Vandermey Sabbatical Report, Fall 2011

TO: Dr. Mark Sargent, Provost and the Westmont College Faculty Development Committee FR: Dr. Randall VanderMey, Professor of English DATE: December 28, 2012

RE: Report on Sabbatical Leave for Fall, 2011

I want to begin with thanks to the College, the Provost, the Faculty Development Committee, and the Department of English. The activities I undertook with their blessing during the summer and fall of 2011 were professionally and personally revitalizing. I found that the energizing effects of the sabbatical began well before the sabbatical itself—just the thought of the approaching time away made me more alert, more ambitious, more strategic in my thinking, better focused, and more creative.

WHAT I PROPOSED TO DO The title of my sabbatical project was “Occasional Poems and Platinum Circles.” What I formally proposed was to complete work on two full-length writing projects, one in poetry and the other in drama. Both projects were already well under way before the sabbatical began: 1) A book of poetry called Occasional Poems, and 2) a “play in three one-acts” called Platinum Circle. In addition, I committed myself to two other projects: to revise my novel, Diamond Lane, and try to publish it with WordFarm; and to redesign my Europe Semester 2008 course, “Narrative in the Arts of Europe,” so that it could serve as a senior capstone seminar for English majors, focusing on theories of narrative and narratology.

WHAT I ACTUALLY DID Ashland Knowing that I would be writing a dramatic work in the fall, I used the summer to begin saturating myself in drama and writing, In June, accompanied by my wife, I went with a Westmont alumni group led by my colleague Paul Willis to attend the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

Santa Fe In late July and early August, I took an eight-day trip, again accompanied by my wife, to attend the five-day Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image magazine, at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. This was my fifth Image-sponsored workshop, where I could mingle with poets, novelists, playwrights, song writers, sculptors, painters, photographers, and passionate followers of the arts. In the past I have studied with poets Paul Mariani, Scott Cairns, and Mark Jarman, and essayist and poet Kathleen Norris. This time I submitted two chapters from my novel, Diamond Lane, for critique, and studied with 14 other writers in a five-day workshop led by Melissa Pritchard, a celebrated novelist from the University of Arizona. I came away from the workshop with reinforced confidence in the literary merit of my 2 novel, with suggestions for revising the first two chapters, and with recommendations for publishing it.

Edinburgh In the last week of August, two weeks after the Glen Workshop, I left the U.S. to live by myself for two weeks in the dormitories of the University of Edinburgh, timing my visit to coincide with the end of the famed Edinburgh Festival and Festival Fringe. At the Fringe Festival alone, there are between 200 and 300 plays staged every day in venues across the city. I reveled in the freedom to see world class (and some not-world-class) drama—about 10 plays in 14 days—as well as dance performances, especially by Indian and Chinese companies, and music performances such as Mahler’s Second (“Resurrection”) Symphony by the Scottish National Orchestra. I hung out at the Traverse Theatre, a buzzing scene of theatrical creativity, which subsidizes and stages original works by Scottish playwrights. When not attending drama, dance, or music performances, I was gallivanting about the city on foot, visiting bookstores, reading in cafés, attending art exhibits, tasting local cuisine, and mingling with the boisterous crowds on the streets, watching the street mimes and other crazies perform. I played only one round of golf, on a private course right outside my dorm window, right under the stunningly beautiful Arthur’s Seat (an extinct volcano) but ended with a birdie on the 18th hole and thus earned an invitation into the inner sanctum of the clubhouse where the old Scottish codgers who were my playing partners hoisted a Guinness in my honor and treated me to some priceless local lore.

When I was not doing any of the above, I was in my dorm room having an inspired run of playwriting. I came to Edinburgh hoping to write a long one-act play called “Bluetooth Paternoster,” the third in a trilogy of one-acts called Platinum Circle. “Bluetooth Paternoster” had resisted me for about three years as I puzzled over how to approach it. I knew that it would be what I would call “abstract permutational” drama, to follow after “Cell Division,” which is in the mode of theatrical realism, and a second play, “Fleas,” in the mode of visionary expressionism. In the quiet of my dorm room, the play finally came to me and flowed without interruption, though the mental labors were intense. I have seven actors in a circle, each one talking on a Bluetooth device or cell phone to somebody off stage. No one speaks to anyone else on stage; each carries on one side of a conversation that is tangential to all the others. The only thing uniting them is the key words and phrases of the Lord’s Prayer, which, though never mentioned, define the sequence of conversational clusters.

Glasgow, Iona, and the Hebrides I wrote about 30 pages of a 43-page script during those two weeks in Edinburgh, but I finished the play over the next two weeks during a delightful period of travel. My wife flew over and joined me in Glasgow so that together we could join Rev. Susan Copeland and three others for a week-long sojourn on the Isle of Iona for a 3 VanderMey—Sabbatical Report, Fall 2011 study of pilgrimage. While in Iona, we worshipped twice a day in the ancient abbey (founded around 584 and rebuilt in the early 20th century). We had daily classes on the history and meaning of spiritual pilgrimage. As part of the worshipping community, we did daily chores scrubbing toilets, swabbing sinks, setting tables. And we made a walking pilgrimage around the island. But during my free time, I holed up in the abbey’s marvelously rich little library and worked on my play until it was done, even as the winds and rain of a transatlantic hurricane pelted the slate shingles outside. Toward the end of the week, we attended an afternoon seminar led by Phillip Newell, an internationally known expert on Celtic spirituality.

When our deeply inspiring week on Iona was over, my wife and I separated from the others and rented a car in Glasgow and set out on an island-hopping tour of the Inner and Outer Hebrides. We had already seen the Isles of Iona and Mull. We stayed the next night in Broadford on the Isle of Skye. From there we took a long Sunday ferry ride from Ullapool to Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, where we enjoyed a five-star guest house. We next stayed in the Ne Gearrannan “Black Houses” on Lewis’s west shore; “black houses” are now-refurbished peasant houses, low rectangular dwellings with long, thatched roofs and four-foot thick rock walls. Such houses date back hundreds of years but were last inhabited as recently as the 1970s. From Lewis, we travelled down to the Harris—the south end of the same island—and then took ferries to the Isle of Arran and back to the mainland. We stayed a night in Fort Williams and then one night in Edinburgh before flying home to the U.S.

Western Michigan When I returned to Santa Barbara, I had intended to work on my novel and my book of poetry, Occasional Poems. In God’s providence, however, other plans unfolded. Back in 1986 I had completed writing a 150-page biography of a Western Michigan oil painter named Armand Merizon. The intended “coffee table” art book came close to being published but was not picked up by Wayne State University Press, who had all but committed to the project. I had left the manuscript untouched for 26 years. Meanwhile, a woman named Muriel Zandstra, a collector of Merizon’s paintings, had produced a polished video on Merizon’s life, keeping his name alive in the minds of Western Michigan art lovers and critics. Muriel contacted me, hoping to produce a critical-biographical book on Merizon and wanting to know whether she could borrow from a cover article I had once published in the magazine Art Gallery International. To cut the story short, I ended up flying to Grand Rapids and driving north to Reed City for a lunch with about ten others to hammer out the details for a book on the life and work of Armand Merizon. Zandtra hosted me and Reinder VanTil, an editor at Eerdmans; Chris Overvoorde, an emeritus art professor at Calvin College; Dick Harms, the archivist at the Calvin College Library; Joel Zwart, an art history professor at Calvin; Dan Gerber, an ophthalmologist who was closely associated with Merizon; and Jan Keessen, a professional writer who was helping Muriel Zandstra. We agree to a 4 three-to-four-year plan for producing a book that would complement a retrospective show of Armand Merizon’s works, to be sponsored by Calvin College, the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, and the Grand Valley State University art museum. According to the development editor, my book on Merizon was still usable almost in its entirety. Therefore, when I got home I spent the next several weeks retyping, and thus digitizing, the manuscript, editing it and re-learning the material as I went. I submitted the manuscript to VanTil and remained in frequent contact with him and Zandstra as we together decided the project’s shape.

The trip to Michigan, incidentally, gave me a chance to visit my father and mother in Grand Rapids, MI, about two month’s before my father’s death from complications of a six-year struggle with Parkinson’s Disease.

Temecula After writing some poems and doing some organizational work for my book Occasional Poems, I was surprised to receive a phone call from former Westmont Director of Human Resources, Robert Duchin, who I had come to know especially well through home groups I had led in the 1990s at my church. Bob’s beloved wife Susan had died, and as the one-year anniversary of her death approached, he had channeled his grief by writing a deeply moving and entertaining book about their marriage. He wanted to publish the 280-page book and asked if I would edit the manuscript. Even though about a month of other sabbatical commitments lay before me, I decided to edit Bob’s book, as an investment in friendship and as a gift to the world. My wife and I spent a weekend with Bob in Temecula, CA, where Bob and Susan had moved after his retirement. There I got a first look at the manuscript and built a working relationship with Bob. I went home and amid the bustle of family holiday affairs, finished editing the manuscript before Christmas.

Reading Along the way, as I did the things recounted above, I kept acquiring and reading books of personal and professional interest. A listing of the books I tasted, chewed, or swallowed appears below.

THE IMPACT OF THE SABBATICAL I failed in several ways to achieve what I set out to do. I barely touched the novel Diamond Lane and, frankly, in ten years have not had the discipline required to push it along to publication. Even though I did add several new poems to the collection I call Occasional Poems, I did not write the essay of reflection on “occasional poems” that I committed myself to write. I still carry it in my mind and on paper in rough outline. Nor did I revise and adapt the course “Narrative in the Arts of Europe” to serve as a senior capstone course. Each of these projects remains on simmer. When revision of the opening of the novel suits me, my plan is to take Melissa Pritchard’s advice and submit it to McSweeney’s in San Francisco, in addition to submitting it to WordFarm. I proposed the essay on “occasional 5 VanderMey—Sabbatical Report, Fall 2011 poems” in abstract form for this year’s Phi Kappa Phi series, but it was placed in the queue. And the idea of revising the seminar on narrative to use as a capstone course underwent some revision in my thinking in Fall 2012, when I went to San Francisco with Tatiana Nazarenko and several others to attend a “Task Performance Workshop.” There I designed a quite different course to use as a capstone for our majors; I aim to submit my model to my department in Spring 2013 as a proposal to stimulate further discussion on the topic as we carry on the much larger project of revising our English major.

It is, of course, satisfying to have edited a book that is now available in published form, as I did with Robert Duchin’s autobiography. And I am encouraged by all the energy that continues to build around the Merizon book. I would expect the fruits of that project to be harvested in late 2013 or early 2014, when the retrospective arts shows and release of the publication are tentatively scheduled to occur simultaneously.

The most exciting outcome of the sabbatical, for me and I hope for the college, is the fact that John Blondell has studied the play Platinum Circle, liked it, and chosen to direct it as the main student production at Westmont for Spring 2013. It is scheduled for the last weekend of February and the first weekend of March. That production will be my true “sabbatical report.” Somehow I’ve found myself more deeply involved than ever with theater at Westmont, especially after being asked by Mitchell Thomas to take on the role of Leonato in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing for the Fall 2012 student production. I don’t know whether his asking had anything to do with my having an original production scheduled to be put on in the spring, but the result of both events’ occurring in the same year is that I have been drawn into fellowship with the theater students as never before. I have heard both Mitchell Thomas and some of the students joking that this is the “Year of VanderMey” in Theater Arts, and I have heard and seen a highly encouraging degree of enthusiasm among students for participating in Platinum Circle. The project I most wanted to finish is the one that got done, and it continues to live in a way that for a decade I had dreamed.

BOOKLIST: SABBATICAL READING, FALL, 2011

Poetry: Cording, Robert. Walking with Ruskin. Fort Lee, NJ: CavanKerry Press, Ltd., 2010.

Lee, Li-Young. Behind My Eyes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.

Fiction: Cary, Joyce. The Horse’s Mouth. New York: Harper Perennial, 1944; 1967. 6

Cather, Willa. The Song of the Lark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915; 1988.

Terpstra, John. The Boys, or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter. Kentville, Nova Scotia: Gaspereau Press, 2005.

Drama: Grieg, David. The Strange Undoing of Prudentia Hart. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Grieg, David and Gordon McIntyre. Midsummer: A Play with Songs. London: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Grieg, David. The Monster in the Hall. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Harris, Zinnie. The Wheel. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Thomas, Gwyn. The Dark Philosophers. Oberon Modern Plays. Cardiff, Wales: National Theatre Wales, 2011.

Thomson, Mark. Wondrous Flitting. Oberon Modern Plays. London: Oberon Books, 2011.

Walsh, Enda. Penelope. London: Nick Hern Books, 2010.

Walsh, Enda. The Walworth Farce. London: Nick Hern Books, 2006.

Criticism and Theory: Abbott, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage Books, 1996; 1997.

Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004.

Buhner, Stephen Harold. Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010.

Eco, Umberto. Confessions of a Young Novelist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Vintage, 2010. 7 VanderMey—Sabbatical Report, Fall 2011

Reference Books: 2011 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market. Cincinnati, OH: Writers Digest Books, 2011.

Herman, Jeff. Jeff Herman’s Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, & Literary Agents, 2011. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, 2010.

Journalism: Froese, Thomas. Ninety-Nine Windows: Reflections of a Reporter from Arabia to Africa and Other Roads Less Travelled. Belleville, Ontario: Epic Press, 2009.