April 22, 2020

Some yard work, trying to hack away the honeysuckle on the outside of the fence.

I  assumed the department was going to let my retirement go without notice. But yesterday I get a note from Lori to summarize my experience here, as part of a public statement about my retirement. Sorry to be so shallow, but I was happy. This is what I wrote:

I came to UNCA in 1983 to head the creative writing program, to which I added as soon as I could non-fiction and playwriting, also founding the student literary magazine, which I quickly passed on to abler hands. I was one of the originators of Arts and Ideas, however much it seems to have crept from its original vision. I loved teaching Humanities, and was maybe as good at it as anyone has ever been. The literature courses that I didn't like were few. I suppose I felt most lyrical and useful with the Metaphysicians and Romantic poets, but I also liked teaching courses I had not taught before, which gave me an opportunity to learn new things. I taught a brand new Arts & Ideas course in my last semester, and American Lit for the first time in my second-to-last. so I was never one for settling into comfortable niches. For a while I was the Shakespeare man. That was a deep mine where one might delve, and I still cherish the sense of discovery that came with every lecture. Creative writing classes depend on their quality on who's in them, but I have vivid memories of hearing student poems and thinking how lucky I was to have the first glimpse at what could, in some cases, only be called inspired. I loved teaching playwriting, and presenting, as happened for many years, to the public  evenings of student plays. Maybe my favorite class was an Oral Interpretation course that got taught only once as a special topic in creative writing.  That was at the apex not only of my energies as a teacher, but of UNCA as a force in the community. I looked for ways to be ecumenical, and for a decade a year did not go by when I did not act in a play put on by Theater UNCA. I sang several semesters with the music department's choral groups. In my last years I was concentrating on my own work, so I tend myself to forget that for a while I was the UNCA professor most evident in the wider community. I performed with every theater group then active, sat on arts committees downtown, sang with commuinity groups, and worked diligently, sometimes dangerously, on issues related to gay rights. The pastor of Trinity Baptist once devoted part of a sermon to me. Who could blame him?  I was then not only an advocate for gay rights (one of the founding members of SALGA, the Southern Appalachian Gay and Lesbian Alliance) but also the faculty advisor for the Wiccans. I was a founding members of the Asheville Gay Men's Chorus, and for two years the poetry slam champion of Asheville. To support new playwriting, I founded Pisgah Players, which became Black Swan Theater, which was active for several years, despite yearly attacks from Theater UNCA. We were the only theater group to perform for the North Carolina Writers' Network.

I am grateful for the personal growth teaching here allowed me. I came to Asheville as a poet, but was in the fullness of time an essayist, a fiction writer, a playwright, and a painter.  I don't know that this wouldn't have happened otherwise, but I don't know that it would. For a decade I ran Urthona Gallery in various places downtown, and served as art critic for the Citizen Times and columnist for The Laurel of Asheville. I had my hand in most of the theater that went on in the community, and am to this day an associate of Magnetic Theater and a partner in The Sublime Theater. I organized the one and only City Dionysia, which featured all the theater groups at that time in a grand performance cycle at the Diana Wortham.

I have been publishing broadly and consistently--and rather variously-- but the full volumes I have published since coming to UNCA include A Sense of the Morning and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, collections of nature essays, and A Childhood in the Milky Way, a memoir. In poetry I published The Basswood Tree, Blood Rose, A Dream of Adonis, and Peniel. In the last two years my extended experiments with the novel have begun to pay off. My first novel The Falls of the Wyona won the Quill Prize from Red Hen Press. Local publisher Black Mountain brought out Night, Sleep, and the Dreams of Lovers, the story of the birth of the Asheville Arts Scene in the 90's. My 3rd novel, The One with the Beautiful Necklaces, a sort of hillbilly magical realism, is due out in November 2020.. Three completed novels wait in the wings. But the literary form to which I've devoted most energy has been theater. My first play won the North Carolina Playwrights Fund prize, and if I go to my archives to count, I have eleven prizes for playwritng, some of them considerable. I have had six professional productions in New York City, as well as productions in Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Cincinnati, London, DC, Portland, and on down. I have twice won the North Carolina Playwrights Prize (with a production in Greensboro) and four of my plays have been produced by the Magnetic Theater in Asheville. That needs to be mentioned because none of my colleagues bothered to attend. My trilogy Father Abraham was given a fine reading by the Sublime Theater, and is being considered for production at Ford's Theater in DC.

Let me say that my goals as a teacher and as a writer have-- I understand at this moment-- a certain lucky unity. I have striven most essentially for clarity-- to say as a writer what I mean as clearly as it can be said, to explain as a teacher the inner workings of art as clearly as it can possibly be laid out, to demand of my students clarity in understanding and in expression. I am a believer that both the making and the consumption of art should be an exultation. joyful, redemptive, revealing. When I was at my best, my classrooms were joyful, redemptive, revealing. I am satisfied with that.