Prof. Tom Chiarella on 'How to Own the Room'

September 17, 2007

September 17, 2007, Greencastle, Ind. - Tom Chiarella's interactions with Bill Murray, and a subsequent personal acting lesson from Jeff Daniels, are the basis of an essay in the current issue of Esquire. The magazine's fiction editor, Chiarella is also a professor of English at DePauw University. His contribution is entitled, "How to Own the Room."

"Presence. I've never understood why some guys have that, whereas most guys seem to go wanting," Chiarella writes. "I once met the King of Morocco. He looked right at me, but it was like he could see the horizon behind me at the same time. A guy who can control the space he's in without showing the mechanisms of that control -- his money, his accomplishments, what the world owes him -- is a man with power. I have a limited set of these abilities. I can scare the hell out of my sons just by standing a certain way in their bedroom door. I can make my dog leave the room just by staring at her with a certain conviction in my heart. I've learned how to make a bartender look at me without shouting or raising my hand. But insofar as presence goes, those are about my limits. But I thought, Why couldn't I learn presence? Why couldn't I climb into another skin?"

Read the piece, which appears in the September issue, at Esquire.com.

Tom Chiarella has authored the books Foley's Luck, Writing Dialogue and Thursday's Game: Notes from a Golfer with Far to Go. In the May Esquire, actress Halle Berry turned the tables on the writer and interviewed him. Details can be found in this previous story.

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