An Eastern professor will revisit her adolescence during “White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian American Life” at 7 p.m. Wednesday in the lecture hall of the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

Daiva Markelis, is the subject for the 2014 Center for the Humanities Annual Faculty Speaker.

The English professor and creative writing instructor said she first began writing in the sixth grade, when she generated “very bad poems about love and thunder storms.”

Since then, Markelis’ work has appeared in The Chicago Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Women and Language and Fourth River, among others.

It was not until Markelis felt an urge to make public her unique heritage, that the idea to write a memoir came into full-focus.

“I felt that since no one had written a memoir about growing up Lithuanian-American, I could fill a gap in the literature of immigrant memoir,” she said.

Markelis will discuss not only her memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian American Life, but also the inherent issues of autobiographical writing.

“I’ll be talking about Cicero and Lithuania, and about how some Lithuanians don’t like my book because they feel I portray them in a negative light,” Markelis said.

She added the discussion will include talk of demons.

“There will be colorful and interesting slides,” she said.

Potential topics of discussion include the struggles of adhering to both American and

Lithuanian cultures – a task Markelis grew familiar with while growing up in Cicero in the 60s.

“I was born and raised in Cicero, a working-class suburb of Chicago famous for a number of shady and unpleasant reasons,” she said. “My parents were immigrants from Lithuania, so I grew up speaking two languages.”

Although the intention of Wednesday’s lecture is for Markelis to share her writing process, she said her writing has grown the most during her time as a professor.

“I constantly learn from my students,” she said. “They are my best teachers.”

Despite being chosen as this year’s speaker, Markelis said she rarely feels a sense of completion with her work.

“I do a lot of rewriting. I don’t think I’m ever quite satisfied with what I write,” she said.

Still, Markelis said she hopes to share with audience members what she has learned through writing her memoir.

“Creative nonfiction can be more formal: a profile of a famous person can be creative nonfiction. A travel piece can be creative nonfiction,” she said. “Memoir is very personal – you’re writing about your own experiences.”

Katie Smith can be reached at 581-2812 or kesmith2@eiu.edu.