Gary Lutz admitted to being a grammar enthusiast on Thursday Sept. 24. (Leigh Kazmaier / Staff Photographer)

When  Gary Lutz writes, he doesn’t have much of an audience in mind. When he reads, though, he has a dedicated, admiring audience.

On Thursday Sept. 24 as part of the Visiting Writers Series sponsored by Ink and Writing Communities, Lutz read from his atypical, thought-provoking short stories to a nearly-full library auditorium.

Lutz, who is an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensboro, said he often “frustrates expectations” of readers because he doesn’t care about conventional fiction elements, like plot, names, character development and setting. Instead he focuses on every aspect of language such as syntax, punctuation, word choice and sentence structure.

Senior English major Steven Klett introduced Lutz as more of a “writer of sentences” than a poet or storywriter. Lutz supported this in the question and answer session that followed his reading when he stated that he believes each “sentence alone should be in its own way almost a self-sufficient work of art.” With a self-diagnosed “obsession with grammar,” Lutz carefully composes winding, layered sentences that force listeners and readers to think differently.

First Lutz read an older, and by his standards more conventional story called “Education,” seemingly about a man’s bizarre homeschooling of a disabled girl. He also read a more recent story, called “People Shouldn’t Have to Be the Ones to Tell You,” which confounds ideas of plot and like many of his stories uses curious, detailed sentences to explore people and the way they think.

After reading, the author fielded questions regarding his writing process, and delved into his passion for language. At an early age he read more than 250 grammar and usage books which he found even “more absorbing than novels,” and sometimes read the New Yorker magazine “solely for the punctuation.”

This fervent attention to language informs Lutz’s own writing. Though not writing specifically for them, Lutz hopes his readers are not page-turners but “page-huggers,” people who cling to the page to get everything out of it before flipping to the next.

“Hearing his short-shorts read surpassed my expectations,” said senior English major Kasey March, who was a fan of Lutz’s work prior to the reading.