in the midst of horror?

“I found myself writing about the past of one person in a way that I wanted to resonate beyond that person, too,” she continued. “In a way that might prompt readers, as it surely prompted me, to think about the largest things in life—love, hate, cruelty, fear, faith, and all the rest.”

Kupperman’s memoir, the award-winning I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence (Grayworld, 2010), is a collection of autobiographical, personal, and lyric essays ranging from her mother’s suicide to the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

For Kupperman, the key element of any memoir is the development of the narrator’s persona. Often a façade rather than a transparent window into the narrator, the persona testifies to the various masks that the author herself wears.

“The narrator is simply the first layer of what we might call the nonfictive veil used by the essayist or novelist,” Kupperman said. “Sometimes I think of [a persona]as the memes that live inside me, the personalities I can conjure in the way actors can pull from their inner beings, selves that are both unrecognizable and deeply familiar.”

Stone’s two memoirs evince the diversity of the genre itself. In 2010, she helped Dina Matos McGreevey write her memoir Silent Partner (Hyperion, 2010) about her marriage to former New Jersey governor James McGreevey.

Her own first memoir, A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from her Student (Algonquin, 2002), tells the story of her student, Vincent, who left Stone his diaries and asked her to write about him following his death from AIDS.

Stone said that the memoir has progressed, historically, to include more than 58 categories, ranging in topics from academic life to war.

“No longer are autobiographies limited to the white warriors of statesmen,” she said. “The autobiographies that have become canonical in the last 30 years are the autobiographies of ‘nobodies’,” she said, referencing stories of immigrants, ex-mental patients, and the children of blue-collar workers.

Despite the variety of their works, the panelists said that the common element to their craft is “messiness,” that is, the fact that composing a memoir is a lengthy and often painful process.

“The process is like a mole banging up against a wall,” Stone said lightheartedly. “Memoirs have a final gracefulness that has nothing to do with the process.”

The event was sponsored by Fordham’s Creative Writing program, the Deans of Arts and Sciences, and PublicAffairs Books.