49 Writers: Kathleen Tarr: Writing from the Heart Forward

This is the third post in a series from our September featured guest author.

When I was a teaching assistant at the University of Pittsburgh my assigned ?office? on the sixth floor of the Cathedral of Learning was a dark, drab cubicle with a metal desk, a shabby lamp, and a few push pins.? It was close to Bruce Dobler?s office, making it easy for me to drop by unannounced which I did all the time.
Bruce had been teaching at Pitt for 25 years on the nonfiction faculty, but he got his start studying fiction at the Iowa Writers? Workshop, though he was humble about it. ?A free-spirited, silver-haired hipster in his late sixties with a passion for swing dancing, he had also tried his luck as a stand-up comic. By the time we met, all three of his novels were sadly out of print, including the novel set in Alaska, The Last Rush North (1976), which I?d never heard about, and which he described as a miserable failure. (In the early 70s, Bruce was in Alaska working public relations for the Alyeska Pipeline Company, something I discovered after I began grad school.)?
His spacious office was crammed with stacks of books, dusty magazines, old copies of student papers, empty soda cans and jazz CD cases, notes and pages from his 600 page novel on the Crusades?a project he labored on and revised for over nine years?and bits and pieces from his unfinished memoir, Vacant Lot.
My first nonfiction readings class was with Bruce, and I remember how he extolled John Edgar Wideman, Barry Lopez, John Hersey, Truman Capote. He compiled a compendium of his top-recommended creative nonfiction books and posted it on the Internet, a list that became widely referenced. We talked about the books and writing we loved, not how to get careers going. For many years he was married to the poet, Patricia Dobler, and they graciously invited MFA students into their home to converse about poetry, essays, and short stories in an inspiring literary salon.
Bruce championed my work. He read and commented on my MFA manuscript in-progress though he wasn?t on my committee. He encouraged me when I didn?t deserve such praise; and he propped me up whenever I sank into the abyss of self-doubt and confusion. He believed in my writing long before I could ever call myself a writer.
Anne Caston (Judah?s Lion; Flying In With the Wounded) tells stories about meeting fellow poet Lucille Clifton at St. Mary?s College when Clifton came to speak in 1988 as a special guest. Soon afterward, as fate would have it, they became back-door neighbors in an apartment complex near campus. Lucille couldn?t drive and Anne would chauffeur her to and from the college each afternoon. They discovered that each loved hymns and oratory of the old sermons as ?lapsed Baptists.? Lucille introduced Anne to the works of Mary Oliver and Marge Piercy, and Anne persuaded her to read Mark Doty and Marie Howe.
A special camaraderie began between the two poets that sometimes gets lost in the fierce competition of academia, where pride and jealousies can get in the way. Lucille Clifton was Anne?s first good reader, one of Anne?s two early readers of her poems (her husband was the other). Caston still treasures how Lucille seemed to read from the heart forward and honored her own literary voice and vision.
I received a copy of The Company They Kept: Writers on Unforgettable Friendships (now in two volumes), edited by Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as a gift from my poet-friend, Olga. The collection features short essays from the New York Review of Books about ?transforming personal and intellectual relationships? among writers and other creative types. Some of the notables: McMurtry and Kesey; Brodsky and Akhmatova; Hardwick and McCarthy; Wolcott and Lowell; Kerouac and Ginsberg; Kunitz and Roethke.
In the age of hype and tweets?and if we don?t happen to be in an MFA program or hanging out at writers? residencies?more often than not, we?re relegated to the quickest forms of communication (i.e., sending minimal emails, ?liking? one another on Facebook, leaving an occasional blog comment). Everyone, everywhere, is in a hurry, which is why the story about what happened between two writers, Amy Andrews and Jessica Mesman Griffith, is so remarkable.
Andrews and Griffith met in an MFA workshop. Upon finishing their degrees and resuming their busy lives in other parts of the country?returning to the ?real world? as we like to say?they sought to maintain more than a superficial connection. Through writing, they wanted to explore their inner struggles, new motherhood, the surprises and joys of ordinary life, the emotional territory of faith. They were thinking in terms of how to keep their mutual intellectual and literary interests alive. Devising a self-imposed writing structure also appealed to them for the continued writing practice it would provide.
To that end, they vowed to write each other real letters?the kind with stamps and envelopes?during one Lenten season, but they moved beyond that timeframe. Letter-writing became their spiritual home. As they wrote intimately about life and literature, and the devastating losses they faced, the process and experience would transform them.?
Their story of how their ?friendship was formed, tested, and ultimately strengthened? has turned into book forthcoming from Loyola Press?Love & Salt. Love & Salt ?portrays friendship as women have always known it?as something serious, sacred, and redemptive?and tells the story of a spiritual friendship between two women, based on their shared exploration of God.? Though we didn?t write old-fashioned letters to one another, Bruce and I stayed connected after I finished grad school. His fascination with Germany and the spiritual life of the Middle Ages continued.? Mainly, we shared long-distance phone calls and lengthy email epistles?writer to writer. I preserved some of his emails and taped them down on the pages of my journal, something I?ve gotten in the habit of doing when emails are obviously ?keepers.? ?
I shared Bruce?s elation when he received the contract and small advance from a British publisher to do a creative writing textbook. He trusted me enough as a reader to send me some draft chapters. In turn, he patiently listened to me moan about my latest depressing rejection, reminding me: ?Nothing worth having ever came without a fight and struggle.?
Bruce dreamed he would make it onto a bigger stage in the writing and publishing world by the time he turned seventy, but it wasn?t meant to be. He died in August 2010 in El Paso, Texas two years after retiring from academia, and I lost one of my closest literary comrades. His ?cool-man? demeanor, the care and compassion he had for his students, and his friendship will never be forgotten. I can still hear Bruce?s voice as he recited E.M. Forster?s words, part of the literary wisdom he drummed into my head:

Only connect the passion and prose and both will be exulted?

Kathleen Tarr is a long-time Alaskan and was the first program coordinator of UAA?s new low-residency MFA Program from 2007-2011. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Alaska Airlines Magazine, Cirque, 49 Writers, TriQuarterly, and is forthcoming in The Sewanee Review. She is a founding member of 49 Writers and has taught creative writing at UAA and the University of Pittsburgh.

Source: http://49writers.blogspot.com/2012/09/kathleen-tarr-writing-from-heart-forward_26.html

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