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Colin Wells recently published the article, "Connecticut Wit and Augustan Theology: John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight and the New Divinity," in the journal Religion and Literature. Wells also delivered a paper, "Unmasking the American Condorcet: Enlightenment, Race and Manifest Destiny in Anti-Jeffersonian Satire" at the Northeastern American Society for 18th-Century Studies Annual Meeting in New York in October.
"Writing as a way to work through grief is as old as art itself," says
Mark Allister in his new book, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow. In it,
he brings together several prominent nature writers who have utilized
reflection of the natural world to sort through and heal their grief.
Allister began working on the book more than ten years ago as an autobiographical studies project. Through his research, however, he became interested in a group of people who have written specifically about overcoming loss with the help of the natural world. He examines the work of Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Erlich.
Several of the chapters were published before the entire book was released this year. For Allister, the work was an exercise in balancing his family life with his writing and academic lives. He is grateful for a six-month sabbatical from teaching in 1998-99 to be able to rewrite the entire piece from beginning to end to make it into a more workable book form.
Judging by the increased interest in nature writing over the last several years, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow is sure to reach an audience far wider than Allister's expected group of scholars and environmental literature writers, because it discusses ways in which different types of people have-and can-find solace in the world around them.
Published by the University of Virginia Press, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow is part of the Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism series.
It is no wonder that Richard DuRocher-a professor well respected and called "cool" by many of his students-took interest in writing a book that examines Milton as a teacher. His book, Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum was published last fall. The following interview took place in March over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
We asked: What is it about Milton that makes you want to be a Milton scholar?
Rich said: On the first day of class, I always get the "why Milton" question. Milton's ideas and his language stimulate and provoke me in ways that no other writer does. It drives me to new positive insights...and it drives me crazy.
We asked: What motivated you to write Milton Among the Romans?
Rich said: Basic curiosity got me started. Any literary project begins with questions. I was most curious to see how Milton the teacher would affect Milton the poet.
We asked: How did you uncover the evidence to support your argument?
Rich said: We knew for a long time that Milton taught school. I read an account by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, about the details of the school. [The students of Milton's academy] read all these works of Roman science-agriculture, architecture, medicine, astronomy and earth science. At the time, I thought, 'that's really odd,' so I started reading the books, and went from there. I'm the kind of nut who likes reading old Latin science and Milton. I thought that since Milton taught this stuff and later wrote Paradise Lost, surely these subjects would come back and make an appearance.
We asked: Where does Roman architecture show up in Paradise Lost?
Rich said: Milton's famous description of Pandemonium, the devil's palace, is Roman architecture. It makes sense that the palace of Roman architecture was made for devils-Rome flourished and collapsed, not to mention the feeding of Christians to the lions. On the other hand, Milton is totally vague about what architecture is in heaven. We can guess that it probably wouldn't be Roman, though.
We asked: What was challenging about writing the book?
Rich said: I've had years of Latin, but sometimes the challenge was reading something in a technical field. For example: how to make olive oil. I wasn't sure if I was translating it right, because I'm not an expert on growing olives. As a scholar, you're always trying to be true and accurate. My work is a study of influence, and requires good judgment. On the one hand, I was always trying to prove my case, but part of me was trying to second-guess myself-to be skeptical.
We asked: Until now, no one has examined the connection between the curriculum of Milton's academy and his poetry. How is your book a new approach to Milton, and how does it feel to be pioneering the subject?
Rich said: I once gave a talk and was introduced by a scholar who said that my work is remarkable, because it is both true and new. I've kind of taken "true and new" as a silent motto. I don't think my book has a new theory or a new tool. The tools are old fashioned, people have known of Milton's use of the classics for a long time. The new part is looking and reading. Not many Milton scholars want to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of classics in search of possible connections. But I had a bizarre interest to make a connection. I often found stuff where I thought there would be the least payoff.
We asked: Are you working on any new writing projects?
Rich said: I have another book half finished already about grief, weeping and suffering in the epic tradition. It's called Tears of Odysseus, and is a more wide-ranging, psychological study. My daughter's chronic illness opened my eyes to this epic tradition.
We asked: Any last words?
Rich said: I've had so much help and support from people at St. Olaf, especially from students in my Milton classes. This kind of book can't happen without students and colleagues who are open to ideas with support all up and down the line.
--Erin Benson ('02), interviewer
EB: The Boys' House struck home for me, because I grew up in North Dakota, in the Red River Valley, where farming is such a way of life. Do you see your stories as a preservation of that way of life? A celebration?
JH: Not as a preservation really. Preservations are memoirs, family histories. I'll hear a story where a woman tells about prairie fires near her farm, which were so bright she could read by the light of them. So I take that detail, and I'll turn it into fiction.
EB: I counted 65 stories in all. Where do your stories come from?
JH: Well, for instance, there was the big problem of animals being on the farm that did not belong on the farm. The adults would be very angry about this. "The Stray Cat in the Garden" takes on this notion of the intruder. The cat appeared to the boys as something dangerous, like an invader. About five days after September 11th, I had a book reading where I read this story. There's a line about "capturing a terrorist," and it was unbelievable to realize how it was part of this short story. So, in the story, of course, after the boys get closer to the cat, the cat arches its back and starts purring, and they realize that it's really harmless after all.
EB: This story is similar to your story about the farmer who drove a Studebaker instead of a Ford, "Who are Those People Anyhow?"
JH: I looked at that theme many times, this fear of the outsider, the nature of this prejudice. I looked at the dark side of it. The story of how the boys notice that these people have all kinds of different equipment, different kinds of cattle. They notice that there was something strange about them, because they didn't fit the norms of the community. Without knowing anything about them they were ready to fight them.
EB: In your story, "Who made Her Husband do all the Work," you portray the oral tradition of storytelling. Do you hope your stories will be read aloud?
JH: The people who like them the most are the people who read them aloud. The stories I love to hear are about people who keep them by their bed and read a couple of them before they go to sleep at night. There are people who take them in the car, and take them on their travels, and read a few to each other. That's where they're at they're best. But of course, when reviewers pick up the book, they read them on the page. So, it has to withstand that too. Every once in awhile, people will say, "Oh, you sound like Garrison Keillor!" I think, well, that's not bad to be compared to someone who has that kind of reputation. But if you look at Garrison Keillor's works on the page, it's different, because he really is a performance person. He has all kinds of little drifting lines on the page. When you put them on a page, you see what he does in front of a crowd, playing the crowd, which is very different than what I do on the page. I intend my words for the page first and then hope they come off the page aloud.
EB: Do you write to a specific audience, children?
JH: I write for adults. I'm always surprised when I hear they're used for kids more and more. I'm trying for a voice that's more like Chaucer's than like Milton's. Milton was my first graduate work before I started writing poetry. But my voice is much closer to the Chaucer--the clear English sentence. I guess if you write that kind of prose, it is accessible to kids. But I write for adults.
EB: I think it is because your stories are about boys. My brother is about the age of the boys in your stories, and I think they would be stories important for him to read.
JH: You know there aren't many stories for boys. If you do a search on Amazon.com, and put in "boys" + "short fiction," you're not going to find much. It's really amazing. I've been surprised in the last couple years how often at my readings there will be a woman with her boys in the audience. She's looking for something for them to read, especially for reluctant readers.
EB: One of your reviewers calls you the "Pied Piper of Farm Life in Short Fiction." What do you think of that?
JH: Anything like that, of course, you love it. Every writer deserves at least one review like this in a lifetime. That's the review everyone hopes to get.
Standing Naked
EB: Whereas The Boys' House was very much about the male experience and consciousness, your poetry is about relationships, growing up, growing old. How is writing poetry different than writing stories to you?
JH: I've written poems and stories on the very same subject. It's very strange because when it gets into fiction, it becomes something else. It's as if a different voice comes to play. And I suspect in my writing poetry, even though I think they are also very accessible, there is something more of my education in there, including the traditions of romantic love and the renaissance scholar and all of those sonnets. I think there were 200 sonnet sequences written in the 1590s, most of them were love poems, and of course, Shakespeare is there. I think part of it is the literary influence in my poems. I feel naturally part of the tradition of poetry.
The other thing about writing about relationships in Standing Naked is that the farm stories are very sensuous. It's very much a sense-oriented world of the boys. When you take that sensibility and put it into your relationships, it's just a change of your subject and not so much a change of sensibility.
EB: I really enjoyed your Iowa poem and your other poems about rural life. How does being removed from rural life affect your poems? Is it harder to write about farm life being away from it?
JH: No, it's easier. I think we need to forget it to remember it. Once you forget it, it goes into the unconscious, into the area of dreams. And then it comes back into the clutches of the immediate memory, where we're so often trying to be too honest to the facts. Now I can speak from the mythical experiences that come from the darker reaches of my imagination. So, I feel I'm freer to write about farm life.
EB: You're working on a new collection, Ordinary Sins?
JH: Right. These are all urban. Maybe that's because I've been urban long enough that that too has been forgotten so I can start calling it up and working on it as a product of the imagination. I just try to go through the ordinary neuroses-road rage, people talking on telephones in public. There's one that's probably the most popular that I've read aloud, called Sad Hour, which is about a bar where they have a sad hour and prices triple and people start coming because they want to get into the sadness of it. Little things like a guy who jingles his change, something so ordinary, odd stories like that. A little section of it has come out as a chapbook called Why Would A Woman Pour Boiling Water Over Her Head?
Ordinary Sins has been in the making for several years. I actually also have another book coming out too. I wrote the text, and they are all little vignettes for a book of photographs of Old Barns. I have a story about two barns arguing about whether they are male or female-the gender question about barns. I have one called the arrogant barn, the confused barn, the tattooed barn. That will be coming out a year from now.
EB: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?
JH: I had this long debate when I was a little boy about whether I wanted to be a writer or a preacher. My family is made of farmers and preachers. I was good singer, a boy soprano. I sang for all the weddings and funerals, and I liked the stage. So I thought preaching would be my place. Then I thought about being a writer, though I continued to think about preaching as late as college. It was because I realized it was literature that I really loved, though I thought that I would never write anything commercial. So I thought of myself primarily as a teacher. But I broke away from teaching pretty early, to do nothing but live the life of a writer, during the shuffle years, as I call them. After doing that for many years and I had the chance to teach here, I found that I'm doing as much writing as I teach as I did when I wasn't teaching.
EB: Do your classes inspire you?
JH: Some of them do. There are several poems in Standing Naked that I wrote in classes.
EB: Do you have any advice for students who are aspiring writers?
JH: I think because today students see such an urgency in making a living right after college. Well, we really didn't have that. If someone wanted to write in the early sixties, we could do this sideline job and rent an apartment for twenty-five or thirty dollars a month. Maybe you'd have a job that paid two dollars an hour, but you really could do it. That's just not a possibility today. So I think the options are much different now. I think anyone who wants to be a writer has to really love the writing enough that they know they can keep it going while they make a living.
The quality that I think guarantees a writer success more than just raw talent is dogged persistence. Not giving up. Of all of the people that I knew in my twenties and thirties, those that are considered successful writers today weren't the most talented ones say when I was 21 or 22. The most successful writers are the ones who are persistent. Maybe even not as doggedly, maybe even not as aggressively, but more casually, not putting too much urgency in it. That's why I worry about some young writers who feel such an urgency to make it as a writer really young. I don't think urgency gives them their best work. They have to work out some agreement with themselves, maybe a lifestyle that will allow writing to flourish while still providing sustenance. I advise marry rich.
In 1999 Associate Professor of English Joseph Mbele published his most recent book, Matengo Folktales, after 23 years of field research, scrupulous translating, and writing commentaries. The book, which contains ten folktales translated from Mbele's mother tongue of Matengo into English, represents the culmination of the professor's life-long project and passion.
Mbele, a widely-known and respected folklorist, began his research on Matengo Folktales during the summer of 1975 while pursuing his undergraduate degree at Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. He was first introduced to the folklore field by a professor from Lesotho, South Africa, who joined the university during Mbele's time there. "Through taking his course I discovered that I connected with folklore naturally. My own father was a great storyteller and storytelling was a very important part of my childhood. I was inspired in the field and never turned back."
During the summers of 1975 and 1976, Mbele recorded folktales from area storytellers near his home in southern Tanzania, including three folktales from his father. After taking detailed field notes and recording each folktale on cassette tapes, he began the long process of translating the folktales from Matengo, an oral language, into written English. In 1999 after 23 years of translating and writing accompanying commentary, Matengo Folktales was published.
The translation process interests and frustrates Mbele, who explains that completely accurate translations are "an impossible dream." He says, "In certain ways I feel that oral languages are richer than written languages, and to say we have translated accurately is to deceive ourselves. Compromises must be made."
One of Mbele's goals for the book was to make it accessible not only for academic readers but for all people. Mbele says, "My father was a great conversationalist. He connected with everyone without distinction. I wanted this book to do the same."
Matengo Folktales can be purchased from the St. Olaf College Bookstore. A complete listing of Professor Mbele's work and praise for Matengo Folktales can be found at: http://www.stolaf.edu/people/mbele/
EL: What inspired you to write this book?
Colin Wells: My inspiration was Dwight's 778-line satiric poem "The Triumph of Infidelity," which I read in graduate school for the first time. What struck me immediately was how apparently incomprehensible it was, which led me to try to "crack its code"--the unspoken assumptions that made it make sense to a number of people in 1788. Once I was able to do that, I realized both that virtually no one had gotten the poem right before, and that the larger story of its significance would take a book-length project to explain.
EL: What other work have you done with Early American satire?
Colin Wells: This is a long-time interest, but most of that time has been spent writing about Timothy Dwight and his fellow Federalist Wits--poets who waged satiric warfare against Jeffersonian Democracy in the early years of the republic (such poets as John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins and Dwight's brother, Theodore).
(Students: don't worry if you've never heard of these writers; not many people have, but I'm hoping that someday they will.)
EL: What did you hope to accomplish in your writing? Do you feel that you have accomplished that?
Colin Wells: I wanted, first, to recover for a modern audience the literary, religious, political and ideological significance of Timothy Dwight's campaign of satire and controversial writing at the end of the eighteenth-century. In addition, I wanted to make "The Triumph of Infidelity" "readable" again for teachers and students alike. (As an appendix to the book, I include the full text of Dwight's poem.) Whether I've succeeded or not I'll leave to my readers....
EL: How did you go about finding a publisher?
Colin Wells: While still working on the book, I applied for a fellowship from the Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, VA, to complete the manuscript. I didn't get the fellowship, but the publications editor at the Institute wrote to say she was very interested in it, and asked me to submit it when finished. I did, and they accepted it (with further revisions, of course).
EL: Have you been happy with the response so far?
Colin Wells: Extremely: the only responses I've seen are by those who provided the blurbs for the cover, but I was struck by how these descriptions of the book matched my own sense of what I was trying to accomplish.
EL: Which part is your favorite? Which part was the most fun to write?
Colin Wells: There are particular passages, particular paragraphs that I reread proudly and remember the moment I wrote them for the first time. But I can't call it fun; as the saying goes, I hate writing, I love having written.
EL: Did your opinion of Dr. Dwight and his work change over the course of writing the book?
Colin Wells: What surprises me is how Timothy Dwight--a figure whom other historians and critics have sometimes viewed unfavorably--appears to me as a better writer and a smarter social critic than when I started. He really is an unappreciated but fine satirist, and judging from the advance quotes, people are starting to recognize that.
EL: How do you balance academic work with teaching? Are there any ways in which they conflict?
Colin Wells: My own work on seldom-taught writers and their worlds is sometimes difficult to make fit with my courses. I've rarely taught Dwight in my courses, though much of what I write about in the book is Dwight's allusions to Pope, Swift, Dryden and other famous figures. However, now that I've made the text of "The Triumph" available (with notes), I will try to teach it. I feel that part of what I'm supposed to offer as a teacher is my particular expertise, whatever that may be. As the world's expert on this poem, I should make that knowledge available. So students, beware!
EL: Do you have any plans for future projects?
Colin Wells: My next book is a larger and wider look at satiric poetry in the Early Republic. Poets and satirists in the 1780s, 90s, and 1800s were engaged almost daily with the political issues of the times, and there is a fascinating story to tell about the "poetry wars" they waged against politicians and each other in the name of shaping America's future. On my sabbatical, then, I've been engaged in a systematic process of reading every political poem written in this period (including poems published in newspapers). I've completed the 1790s, and the list of poems already tops 300. I've got about 25 or 30 more years to do, so look for me at the microfilm machine for the next year or so.
Five years ago, when English department faculty member Mary Winstead began researching a book to record her father's Mississippi folk tales, she uncovered much more than she could have imagined. She discovered, in the words of Jim Heynen, "painful truths of the people she loved and thought she knew."
Back to Mississippi is simultaneously an autobiographical story of childhood and a look at three civil rights activists struggling to change the ignorance and hatred of America towards African Americans. Winstead beautifully weaves the two stories together, eventually revealing the shocking murder of the three activists during the "freedom summer of 1964." Even more shocking, she learns and reveals that the murder was assisted by a distant relation. She presents her story from three perspectives: herself as a child and adolescent growing up in Minnesota, and finally as an adult returning to Mississippi to uncover the secretıs of her familyıs past.
Somehow, Winstead manages to present a painfully honest look at the underlying racial prejudices of her family and society while retaining the humor that only childhood and family life can bring. Whether racism is overtly expressed or is a silent lesson taught to children through the actions of their parents, she encounters it in Mississippi and Minnesota alike. Yet, despite meeting the anger and pain of family members since the release of her book, she still believes the power of overcoming racism lies within the individual.
Back to Mississippi is currently available in the St. Olaf Bookstore.
Cherewatuk awarded James Randall Leader Prize
by Katie Moore ('04)
Karen Cherewatuk was virtually the last person to find out that she was the recipient of the James Randall Leader prize awarded by the International Arthurian Society this year. "The neat thing about this award," says Karen, "is that 350 people kept it a secret from me after I was announced the winner." She was unable to attend the May meeting of the announcement and did not find out about the prestigious award until a medievalist conference in Wales two months later.
The essay, "Born-Again Virgins and Holy Bastards: Bors and Elyne and Lancelot and Galahad" was published by the Arthuriana journal last summer. Karen's "richly learned...and characteristically bold" article, according to department head Jonathan Hill, explores a paradox within the medieval ideal of chastity. Sir Thomas Malory's two mythical knights, Lancelot and Bors, commit similar sexual crimes, yet their consequences drastically differ. While Sir Bors, a "born-again virgin," attains the highest honor of the Holy Grail with his bastard son, Sir Lancelot and son are tragically shunned.
Her essay, however, is only a piece of her diligent study of Malory's work. She plans to revise the essay for inclusion in her five-year book project, which will hopefully be completed during her released-time grant this semester. "I knew it was a good idea, that the scholarship would be fresh," says Karen of the already published except.
Karen first sparked an interest in Arthurian literature when she chose, as her first teaching assignment, to teach first-year composition using Arthurian myth. Since then, she has become highly involved in the International Arthurian Society and attends annual North American branch meetings in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As this year's winner, she will now serve on their selection committee for choosing scholarly essays for the award.
Karen Sawyer won the University of Toronto's "Clifford Leech Prize for 2000-01" for her doctoral dissertation, "The Resurrection of Our Lord: A Study and Dual Text Edition." The Leech Prize is awarded annually for the drama thesis of outstanding merit. Sawyer was also selected to attend a Folger Institute Weekend Seminar on the Early Modern Bible led by Jaroslav Pelikan last September at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
A member of the English department at St. Olaf since 1992, Jim Heynen has published short stories, novels for young adults, and poetry. Geeta Sharma-Jensen, book editor for the Milwaukee Journal, begins her review of Heynen's most recent short story collection, The Boys' House, this way:
"Sometime, someone should give Jim Heynen a writing prize. A big writing prize. Like the Pulitzer or the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a storyteller for the ages. From the ages. For more than 20 years, this backwood's poet has been telling of life on the American farm with a half-smile and a raised eyebrow. His is the archetypal voice: sage, preacher, scribe, storyteller, wit. You can almost see his narrator, tobacco pouch in hand, hat on head, holding a ragtag bunch hostage at a campfire with his talk.
"Heynen has said he writes from 'a rural story-telling tradition.' In hishands it is a pure tradition--clear, economical, relayed to us in thumbnail structures that are part vignette, part parable, part plain story with a kick."
—Karen Cherewatuk and Mark Allister have received released-time grants for tenured faculty for next year.
Cherewatuk will be finishing a book manuscript on Marriage in Malory, in which she "seeks to uncover in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur (completed 1469) the author's and original audience's attitudes toward marriage and adultery, as well as children, parents, and sexual relations."
Allister will be editing Men and B, a collection of essays "exploring men's lives in relation to nature, or in relation to society's constructs of nature and masculinity." He will use his released-time to write an introduction to the volume and to develop a contributing essay based on his interviews of Scott Russell Sanders, a preeminent writer on nature and men's issues.
Diane LeBlanc's essay "Voices" has received the Brenda Ueland Prose Prize for creative nonfiction from Water-Stone Literary Review; it will appear in Water-Stone 2002. Recent issues of the review include work by Robert Bly, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Scott Russell Sanders, Jane Hirshfield, and Donald Hall.
Jan Allister's essay "Morningtown Ride,"about a train trip from Seattle to Oakland she took with her daughter, has been accepted by Kimera,a literary journal in Spokane. It will be online on the web; clicking on Jan's name will allow you to hear her reading it aloud on a machine she borrowed from Media Services. She is currently working on two essays, one on quilts, one on crafts, and at home is making a quilt for her "fieldwork."
Chapel Talk
October 1, 2002
Jim Heynen
Is my discipline, creative writing--poetry and fiction--a friend of faith?
Wherever you are on the faith spectrum, I think creative writing is always a friend. Creative writing is friendly first of all--and from the outset--because it is not utilitarian. It does not come into the world with a practical purpose. It may move the heart or delight the senses. It may make our lives richer, it may deepen our understanding of the world and ourselves--but, as Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book, The Gift, says: it is not part of the consumerism formula. It is not a commodity.
For writers who take this enterprise seriously, the act of writing becomes a spiritual journey. One reason this is so is because creative/inventive/imaginative writing slows things down. Even if you are a witty writer, even if you try such outrageous practices as automatic writing, even if you are an irreverent, in-your-face writer, tapping into the artesian well of your imagination leads you into a kind of meditation. You are slowing things down, and in this slowing down process, in this receptive manner, the imagination starts breathing.
We speak of inspiration, which really means a breathing in of the spirit.
It is no wonder the country turned to poetry after 9-11. We needed a language that only reflection can produce. We needed non-consumerism language that could speak to the unspeakable. A language that would connect us to each other. On 9-11, we were driven back to the source of poetry, to that deep urge to express the needs of our inner lives.
I think the whole process of creative writing is a healthy one. I think it is healthy psychologically. I think it is healthy spiritually. And part of that health comes through hard work. Getting that gift onto the page can be like wrestling with an angel (sometimes a fallen angel!). If nothing else, the struggle to get it right can be humbling.
In my mind, creative writing in a faith community is most legitimate when, with integrity, it honestly looks at the whole of human experience and presents it in what discerning readers perceive to be aesthetically accomplished form. This can mean poems of despair. This can mean dark stories as well as uplifting ones. This can mean cantankerous moods, irreverent moods, status-quo-challenging moods, as well as reverent, affirming moods of contentment and celebration. Creative writing has the hard work of saying what needs saying--about one's own life, about life we see around us, about the broken world. Often putting one's negative moods into artistic form is as much a gift as a poem of celebration.
There are among believers those who want to whitewash creative writing into a literature that has no irreverence in it, no skepticism, no bad words. Too often such mandates of conformity lead to oversimplified and dishonest representations of the world. Sinless characters are not real people and can in no way challenge the reader toward spiritual growth. Spiritual growth, I believe, is rooted in the truth. Flannery O'Connor (perhaps echoing Chekhov, but I think no one would doubt her faith) suggested that a writer's primary objective should be to be "hotly in pursuit of the truth." If writers pursue the truth, whether of their own misery, whether of their own anger, whether of their convictions or their uncertainties, whether of their wry perceptions of the follies of human kind, whether through wit or through wisdom, if writers apply the tools of artistic creation (and that's what our writing workshops are about; that's what revision is about; that's what emulating great literature is about; that's what learning the strategies of the trade is all about--understatement, overstatement, condensation, surprise twists, a leap of association that sends a little current up the reader's spine--that's why we learn to make language sound like music, why we sculpt it, massage it, give it color: all so that we can wrap it like the gift it is going to be!--if the verbal artist does this hard work of creating from the raw materials of imagination and experience and tries with integrity in the pursuit of truth to manifest something that is artistically beautiful, then I think we all have reason to sing, Hallelujah, it is good. And a gift to us all.
Opening Convocation: "Community and Compassionate Imagination"
September 5, 2001
Mary Titus
Some excerpts:
Wonderful new communities are birthing right here on the Hill. But I want to push community creating further. How do we connect with people different from ourselves, develop compassionate imagination for the unfamiliar? How do we create community in the midst of diversity? How do we create it all over the world?
...
The skills we learn as we create and transform community in our classrooms are the skills we need to create and transform larger communities. I believe that if we can learn how to make each person in a classroom a full and contributing citizen, we will then have the tools to do the same thing in our nation. I'm bringing in the word citizen for a purpose here, for I am invoking one of the great hopes for Higher Education in general, and for this college, the community to which you now belong.
...
Higher education leader Carol Schneider envisions the college classroom as a place where we practice the skills of democracy, talking and thinking together, sharing and making new stories, new meanings, a place where we learn to recognize different kinds of people as fellow contributors to, citizens of our community.
Unless we exercise compassionate imagination we remain isolated, silent passengers, each in his or her small cramped seat, riding the bus of life--to where? As Paul Loeb wrote in Soul of a Citizen: "We can blank out the voices of our fellow human beings...but if we do, we risk the decay of our humanity. When we shrink from the world, our souls shrink too."
Not attending to the stories of others, we lose the power of compassionate imagination and become ever more separate: separation leading to lack of relationship, leading to callousness and fear. I can think of many moments in our history when separation did this work. Consider Germany divided after the War, Northern Ireland today; Serbians and Croatians; South Africa under Apartheid--the Jim Crow laws here in the United States: separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate restaurants, separate people--black and white. Or consider the Jewish ghettos in Poland. When human relation is broken, apathy and fear fill the gap. Those people are not like us. For them we have no compassion.
...
As I told you, I'm an English professor and I believe in stories, in fact I believe stories can help us develop compassionate imagination by creating rich relationships with all kinds of unfamiliarity, stories connect us in our minds and hearts with each other--in a classroom, a campus, a community and beyond.
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In her book Poetic Justice philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that stories--literature--can do just this work. Through reading novels, she believes, we can strengthen our ability to imagine what it is like to live the life of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be oneself or one of ones loved ones (5).
As an English professor I want to agree with Martha Nussbaum, yet I am always admonished by the words of that intrepid heroine, Janie, from Zora Neale Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Do you know of Zora Neale Hurston: the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in anthropology and one of the great black dialect writers of American literature? Those of you who have read Their Eyes Were Watching God--and I hope there are a lot of you out there!--will recall that when Janie returns to her hometown (after three husbands and a hurricane) she tells her adventures to her friend Pheoby.
Janie's story changes her friend, immediately enlarging her world. As Pheoby breathlessly announces, "Lawd! A done growed ten feet higher from jus listen tuh you Janie." Janie knows the power of story--she is a great porch sitter, yarn weaver herself. But she believes you need more than just words. So she tells Pheoby: "Its uh known fact, Pheoby, you got tuh go there tuh know there. Yo papa and yo mama and nobody else cant tell yuh and show uh. Two things everybodys got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin fuh theyselves."
You've got to go there to know there. That's the hope of study abroad in higher education--and again here at St. Olaf College. Not only will students sit in classrooms and share stories, not only will they read books and encounter more stories, talking about them together, but they will also leave their homes and communities for places far away. Can we really become citizens of the world? Is the world a community? How far does your compassionate imagination extend?
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Let me read a story from a traveling Ole. She writes of her experiences in Australia where she lived for a week with an Aboriginal family, helping prepare for a dance, a corroborree, making grass skirts, clapsticks and didgeridoos. She writes of an evenings end, after she has danced and sung, carrying her own clapsticks:
I linger in the circle for a while longer. I am alone. At first all I hear is silence. All I see is the light of the fires near me and the darkness beyond the circle. I look up to the stars. They twinkle brighter than I've ever seen before. Slowly, I begin to hear: the beating of the clapsticks, the rattling of the boomerangs, the singing of the didgeridoo, the chanting of Country's voice, and the movement of our feet as we dance. I hear it in the air, feel it in the soles of my feet, and see it in the light of the fires. The darkness of the forest is replaced with light. There are figures dancing, children singing, voices laughing. I close my eyes gently, feel the night surround me, sense the moonlight upon my face, and hear the crackling of the fires. For a moment, all is peace within me. I feel connected to something greater than I have ever known. I leave the corroborree circle somehow different than when I entered, and I look forward to tomorrow night, when, once more, we dance.
With her whole self this student entered into the story of another culture: living with a family, trying her own hand at making clapsticks, eating, singing, dancing--becoming connected. Her story grows larger, her imagination embraces a bigger world. As she tells us: I leave the circle somehow different than when I entered.
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Its a new year and you are a new generation of St. Olaf students. On behalf of the staff, the faculty, the students--this whole small city on a hill--I bid you welcome. We look forward to hearing your story and creating community with you.
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