I arrive at the Sanctuary on time. Martha’s the only one there.  After the hour of sitting and walking meditation our conversation continues. I mention that it was a real-estate agent publicizing cheap rural property in the Georgia Straight newspaper that drew us and many of our neighbors from far-away places to settle in the Powell River area forty years ago. She asks why we left, and I say a sense that after nine years, the time was ripe for me to return to the active life of career development and public engagement from which I had withdrawn into a rural retreat. Also that this personal feeling provided an answer to the research question which had kept my doctoral dissertation in English Literature unfinished: why, in literary tradition, is the pastoral setting associated with youth and old age while middle age is associated with the city.

“Interesting,” she says, “that corresponds to my own experience. I left Cortes to marry and live for many years in Chicago, before returning here.  It reminds me of a great class I audited at Harvard as an undergraduate by a professor…what was his name…”

“ Erik Erikson,” I exclaim, “the author of Childhood and Society. He’s the one whose ideas about stages of the life cycle guided my research. I still have his wonderful response to a fan letter I wrote him in 1967.”

“I’d like to read your dissertation,” she says.

“It’s online, Google ‘Youth against Age’.”

Before breakfast I call Jan, who is driving Claire to Santa Maria today for a biopsy of the cyst on her ovary.  I thank her for handling all this alone while I’m away.

The morning workshop begins with announcements.  At 2 p.m. there will be a memorial service in the sanctuary for Christine, a friend of Ruth, Kate and Martha who was active in their Vancouver Zen Center, and for Anna, an Islander who recently succumbed to cancer. We’re invited to join and include names of our recently departed. Tonight after dinner, Ruth will host a little farewell wine and cheese party in her Hollyhock living quarters. Tomorrow after breakfast, we’ll gather at the beach to see Steven off, since he needs to start paddling back to Lund before our final session.

Kate introduces the day’s theme of Metta, the Buddhist directive of Compassion or Lovingkindness for all living creatures. To prepare, it’s traditional to ask forgiveness of others, offer forgiveness to others and offer foregiveness to oneself, with appropriate variations of three utterances:

There are many ways I have hurt, betrayed or abandoned others, knowingly or unknowingly, through greed, aversion, or ignorance.
I ask your forgiveness.
I open my heart to receive your forgiveness.

Now comes the expression of Lovingkindness itself, through an utterance like this:

May you be free from harm
May you be well in body and mind
May you be happy.

She guides us in Metta meditation, which applies the blessing to a sequence of recipients: first, the self, then a friend or benefactor, then a person to whom one has no emotional reaction, then a “difficult” person—someone by whom one feels aggrieved or irritated—then to all four as equals, and finally, through an expandable set of steps, to all sentient creatures.  The sequence is then followed in reverse order, concluding with the expression of lovingkindness to oneself. Kate’s subdued enthusiasm for this practice in ethics complements the quiet righteousness of the poems she read two nights before. After four days together, I can apply these categories to fellow participants in the retreat. It works.

Ruth says that the practice in developing empathy, opening the heart, dissolving the barriers between self and the world honed for thousands of years in Buddhist tradition is indispensable for writers, facilitating imaginative access to others from the inside. Our prompt is to select one of the people from our Metta meditation and to write from that person’s point of view.

At first I’m at a loss. I’ve never been observant enough to record the details that would allow me to imagine another person’s story.  But I did have that disarming flash a couple of days ago about the teacher’s momentary succumbing to Doubt, probably only my own projection, but neverthess concrete and vivid.  And Ruth is the person I chose in the Metta meditation as “friend or benefactor.”  I wished her relief from any fatigue she might be experiencing while giving so much of herself to our small circle of students.  Perhaps I could use that session as the framework for doing this assignment.  There’s just enough time now to get started, but I’ll come back to it later.

Next prompt is to adopt the point of view of a child, using simple sentences and vocabulary: “a time when you were sad, a lie you told, a time when you were too big or too small, a time when you got wet or dirty.”

O shoot, it’s grandpa again.  I wish my mom would pick me up at school, like Max’s and Kevin’s. Now he’s going to ask me questions about the spelling test and tell me to talk louder and take me to Trader Joe’s for a healthy snack before karate. I don’t want him to see me taking off my boxers and putting on the cup. I really hope she isn’t late  so we have to put off dinner and everybody gets cranky.  Or even worse we hold hands around the table and start without her.

It still feels forced, but I’m starting to enjoy this task, and occasionally images and words take off on their own.

Another prompt.  “You’re an old man in a supermarket shopping. Don’t mention your wife’s recent death, but evoke it indirectly.”

Howard steered his cart carefully up to the checkstand.  It was full of frozen dinners that reminded him of their meals: Turkey and mashed potatoes, steak and broccoli, spaghetti and meatballs. From the overwhelming selection, he’d limited himself to the ones marked “Von’s Club Special, save 30%”.

At lunch I meet with Kate in a personal consult about meditation.  I learn a little about her history as an anti Vietnam war exile from New Jersey, her work as a hospice chaplain in Vancouver, and her recent move to the fringes of the city where she and her husband have  established a community zendo in their home.  I tell her about my attending this workshop as a kind of revival effort to infuse more intention into my meditation routine and of my enjoyment of longer and more directed practice under her and Martha’s guidance.  She asks if there is a Zen community near me and I say yes, and I know several people who belong, but I’ve steered clear of any institutional religion since adolescence. She says nothing, and then I hear myself say that I think I’ll get in touch with them upon my return.

Before the afternoon memorial service, I work on the point-of-view exercise.  As with the dying person’s monologue yesterday, my effort to summon up detail leads to irony. Invading another person’s mind uncovers the difference between what they’re projecting and what I can imagine they’re feeling. At least that’s a way you can engage the reader, find the juiciness, even if you have to make it up.  But it gets morally risky. Empathy can be spying and stalking, like a hunter knowing one’s prey. Invention can be forgery.

In the sanctuary at 2:00, Ruth, Kate and Martha sit wearing little rectangular bibs around their necks, Kate and Martha in black robes.  Also attending are fellow workshop participants, Carol and Fran. The carefully orchestrated ritual begins with silent meditation and is followed by a fifteen-minute monotone chant we read from a single page of transliterated syllables, their sounds from the pre-Sanskrit language of Pali, their meaning lost centuries ago. Names of the recently departed are incorporated: Christine, Anna, then Carol’s mother, and my mother-in-law Ruth.  Afterwards we speak in tribute to the dead. From what is said about Anna, I recognize a person I never met, but whose name was often mentioned by Larry C., the man whose Vancouver home Jan and I lived in while looking for land in 1970. He too now lives on the Island, a friend of Ruth and Martha’s. He was sitting in the first row at the reading two nights before.

After the service I call Jan again.  She says this morning’s exploratory surgery turned more serious. The whole ovary had to be removed and sent to pathology.  Claire will spend three days in the hospital recovering.  The doctor thinks its benign, but further conclusions await the lab report in two weeks.

My last workshop session starts at 5:00.  Just time to share our reworked point-of-view sketches.  Laura reads a long rollicking account of two sisters from a remote Alberta farm getting intiated into the Banff party scene during high school summer jobs.  What an ear! Carol narrates her childhood experience of riding in the backseat of the car with her mother singing a tragic folksong. What a memory!  I read my piece.

Day three. Getting tired. Trying dutifully, but this afternoon I’m losing incandescence.  Is it these baggy pants?  This dirty hair? We’re at the place where the startup wonder wanes, and they hanker to do their own work. Three hours of workshop in the morning.  Those avid consults while I’m supposed to be eating, and now more lecture. All prepared. For only six people, sometimes five.  Babysitter’s wages. Maybe tonight will spark it up.  Right now the rat in the wall’s more interesting than synaesthesia.

There’s some laughter and a request to read it again, which I do.  Then silence.

I finish dinner early and linger in the bookstore planning to catch Ruth and apologize for the intrusiveness of my sketch, but hoping she’ll say she liked it.  She exits the lodge and approaches me as I walk toward her in the garden.  She speaks first and says that she was really hurt by what I wrote.  Not for herself, but because of what the other members of the workshop must have felt when she laughed and seemed to accept my characterization of her thoughts about them.  It was so far off that when I read it aloud she didnt get it, and by the time the connection registered, it was too late to reassure them that she’s really loved doing this workshop and deeply respects the people in it.

I’m flooded with shame.  I’d meant to be a diligent student.  And I’d meant to be a compassionate  colleague. But instead I played a cruel trick on the person I held in highest esteem.  I’m amazed at  her concern that they, not she, could be hurt.  I try to explain: getting into another’s point of view as a writer was very tough for me.  Being a teacher myself allowed me to imagine that situation. I was looking for the juice, following directions, trying to be sympathetic and also to be special.

She says yes, she understands.  It’s her problem.  I’m warmed and relieved by her hug of forgiveness, but still  confused by my own motives.

Ruth’s room in the guest house is abuzz when I arrive.  People are setting out cheese and crackers, opening bottles of wine, and fussing to get a large monitor hooked up to her laptop.  This is the occasion to roll out the weblog she’s been adding to while we were writing in Kiakum.  Accessible by password only to us participants, it’s an archive of the lecture notes, prompts, and citations that she and Kate have assembled in preparation, and it will contain work that we’ve produced while here and any links we can recommend.  She clicks links to my website, to her own blog, Ozekiland, to the huge Everydayzen.org site she moderates for her teacher Norman Fischer.  I drink my first glass of alcohol in a week.

She talks about her upcoming ordination as Zen priest by Norman and brings out a large piece of black needlework she’s about to finish as part of her preparation: Buddha’s robe, fourteen thousand tiny even stitches. Her head will be shaved. A couple of weeks later she and Kate will be led by Norman on a tour of Zen monasteries in Japan.

I empty my glass the second time. Outside the wind has come up in the treetops. I think about kayaking back tomorrow.  For the last three days, storms have been predicted. Several of the women express worry.  I assure them that if necessary I’ll get someone from Hollyhock to take me and the kayak by truck ten miles down the road to the sheltered harbor in Cortes Bay and call the Lund Water Taxi to come out and pick me up.

[Written for ASLE Newsletter at Ruth's request]

At the 2009 ASLE Conference in Victoria B.C. the plenary speaker at the final banquet, Ruth Ozeki, suggested that members of the Association make room for the practise of contemplative meditation in their activities of meeting, writing and teaching.  Ozeki is the author of two influential novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), which dramatized issues of industrial agriculture, animal welfare, genetically engineered crops, and malnutrition which have taken center stage in recent discussions about sustainability and the food system.

Lately, in essays and poems and in her role as editor of Everydayzen.org, the website of her mentor Norman Fischer, Ozeki has been promoting the practice of Zen meditation. From June 5-9 Ozeki and her colleague Kate McCandless, a poet and ordained Zen priest, conducted a workshop on writing and meditation at the Hollyhock Learning Center that provided compelling support for the value of adding contemplative practice to the mix of analytic, creative, scientific, political and recreational activities associated with Literature and the Environment.

The setting was appropriate.  Hollyhock is located in a spectacular wilderness on the coast of remote Cortes Island in the Straight of Georgia, within view of peaks and glaciers on Vancouver Island and the mainland Coast Range. The island’s sparse population includes indigenous peoples, loggers and fishermen, hippies, artists, and environmental activists, including Ozeki and her husband.  The site was originally developed during the 1970’s as Cold Mountain Institute by Richard Weaver and served as a gathering place for Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Alan Ginsberg, r.d. laing, among others.  The facility was sold to a consortium of artists and activists in the 1980’s and since then has developed as a model of local organic food production and home-built sustainable architecture offering hundreds of educational and outdoor recreational programs to the public.

The five-day workshop featured guided meditations directing attention to posture and breathing, to the impressions on the five senses, to memories of childhood, to the four elements shared by the body and the natural world, to the consciousness of emotions and to empathy with others.  Emphasizing the complementary aspects of sitting and writing, each of the meditation exercises was coupled with prompts and time for composing, presenting and listening to others’ work. The many opportunities for exploration—kayaking, a boat trip to a world heritage bird sanctuary, hiking the inland trails—were forsaken in favor of the contemplative practices, which were however heightened by the surrounding presence of forest, sea and sky and to which connection was intensified by silence and concentration.

The workshop reinforced the importance of frequently ignored components of the ecoliterary tradition: the pastoral of solitude and the pastoral of contemplation celebrated in  Chinese and Japanese nature writing as well as by European and American authors like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau. It led participants to the place in Andrew Marvell’s Garden where

the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
…
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Another early awakening next to the big cedar, a soak under a pink sunrise above the sea, a sitting in Kiakum. The pastoral of solitude: Marvell, Wordsworth, Thoreau.

Before breakfast I call Jan to hear news and report in.  She says, “you went for that workshop like an arrow to a target.”

The theme of the morning session is awakening the senses. Kate guides the group meditation.  “Move your attention now from posture and breathing to sound: sounds of the body, the room, the outdoors, the silence surrounding the outdoors, and then back step-by-step to the body.”  Then we write:

Breathing quiet after settling, throb of heartbeat in the temples, the room silent, distant woodpecker rattles outside, then speakers on inside my head: a buzz, like soft, high pitched crickets, steady current, ringing.  Spare me from tinnitus.

Kate says that the senses are the gates to awakening and being present; meditation is about awakening, being present.  We can train ourselves to extend that presence and awareness to the rest of the world.

Ruth says that the sense gates are the interpenetration of the self and the world.  Breathing involves taking in and putting out to the world; so does writing.  Open the sense gates; ground yourself. Move from meditation into writing; when you’re confused or tight while writing, move back into meditation.  Sound is essential to writing. Read what you write aloud to make sure it works. Sound bridges the gap between what I think I said and what I really said.

I’m stirred by the teacher’s presence, flickering between girl and wise woman.

The next exercise: let the memory of a sound be the trigger of what you write. Make a list of sounds, choose the most vivid, try to recall it, its beginning, middle and end, the effect on your heart rate. My list: chanting on acid in 1970, her cry, “So Strong,” Appleton Creek Waterfalls, chainsaw and falling tree. The writing:

He pulled the ripcord on the old Homelite. It sputtered and fizzled.  Once again, this time harder, still nothing.  “Flooded,” he said the to the child from the city who wanted to help with firewood.  He pushed back the choke and waited. Then he yanked again. Now the roar filled his ears with pleasure: the fury of a lion he held in submission with bare hands.

Not enough time to tell the rest of the story: his directing her to take the weight off a branch he was sawing from below, the bar lifting as the branch fell, the moving chain touching her soft forearm, the scar still there.

Ruth lectures now from a three-hole binder with typed notes for each session separated by dividers. “If you get bogged down or bored with where the writing is going, stage an intervention.  Say ‘What I really want to say is…’.”  Not my problem, I just want to get back to the writing.  She moves on to an explanation of synaesthesia, a way to make sensations sound fresher and reads us a poem by Donald Lawler, “With Amy, Listening to the forest.”  Very appropriate, but I’m thinking about how to convert my little four elements project into a sonnet.  Her talk is interrupted several times by the noise of a rat rapping in the wall.  I feel unsettled by the sense that she is struggling to stay in character, no longer priestess but vulnerable colleague.  This frees me from a thrall but heightens my empathy.  I recall the flush of fatherly love I experienced for her two novels’ pained protagonists.

The next exercise is to go back outdoors and this time write in situ. I’m relieved. My own immediate task is to plausibly describe the growing ends of cedar branches, the destination of water sucked up from roots in the ground. There’s a large boulder just outside Kiakum surrounded by saplings. I scramble up it and find what I’m looking for, “tough top tips.” I sit on the rock and start arranging the sentences on my yellow pad into quatrains, discarding material, redoing lines from the rhyme end backward.

The hours after lunch are unscheduled. I walk to the Sanctuary back behind the orchard.

[picture credit]

From the outside it looks like an awkwardly designed set for a hobbit house, but the interior space feels sacred.  The thick walls are contoured white plaster, the window frames and beams irregular unmilled wood. The light descends from a transparent cupola at the top of a dome that’s both circular and tilted, creating two focal points–one at the center, the other at an altar extending from the perimeter wall, above which a small window opens on dense forest.  I’m here alone.  A dozen round pillows and mats are arranged in a circle on the carpeted stone floor.  I sit on one for half an hour. This is how it’s supposed to feel.

I walk back through the blooming orchard to the library in the lodge and grapple with the sonnet.  By three p.m. it’s finished, the couplet almost writing itself, and in the last minute, an epigram popping out of nowhere.  A voice inside says “These could be published!”  With beating heart, I walk downstairs and see Ruth in the dining room still in a consult with another workshop member. I imagine she must by now really need a break. Nevertheless I wait until she heads back to her quarters and thrust the yellow pad in her way.  She reads the poem and asks me for a copy to post on the workshop website she’s in the process of assembling.  Placing my arm around her shoulder, I declare “You’re my inspiration.” She makes her escape, and as I walk down the path to the shore, I’m stopped by the fragrance of wild roses.

I could paddle back to Lund now, I tell myself, trophies in hand.  As a reward, I’ll break my five-day computer fast.  In the basement of the lodge is an ugly cinderblock cubicle known as the Chat Room.  It’s equipped with a few older machines and high speed internet. When I enter, a woman on one of them asks for my help.  She can’t download a Word document that she tells me contains some divorce papers that she came here to try to get away from.  After I succeed she strokes my arm. I log in to my blog’s posting page and copy out the sonnet, but when I press “publish,” the machine crashes.

I arrive early in Kiakum for our workshop and find Ruth and Kate conferring about their presentation at the upcoming evening program that’s been advertised all over the island. The session begins with reading the products of our afternoon’s labors. The response to my sonnet is muted. The topic moves to publication strategies. Ruth says that blogging is easy to do and a good idea, and that these days self-publishing in hard copy with a company like Lulu or Trafford no longer has the stigma it used to.  She reads “Berryman,” a tribute to the suicidal alcoholic poet written by his healthy disciple W.S. Merwin.

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips …

I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write.

After dinner, Kiakum fills with “Islanders,” the residents of Cortes. Some settled here when we did in Lund, during the late sixties and early seventies. Others are later immigrants of succeeding generations. A number are Hollyhock staff.  They seem like invaders to the space we’ve claimed for two days, but of course we are the outsiders and Ruth is more theirs than ours—a celebrity member of a remote community of artists, environmental activists, and back-to-the-landers, akin to the one I belong to peripherally over on the mainland.

Ruth appears energized by the crowd that packs the room. She and Kate are introduced by Dana along with the editor of the island’s arts and ecology magazine, Howl, who thanks her for contributing a poem headlined in the current issue. They explain the format of our workshop and lead everyone in a meditation. Dressed in her monk’s robe, Kate reads some of her own poems—reminiscences of an alienated childhood in New Jersey and elegies for a lost sister—and Ruth presents a section of her powerful essay on Writing and Death that I’d read twice before arriving.  The audience is invited to participate in a writing exercise of the kind that we’ve been doing, and most people seem deeply engaged, but I’m pleased that my appointed partner wants to talk about kayaking instead.

Friday May 7 was the thirteenth and final meeting of the Sustainability Book Club.  I looked forward to that conclusion with mixed feelings.  Since I had deferred my last year of part-time teaching until 2010-2011, it constituted my only regular contact with the University and a small remnant of the teaching obligations that had weighed heavily as complete retirement approached.  I welcomed the relief and dreaded the loss.  It was also an occasion to evaluate the project—through the judgments of participants who’d filled out a questionnaire circulated by the Center for Teaching and Learning which hosted and supported it, and through my own reflection. The gift of a collection of environmental writings signed by most of the seminar members a few months ago made me less anxious about their verdict than about my own.  The drama of the moment lay in a choice I’d have to make about whether or not this outcome warranted the effort of trying to renew the program for next year.

The last meeting’s moderator was Rob Rutherford, Professor of Animal Science, Director of the Sheep Unit, veteran Sustainability activist, voracious reader whom I liked to call our Good Shepherd. He’d selected a book called Resilience Thinking, as our text for the day. It introduced a concept new to me, which for some people was replacing the idea of Sustainability at the cutting edge of environmental discourse.  It emphasized 1)observing processes from multiple scales to understand how very small and very large changes interacted and 2)studying universal cyclic stages of growth, solidification, decay and reconstitution. I’d found the book poorly organized–often redundant, yet in several places too dense in its use of models plotted with three dimensional calculus.  However, its elaboration of the idea of tipping points–when systems lose the capacity to absorb disturbance and flip into conditions with new baselines of equilibrium–seemed applicable to the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill two weeks old at the time, after which the return to the kind of stability implied by “sustainability” seems increasingly unlikely.

Rob had suggested that instead of meeting in our regular location on the fifth floor of the library, we get together at Cheda Ranch, the home of the sheep unit, where he would show us around a landscape that embodied some of the resilience concepts and where he could serve us some of its highly sustainable fruits: fresh lamb, bred, raised and barbequed by his students.

I biked out a little early on that glorious May morning, approaching the ranch through a gate across the road from the Poultry Unit, one of those notorious CAFO’s, which kept five hens in each two foot square cage, which I had visited with my Cal Poly Land students a few years ago.  The sight of the old Cheda barn nestled in the vegetation around Stenner Creek and guarded over by the monolith of Bishop Peak, recalled the many times I had made the pilgrimage to this historic hardly known corner of the University’s large land holdings.

larger image

I crossed the creek and sat on a haybale in the old barn making some notes for the seminar, and glanced at the student historical project framed on the wall,

used on the website that one group produced to spread the word about this place after Rob had given them a tour

and introduced them to the idea of holistic management.

A red shouldered hawk fat from hunting gophers that lived in the barn’s basement settled on a fencepost,

reminding me of the hawk in Mary Oliver’s poem that my environmental literature class read by the little reservoir up the hill while watching the raptors she described

This morning
the hawk
rose up
out of the meadow’s  browse
and swung over the lake—
it settled
on the small black dome
of a dead pine,
alert as an admiral,
its profile
distinguished with sideburns
the color of smoke,
and I said: remember
this is not something
of the red fire, this is
heaven’s fistful
of death and destruction,
and the hawk hooked
one exquisite foot
onto a last twig
to look deeper
into the yellow reeds
along the edges of the water
and I said: remember
the tree,  the cave
the white lily of resurrection
and that’s when it simply lifted
its golden feet and floated
into the wind, belly-first,
and then it cruised along the lake—
all the time its eyes fastened
harder than love on some
unimportant rustling in the
yellow reeds—and then it
seemed to crouch high in the air, and then it
turned into a white blade, which fell.

Not noticing me, Rob drove a little cart past the barn entrance loaded with folding chairs and tables and headed toward the sheep paddock where he’d arranged for us to meet.  Down the road from the reservoir four members of the book club came racing on their bicycles and scaring off the hawk.

Four more people moseyed over from the parking lot. Rob returned to lead us by foot across the creek and riparian corridor which had recently been returned to health as a result of proper sheep grazing management after decades of degradation caused by earlier overuse and later neglect.  Last winter two good sized steelhead trout were observed there, illustrating the principle of resilience.

At our meeting place upstream, Rob had placed paper bags full of raw wool (yessir, yessir) on chairs for each of us arranged to enjoy sunshine or shade.  This was the perfect fibre, he noted, stronger than steel, durable, waterproof, and produced by animals transforming vegetation created from water, soil and sunshine with no other inputs. I said nothing about the classic account of the effect of sheep on landscape and rural economy found in Thomas More’s Utopia and cited at length by Vananda Shiva.

We exchanged widely divergent impressions of Resilience Thinking, a couple of people planning to assign it in their classes, others having no use for it.  The sheep flock came as close  as the electric fence permitted, occasionally bleating their opinions.

An hour later, three students arrived in the cart and set barbequed lamb, chopped heirloom tomatoes and other fixings for pita pockets on the white linen covered table.  Even those of us who’d recently converted to vegetarianism couldn’t resist partaking of the marvelous offering grown in our own back yard.

On the walk out to the paddock, Christine had handed me her tabulated results of the questionnaire.  It’s taken me several weeks to consider them. As opposed to student evaluation forms, which I rarely found useful, there was no way to discount the opinions of faculty colleagues.  Ten questionnaires were returned out of probably about twenty distributed by email.  Twelve people were “presenters,” that is actually enrolled in the program, recipients of free books and a stipend and obligated to moderate one session. Seven respondents identified themselves as presenters and five identified themselves as “participants,” regular attendees who were not enrolled.  The non-response rate suggests that the results were skewed positive. Eight respondents were ladder faculty, two were lecturers. Five respondents had been here five years or less and five ten years or more.

Evaluation questions were answered with a number between 1 and 5 along a scale from Disagree to Agree

1.  The readings and discussions were useful to me.    7 fives 3 fours
2.  The time and effort required to participate was well spent.    7 fives 2 fours 1 three
3.  I liked the overall format of the discussion.    7 fives three fours
4.  I would participate in a continuation of the Sustainability Book Club next year with the understanding that copies of the books would be supplied but that stipends would not.  5 fives, 2 fours, 2 threes, 1 two
5. I would recommend participation next year to colleagues.  7 fives and three fours

Two discursive questions followed. “What did you find valuable about the program?” elicited these responses:

• I had two motivations to join the book club – I wanted the encouragement to read new books and I wanted the opportunity to meet and better know colleagues across the colleges who are interested in sustainability (broadly defined). I met both of those objectives.
• The opportunity to read about sustainability from a different perspective.  It was also wonderful to learn that others in our community were interested in advancing their knowledge about sustainability.  Finally, I really enjoyed the conversations.
• Networking… breaking down the Cal Poly silos…
• The presentation of books that I would not read outside this opportunity.  The presentation by other participants and the opinions about issues raised in the books.
• The discussions by colleagues from different colleges, and the monthly schedule for reading one book by all.
• I am roundly enthusiastic about my experience in the SBC and might list any number of things here.  In broad form, it was most illuminating to have a truly interdisciplinary conversation about a series of excellent, often challenging books and ideas.  I learned as much from my colleagues as from the texts and am grateful for the various perspectives to which I was introduced.  My whole notion of “sustainability”—what it is, who the stakeholders are, to whom it applies, etc.—has been significantly revised and expanded over the course of the last year and a half.  This workshop has been extremely important to the development and reinforcement of my research and pedagogical interests and approaches.
• Discussion with colleagues from other disciplines that I didn’t previously know.
• A few books like Biomimicry and Deep Economy
• Books I wouldn’t normally read, perspectives from other members I wouldn’t have thought of myself, getting to know (just a little) instructors from other areas of the university
• Hearing other perspectives because of the interdisciplinary membership.  Presenters did an excellent job.

Each of these echoed my own positive responses. I was nervous before the meetings and excited by them from the first minute to the last.  Having an extended voluntary conversation on a shared topic allowed me to appreciate the wit and wisdom of colleagues. Reading the books closely, whether or not I liked them, offered bracing mental exercise and brought me current on important topics.  A high standard was maintained by each moderator’s prepared introduction of the book, which was preserved for useful reference on the wiki, along with detailed notes on the discussion, outlines of the books’ content and some written reflections by seminar members, including Alypios regular trenchant reviews.

The second question, “Which aspect(s) of the workshop could use improvement?” yielded these comments:

• Attendance was very spotty.
• Quality of the books.  The content was at times more rhetoric than useful, and the essence also got repetitive which became boring.
• More discussion/work on how to tie to curriculum.
• Connection to curriculum development
• Would like to know if there was any consensus on the learning gained and how the learning is going to be actually utilized.  What has the core decision making group achieved.

They also confirmed my assessment. Spotty attendance was partly due to people being away at conferences and having conflicts with teaching schedules and partly to voting negatively with their feet.  However, only one session, last May’s, drew fewer than ten and most drew fourteen or more.

Another concern for me was a sense that a number of attendees hadn’t done much of the homework. This was partly due to the uneven quality of the readings, some of which were poorly edited, overburdened with rhetoric, and overlapping in content. Even two classic Sustainability books that felt like world-changing prophecy when they first came out, Biomimicry and Cradle to Cradle, seemed overly optimistic or questionably argued when reread in the cold light of recent history.

Conditions two years ago, at the time this project was planned were perhaps more hopeful.  Sponsored by the Academic Senate Sustainability Committee, itself an outgrowth of Cal Poly’s becoming signatory to the Talloires Declaration and joining the burgeoning Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education(AASHE), one of the Book Club’s stated intentions was to be an incubator of a large university-wide Introduction to Sustainability course.  A year ago three Club members met to start planning such a class.  Implicit also was an aspiration to follow the strategy for institutional transformation of the kind proposed in Peter Senge’s “The Necessary Revolution.”

But these aspirations never materialized, a significant factor being my own flagging commitment to them.  And what accounts for that?  In the big world, the new Congress and Administration’s being swamped with economic catastrophe and stymied by Republican obstructionism, the failures of Copenhagen, the slowing of progress toward a sane energy policy, the expansion of our wars in Asia, and the general continuation of business as usual in the face of growing crises. Cal Poly history took a parallel course:  budget cuts, threats, and furloughs undermined hopes for experiment and reform, the sudden disappearance of the UNIV program eliminated any institutional framework for mounting interdisciplinary courses, and the Academic Senate Sustainability Committee itself was threatened with dissolution.

Over time, the Book Club itself settled into a comfortable groove. Presenters gave polished introductions, discussion was fluent, strangers became familiar, and  the activity seemed sufficiently satisfying without moving toward goals. The Necessary Revolution was put on hold.

With one exception.  The most prominent theme running through all the books that we read related to food.  Whether in McKibbens call for localism in agricultural production and distribution, Pearce’s account of the water lost and polluted by industrial agriculture around the world, Foer’s expose of CAFO’s and story of his conversion to vegetarianism, Louv’s report on the value of school vegetable gardens, Shiva’s call for resistance to global chemical-food monopolies and rescue of small farmers, all seemed to reinforce the vision of sustainable agriculture and sensible eating habits presented in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food.  This was amplified in the talks Pollan gave at Cal Poly last October, hosted by our Book Club member, Hunter Francis, and the Sustainable Ag Resource Consortium, recently reinvented as the CAFÉ Center for Sustainability. Cal Poly’s role in the food system controversy put him and fellow member Rob Rutherford in worldwide headlines for a couple of weeks,  highlighted the contrast between sustainability and its opponents, and appears now to be in a state of real transformation.

Our readings on food changed at least two of our members’ behavior in significant ways, turning us from omnivores into qualified vegetarians (fresh lamb raised by friends being an exception, as noted above). In addition they contributed to my tripling the size of my vegetable garden and focusing my own activist energy into developing a working farm, processing facility and distribution system to school lunch and food bank programs on city-owned land. Food seems an arena where on a personal level it’s possible to make strong changes toward sustainability without the major sacrifice of giving up one’s car or one’s  travel plans, and where on a political level, promoting localism can have some appreciable consequence.

The questions on the survey I  had most difficulty answering dealt with the future of this project. Seven out of ten respondents said they would continue in it if offered next year and ten out of ten said they would recommend it to faculty colleagues.  The Center for Teaching and Learning has offered continuing financial and logistic support.  But given my misgivings, do I want to stay involved?

After weeks of vacillating now I can say yes.  Yesterday I started hunting for possible titles and came up with nine books published in the last two years that sound intriguing.  I’d like to try alternate formats for some meetings, such as reading and commenting on blogs like Andrew Revkin’s dot.earth or Real Climate.com, or picking a theme like oil addiction instead of a book to discuss.  So whether or not the Club will meet again next year will now, as they say, depend upon enrollment.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock died peacefully today in her Dublin, New Hampshire family home at 7:18 p.m. Tuesday, March 9, 2010. She was 100 years old. Born in 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire, she attended Emerson College and lived through two world wars and the Great Depression. She was an activist for her community and for her country, remaining active until the return of chronic respiratory problems four days ago.

I only met Doris once briefly when she visited San Luis Obispo in connection with the Cal Poly Preface Reading Program but she touched me permanently.  As I seek ways to adapt to growing old in a world that feels easy to abandon, her love of life, her pride in her past, her urgent concern with the future, her fighting spirit, and her refusal to give up in spite of disappointment, provide me with guidance and inspiration.  What a sad irony it is that during her last few months, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that, for the time being at least, reverses so much of what she worked for. Finally now she gets a break from that relentless struggle.  Or perhaps, somewhere, her spirit still is on the march.

Two freshman student responses to Granny D’s visit to Cal Poly in 2004

Go Granny Go!

When I got to Cal Poly this fall, I soon learned that not too many people actually read the shared reading book, Granny D., You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell.  Furthermore, those who did read it did not really like it.  I was surprised because I loved reading the book!  I love to travel and have been to most of the states of our country, so I loved hearing about her adventures in the different states.  In addition, I have gotten really into politics over the summer, and I have loved forming my political identity and views.  Doris “Granny D” Haddock is very inspirational, and she demonstrates what a difference one person can make.

I have looked forward to hearing Granny D. speak since I read just a few pages of the book.  I was very excited to finally have the opportunity last Friday night when Granny D. gave her speech entitled “I am in the Example Business.”  She is an engaging speaker, and it was delightful to hear her.  I liked how her speech started regarding writing a cheaper and shorter book, although I was not one of the students with an “independence streak” (at least as far as this book goes).  I liked how she drew us in with her stories of New England autumns, which I remember vividly from the year I lived in Massachusetts.  Additionally, I loved all the “political stuff” and her stories of life in New Hampshire.  My favorite part of her speech was when she said, “We cannot move the world toward our wisdom and love so long as we permit political systems that run on greed and fear instead of love and ideas.”  At the end of the speaking, I enjoyed the question and answer time.  For example, her sticker that said “Vote Dammit!” and when Dennis Burke told her that a question was “regarding Iraq.”  Throughout her speech, I loved to applaud her and give her standing ovations.

Attending Granny D’s speech was one of the most enjoyable things I have done at Cal Poly.  It was motivational, and I felt “the hero inside my heart.”  Granny D. is one of my heroes, and she is what this country is all about!

Granny D

When I found out Granny D was coming to speak at Cal Poly, I was excited but did not think it would be worth my time. Looking back to the event and reflecting on what she said, I am extremely glad that I decided to attend! As in her book, her speech was filled with inspiration, politics, life lessons, biographical anecdotes, and of course humor. Her opening statement “Had I known that 3,000 of you would be forced to buy and read my book instead of enjoying your summer, I certainly would have written a cheaper and shorter book” had the crowd roaring with laughter. That statement was a perfect example to explain her personality. She is a person who loves life and has made her mark in the world and will continue to do so in the United States Senate if she gets elected.

I enjoyed learning about life in her small hometown of Peterborough, New
Hampshire. Her description of autumn made me want to become a “Leaf Peeper”! Peterborough seems to have a lot in common with San Luis Obispo and through the examples she gave, it made me want to get involved here in my new hometown and find out about local issues since I am a citizen. The fact that a play was written about the town struggles showed what a tight- knit community Peterborough is and how it is good that people don’t take things too seriously in the end. There has to be a sense of humor to get through life and not let differences divide one another. That message was strong throughout her talk.

It was nice that the forum was opened for questions. It was good to hear about local issues and hear what Granny D had to say. She is a person who knows her stuff and is not afraid to tell you. She has and will continue to fight for what she believes in until she gets what she knows is right. The United States Senate is a good move for Granny. She will be a strong influence and I believe a good influence to the senators. She will make changes for the better. Granny D will make America better and keep its ideals alive and on track.

My notes in preparation for the discussion of Granny D, during the 2004 Preface Program at Cal Poly
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Notes in preparation for a discussion of the book by David Orr, published 2009, at the Sustainability Book Club at Cal Poly.

David Orr is one of my gurus, but the first time I read this book I was disappointed by its repetitiousness, vagueness, lack of sequential structure or sustained, fully supported and defended claims, and its preaching to the choir, who have already heard most of this many times.  The central points were hardly controversial or new for us, but still unacceptable to the great majority of citizens who are looking more than ever at short term rescues or pleasures. For that reason the urgency and insistence of the tone seemed irritating and disrespectful of the audience. Compared to his last book, Design on the Edge, which contained a fascinating autobiographical narrative and a detailed account of the remarkable history of the building he was responsible for planning, designing and financing at Oberlin College, this book felt vague, uninspired, and sentimental. What does it mean after all to insist that what we should do is “deepen our humanity.” (202)

I also found it sadly dated.  Though filled with topical references to the impending Obama adminstration, the events of the fifteen months since his inauguration made many of the proposals about transforming governance and launching a revolution in Washington seem painfully overoptimistic.

Nevertheless I decided to give it another try, either to be able to articulate specifically what I found wrong with the book or to give it a more sympathetic and engaged reading.

First, I confirmed what I suspected about the book’s process of composition.  Most of the material here was previously published in the form of essays that Orr writes for the journal Conservation Biology and others.  Many of these can be found at the website, http://www.davidworr.com/index.html.  That accounted for and in a way justified the sense that each chapter recovered much of the same territory and started from scratch rather than building on what preceded.  Viewed from this perspective, each chapter had the coherence and scope of his remarkable speeches, such as the one I heard at the organizing conference for Focus the Nation in Las Vegas.  And even when general points were repeated, Orr seemed in each essay to summon up different examples and sources.

A second reading also revealed an overall structure of chapters that moved forward from beginning to middle and end despite the backtracking.  Preface and Introduction both state the predicament and his solutions. We are facing what has been called a long emergency or a bottleneck, a worldwide period of crisis brought on by the environmental degradation and climate change that misguided human impacts have produced over the last 200 years. The way out will be long and arduous, and only possible with strong, transformative leadership, primarily in the presidency but also at all levels of government and society.  Leaders have three leading tasks: move the citizenry out of a state of denial to a recognition of the dangers, develop energy policies that reverse our dependence on carbon and promote renewables, and foster a deepening of public morality emphasizing fairness, compassion, nonviolence and a sense of purpose and reverence for nature grounded in appreciation and gratitude. These three mandates are reaffirmed throughout the book.

The three chapters of section I, Politics and Governance, assert that Government is the only agency strong enough to effectively address the emergency but that government needs to be transformed. Chapter 1, Governance, asserts that the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change and its associated catastrophes can be faced by reversing the trend toward unregulated corporate power, trivialized and ineffective journalism, excessive consumerism and rule by lobbyists.  This can be done by redistributing wealth and privilege, publicly funding elections, smartening land use and agricultural policy, guaranteeing universal access to communication media and promoting small community autonomy.  But first government itself must be transformed from its present corrupt and dysfunctional state to a just, effective and elevating one. This will have to be accomplished through a mechanism like a new Constitutional Convention and the establishment of a new consensus.

Chapter 2 is a meditation on democracy, the form of government most likely to succeed despite its faults, the failures of its alternatives, like natural capitalism, and unregulated free-market capitalism, and the proposal of a legal, constitutional framework for instituting the kinds of social transformation needed to address climate change based on the new idea of the legal standing of future generations. Chapter 3, Leadership in the Long Emergency, compares today’s crisis with those faced by Lincoln and Roosevelt, and concludes that Obama can learn leadership lessons from both his great predecessors, which include the necessity of understanding and framing those crises both as legal-constitutional issues requiring preservation of law and tradition and as moral issues requiring deep personal insight and unshaken commitment. Orr repeats the laundry list of reforms mentioned earlier that Obama needs to accomplish.  Chapter 4, Leadership, defines true leadership, like that of those predecessors, as the capacity to energize and give direction to the populace.

Part II, Connections, is transitional in the overall structure of the book, but provides a sample of some of Orr’s strongest qualities as a writer, manifested when he lets a more imaginative, associative principle guide his design.  Chapter 5, The Carbon Connection, juxtaposes two powerful narrative descriptions: nature’s devastation of humans in New Orleans by Katrina, presumably caused by climate change, and humans’ devastation of nature in Coal Companies’ mountaintop removal, causing climate change. This is connected to Chapter 6, The Spirit of Connection, which explores spiritual and religious perspectives on Climate Change, differentiating the apocalyptic fundamentalism that both affirms and brings it on with the subjective experiences of wonder, reverence and gratitude for the gift of life that provide meaning and hope for those struggling to protect it.

Part III, Farther Horizons, contains three chapters overlapping earlier chapters and one another in content.  Chapter 7, Milennial Hope, lists factors blocking us from taking the steps necessary to confront and deal with the coming crisis and solutions, psychological, political, and spiritual, concluding with a story of Gandhian non-violence displayed by Amish toward a mass murderer who shot a number of their children. Chapter 8, Hope at the End of our Tether, expands the emphasis on anti-militarism, Gandhian Satyagraha and other Gandhian principles like anti-materialism—shift from wealth to happiness—social justice, and localism.

The final chapter, The Upshot: What is to be Done? echoes both Aldo Leopold and Lenin, verbally in the titles of two of their well known works, and thematically in calling for the creation of a community that includes natural beings and systems and in calling for a total revolution to be initiated by a vanguard of leaders, giving direction and energy to an awakened populace. The first section covers the same ground as the preceding chapters, but the chapter and section ends with a powerful vision of a desireable outcome from the long emergency only ten years in the future, imagined in his home town of Oberlin Ohio, where the  programs he has set in motion as an activist and educator have run their course.  The vision is startlingly similar to the kinds of programs and visions activists at Cal Poly and in San Luis Obispo County have dedicated themselves. More than anything in this book, these few pages (212-215) provide some of the grounds for hope that present conditions don’t encourage in regard to most of the books larger recommendations.

“Postscript: A Disclosure” is vintage Orr.  It’s a recollection of the  extraordinarily hot summer of 1980 when he and his brother worked like slaves on a farm in Arkansas, as the temperature reached 111 degrees and stayed there. It was then that he became interested in climate change.  He says he felt it viscerally, the memory recorded in his body.  That’s why it’s presented as a disclosure.  But the impact of that memory, I’m afraid is unlikely to be felt until the rest of us consistently experience such nasty conditions, and by then it’s likely to be too late.

Taking issue:

• “leadership”—is Obama like Lincoln and Roosevelt, sticking to the moral vision, keeping legal and constitutional integrity at the fore, reaching the people?
• Seemed so at inauguration, but less so now, largely because of loss of confidence resultant from bailouts and compromises, failure to seize the opportunity with courage—e.g. Copenhagen
• The long emergency—less perceivable now than in 2006, when much of this was written and when Katrina and An Inconvenient Truth and IPCC and oil spike converged to shake people up.
• Non-violence, Satyagraha—true, and a manifestation of deeper humanity, but turmoil is less likely to bring it to the fore, especially when the rulers and perpetrators are becoming more brazen
• Coupling peace, justice and sustainability has advantages but also makes any progress seem hopeless, because it will leave so much undone.

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Dear Chancellor Reed:

At the advice of your office, I am submitting some input on the search for the successor of Warren Baker as President of Cal Poly University San Luis Obispo.

I have taught here since 1988 and am recipient of the University’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Scholarship Award and the CSU Systemwide Quality Improvement Award.

During his tenure President Baker has led Cal Poly to become one of the country’s preeminent Polytechnic Universities. I believe the primary mandate of his successor should be to transform Cal Poly into one of the country’s leaders in Education for Sustainability—the long-term approach to integrated solutions of economic, social and environmental problems.

It is crucial that the Trustees Committee for the Selection of the President incorporate terms in the job description and advertisement that call for successful experience in leading such institutional transformation and that they make promise in advancing sustainability an important criterion for final selection.

Doing so would serve the interests of Cal Poly’s students, who seek employment in emerging fields, of the institution, which needs more cross-disciplinary collaboration in teaching and research, and of the larger community, whose health and welfare depend upon the next generations’ commitment to addressing these problems effectively. (see  http://presidentsclimatecommitment.org/documents/Leading_Profound_Change_ExecSum_final7-28-09.pdf)

In support of this opinion, I refer you to the University Sustainability Learning Objectives recently adopted by Cal Poly’s Academic Senate and ratified by President Baker:

Cal Poly defines sustainability as the ability of the natural and social systems to survive and thrive together to meet current and future needs. In order to consider sustainability when making reasoned decisions, all graduating students should be able to:
•    Define and apply sustainability principles within their academic programs
•    Explain how natural, economic, and social systems interact to foster or prevent sustainability
•    Analyze and explain local, national, and global sustainability using a multidisciplinary approach
•    Consider sustainability principles while developing personal and professional values

It also bears mention that the “Top Ten Best College Presidents” selected by Time Magazine in November 2009 are all Sustainability Champions. (http://www.aashe.org/blog/top-ten-college-presidents-also-sustainability-champions)

In recent years Cal Poly faculty and students have collaboratively demonstrated initiative and talent in developing major sustainability projects in and out of class—e.g. the Solar Decathlon (http://www.solardecathlon.calpoly.edu/mainpage.html),
Focus the Nation (http://focusthenationslo.wordpress.com/about-focus-the-nation/), the Sustainable Agriculture Resource Consortium (http://www.sarc.calpoly.edu/), the Business of Green Media Conference (http://www.californiagreensolutions.com/cgi-bin/gt/tpl.h,content=2983) —and Facilities Departments have moved forward in conserving money and resources, thereby teaching by example (http://www.afd.calpoly.edu/facilities/sustainability.asp). What is now urgently needed is creative, daring and seasoned leadership at the top to articulate the vision and summon the resources to strengthen this focus.

This website is the beginning of my endgame.

My aim is to do this kind of sifting of grain from chaff with the motley collection of journals and letters that fill my file cabinet. I’m content with the belief that this life is all I get. Rather than a mess to clean up, I’d like to leave behind an ordered recollection of what I’ve learned and enjoyed.

I wrote that three years ago on the  “about” page  of this weblog.

I knew then I was starting a big project.  The more I work on it, the larger it gets. Not really then an endgame.

Next week mother-in-law Ruth will be 93. This morning I visited her in Sydney Creek, the Dementia Facility.  As usual when I arrive, she is asleep in her chair, but she perks up immediately, light streaming from her almost blind eyes, her voice clear and joyful.  She tells me her dreams and hallucinations and memories.  She picks up our last conversation where it left off.  I report on Claire and the two great-grandkids, she listens and laughs and says, “I remember those playground toys you built for her in your backyard in Claremont.”

That was 1983.  I tell her that just this summer the cable and hardware for that tree trolley, which I’d stowed  in an old carpenter’s chest salvaged from the farm, returned to Canada, where Joe rigged it up at Knoll House for the use of his kids, their friends, parents and grandparents.

Back home I dig old pictures out of a huge lateral file drawer  and scan a few to match with this summer’s.

The galvanized steel of the cables and eyebolts and the polyethelyne of the rope are more durable than other artifacts I’ve been excavating.  Week before last I spent many hours in the Cal Poly Art Resource Library using its expensive equipment to scan 250 35mm slides that had been boxed in cassette trays in my garage. They record moments from our wedding, from early days on the farm, from our family trips to Europe in 1978, to Hawaii in 1984, from our time in Claremont and Palo Alto. The slides were covered with dust and grease and their colors were faded and distorted. The scanner software and adjustments in Photoshop brought them back to life, some almost as good as new, many better.  I gasped as our images of thirty years ago revived on the monitor.

I  spent much of the previous week in the CLA computer lab converting old VHS videotapes of English 510 Players productions of Twelfth Night (1990) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) to binary files.  Like the slides, they needed to be restored to a more accessible and permanent medium.  I’d discovered that the dozens of short segments I’d digitized nine years ago and placed on the University Media Server to provide material for my Triangulating Shakespeare website had decomposed over time into a kind of pixel jelly. Now I could replace them in larger, clearer format and at full length.  But the new digital files will probably be no less fragile than the previous ones I’d assumed would last forever.  The problem is called “bit-rot.” See the entry called “Data decay: even computers forget” on the Australian blog,  Time, etc.; Humans in the big scheme of things.

This echoes the title of the work that Shakespeare rewrote as The Winters Tale, Thomas Greene’s The Triumph of Time. As I played and rewound and spliced the recitation of the character named “TIME”  in Act 4, Scene 1 (performed fifteen years ago by the daughter of my wife’s best friend in elementary school) I slipped into the allegorical role myself:

I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now received: I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To the freshest things now reigning and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it.

When I watched the final scene, where a memorial statue comes to life after its subject was thought to have been dead for sixteen years scripted  as a theatrical resurrection in a chapel, I felt that moment  of performance on the altar of San Luis Obispo’s  1762 Mission Church quickening again, wrinkled now but still warm.

POSTSCRIPTS:

January 20 2010: Wow! Just watched the old Measure for Measure video. Really amazing that you managed to get such solid performance out of non-acting students. I found the play charming and — most importantly — the language really came alive. You should do some directing for community theater. — Elizabeth

November 30 2009: It was wonderful to hear from you. I just got started on Facebook. Wishing you happy holidays, Don

November 28 2009: How wonderful to hear from you! Unfortunately I can’t seem to open this link – which might be a good thing as I think I was a pretty shockingly bad actress–Ann

November 24 2009: Thanks Steven–it’s amazing!  Tom

November 24 2009: Hi Steven! Wow. Thanks for this treasure trove! I remember lending my VHS copy of”Twelfth Night” to a friend soon after I received it. Never got it back. Almost twenty years later, my kids are saying “Daddy, you look weird. And why are talking so funny?” Congrats on leaving lasting wonderful impressions on your old students!–Greg

November 23 2009: What fun! Good to hear from you. Patty

November 23 2009: Participating in the English 510 Players Production of “Measure for Measure” was one of the highlights from my Cal Poly years. I’m sure I’ll cringe as I watch my performance but what an awesome experience it was. Thank you, Dr. Marx! –Candice

November 21 2009: This is great! Thanks for doing this Steven.  We’ll give you a call for lunch next time we’re down–we had a really good time with you guys last time. Take care. –Craig