XIV

Passions: My Children, Teaching, and Nimrod

The word passion has most often been associated with strong sexual desire or lust. I have felt a good deal of that kind of passion in my life but I prefer not to speak of it at this moment. Instead, it is the appetite for life in a broader sense that seems to have driven most of my actions. Moreover, the former craving is focused on an individual (unless the sexual drive is indiscriminant) and depends upon that individual for a response in order to intensify or even maintain. Fixating on my first husband—sticking to him no matter what his response, not being able to say goodbye to him —almost killed me. I had to shift the focus of my sexual passion to another and another and another in order to receive the spark that would rekindle and sustain me. That could have been dangerous; I was lucky.

But with the urge to create, the intense passion to “make something,” there was always another outlet, another fulfillment just within reach. My children, teaching, and Nimrod, the journal I edited for so many years, eased my hunger, provided a way to participate and delight in something always changing and growing.

from The passion to give birth to and grow with my children has, I believe, been expressed in previous chapters. I loved every aspect of having children conception, to the four births, three of which I watched in a carefully placed mirror at the foot of the hospital delivery room bed: May 6, 1957, birth of Leslie Ringold; November 8, 1959, birth of John Ringold; August 2, 1961: birth of Jim Ringold; July 27, 1964: birth of Suzanne Ringold (Harman). I love holding babies, rocking them, nestling them in the crook of my neck. As my four grew, I loved guiding their learning and participating in their play. They sparked my imagination and I, in turn, sparked theirs: taking long walks, usually with one in a stroller, the others close by; making pilgrimages through the “jungle of streets” and gardens; creating original family performances and collaborative stories about “Abercromby Dog,” “Lafcadio the Lion” and others.

If I were to write in more detail about the rich lives of my children and grandchildren, I would never finish this memoir. Their lives, even just portions of each of their lives, are for them to write, if they wish. I don’t need to express my passion for them, my fascination with their individuality and growth, my preoccupation with their wellbeing or my love. I believe they know; and that is all that matters.

Recently, I had the pleasure of taking a trip with my eighteen‐year‐old granddaughter, Emily, who shares with me and her mother Suzanne and sister Leah a love of books and writing. Emily is beautiful, brilliant (naturally) and shy. On this trip to San Miguel Allende for the annual Poetry Week series of workshops and readings, I watched Emily blossom. She had been terrified at the prospect of this singular

1 opportunity but willing to try it anyway. Cautiously, at her own pace, yet with a great deal of bravery, she became part of a group of ambitious, self‐critical, eager older writers. Yet she maintained her independence. She responded clearly and with a smile to adult questions, but within the group she was quiet—for the most part—reserving her thoughts for herself and private conversations with me, as well as with my close friend, Laura. Mature beyond her years, she evidently also felt free to become childlike in her enthusiasm for a passing dog, a sunrise, a view of the cathedral against a startlingly clear blue sky. Moreover, she was an enormous help to me in managing the hills and stairs and cobblestone streets. Two feet taller than I, she would extend an arm or shoulder or hug me like a pal. There was no pity here, no condescension. I have three other grandchildren, and I’m sure that if I can manage private trips with them, they will be equally successful. But as for this trip to Mexico with Emily, I am eternally grateful. Here was a passion fulfilled, a vision of past, present, and perhaps even future coming together with great beauty. I am beginning to understand that child and adult switch back and forth for the good of us all when there is love and care and passion spread heavily on all sides.

And it is children, especially, not just my own but almost all children, that seem to me to be magic. Their honesty, enthusiasm, intelligence, spontaneous gestures and movements express life and give life — if, of course, they are not stifled. My grown children, each so different from each other, give me joy to this day, when they are 56, 54, 52, and 49. Perhaps that is because when they speak to me (and that is often, even if it is by phone), they are children again. They screech, or complain, or laugh, or tell me a story. They are not guarded (at least most of the time). They have, from time to time, become my parents, or at least they try to do just that. But still, most of the time, they have that pristine quality of life‐fullness that we all wish for. Since, as I implied, they are a part of everything I do and think, I’ll not dwell on this aspect of my fervor, appetites, hunger, and passion. They are always in my mind and heart. They walk with me. They hold me up even as I try to do the same for them — with a light touch, I hope, and even as I still burn to say more, do more.

In E. L. Doctorow’s unforgettable novel, The Book of Daniel (based on the true story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg who were accused of espionage during the McCarthy era and executed on June 19, 1953), the young son Daniel speaks to his grandmother who always hugs him fiercely, forces pennies in his damp hand, and smells bad. “Grandma,” he asks, “Why is it necessary to blow your mind in a way so frightening to children?” And his Grandma answers: “I sing to myself in the old language and my curses are my love . . . Do you understand? . . .” [What we have, we old women] “is an excess of passion, that shimmering fullness of stored life. . . . We offend. We stink with life. Our hearts make love to the world — not gently.”

It seems to me now, that the men in my life, primarily Tony and Manly, could not accept that excess, that desire, as Walter Pater said, to “burn always like a hard gem‐like flame.” Was it a threat? Unmanageable? Certainly not on the surface. On the

2 surface, I was almost docile, rarely argumentative or demanding. But they felt it, flaming underneath — my fervor, my appetite for life. Did they need to distance themselves from it, from what they saw as the demands of my passion? I know that Tony did. That was a great shame.

I don’t believe I demanded the same intensity from them. I asked for their support, their love, their companionship; I gave them my love, my care — and my energy. For, after all, that was, to a great degree, what attracted them to me, or so it now seems, as I look back — that “shimmering fullness of stored life.” It was as if I were a spark that would help ignite their own energy. But sparks, no matter how strong, need nurturing, need to be coaxed into full light. We are who we are and do what we can. Unfortunately, what we know in later life frequently surfaces too late.

Teaching

The classes I taught, the students who responded, the children of my body and mind were never threatened by the fire within. Even now at 80, as well as when I began teaching at the age of 31, I have “an excess of stored passion,” a desire to discover the world and especially the people in it, a desire also to give back, to share, to claim that space that brings student and teacher to a neutral and reciprocal ground. Often, as Henry Miller said, “I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. . . . Often I put down things, [I even say things], which I do not understand myself, secure in the knowledge that later they will become clear and meaningful to me.” Over the forty‐seven years that I taught, in many venues (The University of Tulsa, grade schools across the State of Oklahoma, prisons, homes for the physically and mentally challenged, nutrition sites for the elderly), I never failed to receive far more than I gave.

Certainly, my “teaching career” (if one could call it a “career”) did not follow a typical path, but it was filled with the turns and twists created by love and responsibility, and the urge to reach out and to explore. I loved every facet of teaching, as I did child rearing. Through the generosity of Professors Zimmerman and Alworth of TU, I was permitted to take one or two courses in independent study each semester so that I did not have to haul my large tummy to class; and, thus, I earned a Masters Degree in 1964 (just before Suzanne was born).

I accepted an adjunct teaching position at the University of Tulsa in 1965, after Suzanne, our fourth child, was a year old. Fortunately for Suzanne and for me, I did not accept that position when it was first offered, the year before, when I was still nursing and Suzanne was one month old, slithering on my lap, all glossy and wet, as I watched the others swimming at the Feldman’s pool. (Recently, Nancy Feldman died at the age of 93, and Ray, her husband, will not be far behind, for they have always been linked at the hip and heart. The days with them at their pool or sharing political discussions are still a part of every thing I do and think.)

3

Back to academe: I never intended to work towards a Ph.D. but after the Doctoral Program was instituted at the University of Tulsa, I was told that “everyone” who would be teaching at the University would have to have a Ph.D. I wanted to teach. Slowly, one or two courses at a time, I obtained a Doctorate in Letters from the University of Tulsa in 1975. All four of our children were attending grade school or high school, so I had a little more free time. Everyone in the family, except the dog, attended the oral defense of my thesis, which I researched and wrote largely after 10:00 p.m. on many evenings. Tony gave me a party, organized by Ivy and Charlotte, to celebrate the attainment of the Ph.D. I remember feeling depressed by Tony’s pro forma gesture towards a party.

It would be easy, even “logical,” to say that my husband was ignored during those years. But to be fair to me and to him, I don’t think that was true. Tony worked a great deal; I was alone or with the children — a great deal. He was also taking French Horn lessons and working towards a Masters Degree in History, which he achieved long before I started back to school, and he played golf on Saturdays and was away from home all day. But when he was home, he was a good father, tumbled with the boys, planted vegetables and flowers, with each of the four children given a specific task. The family had dinners together; our sex life was good, if not the subject of books. We had friends and entertained and went to social functions. But there are many hours in a day and in a night when you have the energy and passion to want to fill them meaningfully. For me, the trajectory always led to teaching. Ah, irony! The University, I discovered, did not employ its own graduates full‐time. At first that ruling fit right into my lifestyle. I needed a flexible schedule.

I taught halftime and once even “double halftime” at TU as an adjunct for 40 years (“double halftime” means you get paid adjunct salary but still teach a full load of four courses). At first, like the other adjuncts, I taught Freshman Composition courses because there was far more of those offered, more than the senior members of the English Department could handle. Ironically, I even taught logic, as part of Classical Rhetoric, in the Composition II class. Despite my propensity to ignore what many feel is the logical choice (or as I once told my son Jim, “That’s the difference between you and me, I don’t have to be logical!”), it was Barbara, my desk‐mate, and I who found a mistake in the logic textbook. Sometimes when you don’t understand something and keep pushing at the problem and asking questions of the supposed experts, in your innocence you make amazing discoveries.

While other adjuncts were let go after a few years, especially when the Ph.D. program in English was established and teaching fellows were therefore available to instruct the Freshman courses, I had matured and acquired a niche: creative writing, playwriting, poetry, and new courses that I invented.

4 Devising new courses and convincing my superiors to accept them into the curriculum was great fun and a mental challenge. In order to link literature to the other disciplines, I dug wide and deep but ultimately discovered inevitable connections. What could be more fun than finding out about medicine and literature, law and literature, sports and literature? It turned out, for example, that baseball was the favorite sport of poets like Marvin Bell, Manly Johnson, and Donald Hall, who even wrote a sonnet sequence of 9 parts (9 innings—get it!). Basketball was the favorite of Seattle Sonics pro‐player and poet Tom Meschery, and novelist, poet and painter John Updike, whose Rabbit Run and other novels depicted the glory days and fall of a minor basketball hero. Amongst women writers, swimming and even motorcycle riding was a preoccupation. “Really?” the uninitiated would say. Absolutely!

“Writers are such a sedentary lot,” said Pulitzer Prize‐winning poet Stanley Kunitz. They have to stretch their muscles to stretch their minds. Moreover, writers are human beings; many played sports in their youth and still hunger after that surge of energy and spirit. Poet Stephen Dunn, when interviewed on NPR after he had won the Pulitzer Prize, said that even that award was not as thrilling as a high‐five after a winning game.

The connection between medicine and literature was easier to document and not as startling for people to accept: Chekhov was a country doctor; John Keats during his short life also studied medicine; poet William Carlos Williams was a practicing pediatrician, and the 2013 Nimrod award winner in fiction, Jonathan Appel, is a physician at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC and a lawyer.

Law and literature! No problem there. From the theatrical performances in the Inns of the Courts during the Renaissance to the enumerable dramas that are in their entirety performed within the procedures and confines of a trial or contain a major trial scene, for example: Euripides’ The Eumenides, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, and modern trial dramas like Bertholt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, Daniel Berrigan’s Trial of the Catonsville Nine and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men — the gavel lifts and falls.

The thematic courses were very popular and, in addition, teaching creative writing became my specialty (probably because no one else wanted to do it). I taught poetry and playwriting and once even fiction writing. The classes were always too large, often 26 or 28 students when there should have been 12 maximum. It worked out; I loved it.

One of the most sustaining outcomes of teaching at the University has been the friends I made, not just fellow academics, but students like Molly and Carol and Philip and Steven who return to Tulsa to visit, who still write letters, send cards. I even enjoy those who “text.”

5 Nimrod: the “Little” Magazine that Became My Baby and Therefore Grew Up

Overview

Neither ceremony nor financial enticement lured me to my position as editor of Nimrod in 1966, just a few months after I began teaching at the University of Tulsa. Professor Winston Weathers, a gentle, highly regarded teacher and writer, wanted desperately to get rid of his responsibilities as editor of Nimrod and have more time for his own writing. Ironically, I had known Winston before either one of us came to TU. In 1957, he and his partner, Joseph Nichols, lived in a small apartment directly above the one Tony and I rented when we first came to Tulsa with our ten‐day‐old baby Leslie. Though both Winston and I were shy, a few brief conversations passing in the halls and shared dinners at his apartment and ours brought out our mutual interest in writing.

Ten years passed during which my small family grew and grew and grew and we moved into a house on 38th Place, in Brookside, a small house with two bedrooms, but a palace to us — even though it soon became cramped and we moved again with three children and one on the way to a large two‐story house on 25th Place. It had trees and a backyard that accommodated sandbox and swing, wading pool, vegetable garden — and even an occasional baseball game. Winston also moved from the apartments on S. Frisco to Norman, Oklahoma where he received a Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. He returned to Tulsa and, therefore, to TU because Tulsa was where Joe was employed with an oil company.

Imagine our surprise and my delight when we met again, he my superior at TU— as he always was. The invitation followed. “I wonder if you’d be willing to help . . .” The story is familiar. You become a small cog in an academic machine like The University of Tulsa. You do well; people like you. Whenever someone doesn’t really want to teach a particular course or continue a previously assumed task, they say, “Why not let Fran do it!”

I was gently guided by the then‐editor Winston Weathers to a 5‐foot‐tall filing cabinet stuffed with manuscripts. He asked if I would help. The task seemed formidable: over 100 manila envelopes, unopened and unread, awaiting evaluation and selection. But I was young and energetic and foolish. Little did I know that forty years later I would still be opening envelopes (now numbering 3,000 a year), still searching for the special voice that would awaken my senses and then, hopefully, those of our readers. Hence the birth of my involvement with Nimrod International Journal, a 47‐ year involvement that gestated each year and eventually bore two issues a year of 224 pages each.

It became obvious to me at the outset of my involvement with Nimrod, when I became an assistant to Winston Weathers, that a publication with a mission of discovery and an ambition to promote the careers of new writers of quality must be a

6 collaborative effort. Nimrod was created in 1956 as a “little magazine,” in the tradition of early American magazines like The Dial and The Little Review, responsible for the discovery of T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, HD, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and other fathers and mothers of modern literature. Historically, literary magazines, or “little” magazines as they are sometimes called (“little” because they did not seek mass market distribution, were satisfied with bare‐bones funding, and so forth, as long as they made their imprint felt with integrity) have a brief life span—from one to ten years.

Nimrod, however, did not just last but grew in pages and reputation. Submissions multiplied. No one person could read the thousands of manuscripts submitted. Especially since our policy required that more than one editor read each manuscript, many readers, editors and financial supporters were required. The journal as a whole, when it is done well, aspires to have an organic shape, and all the many hands coaxing it into existence disappear and applaud.

Through financial and political challenges, Nimrod maintained its integrity and kept fulfilling its mission as well. If you go to the archives and open the first issue, a slim 16‐page stapled effort from 1956, you will read the statement of purpose written by the founding editor, University of Tulsa graduate student James Land Jones. The journal was “conceived,” he said, “as an organ of expression for the literary ability that is in this area . . . that is our first responsibility.” Just a few paragraphs later, Jones adds, “Nimrod will also seek writing of distinction, both experimental and traditional, from across the nation and from abroad. Discovery is our mission!”

In the initial and much‐needed search and discovery of new and/or ignored writers from Oklahoma and the four surrounding states, Nimrod published the early work of Tulsans Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett (poets who, ironically, later became known as the “New York Poets,” a group that clustered around the painter‐poet Frank O’Hara). Yet even in the first ten years, the journal also fulfilled its mission by including out‐of‐the‐area writers such as William Stafford, Louis Ginsberg, and Judson Crews; Japanese‐American poet John Hideyo Hamamura; and Dutch novelist and playwright Jan de Hartog. After its first decade, hard work and national recognition brought even more well known writers to Nimrod’s pages: Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz—at the height of their careers. These prominent writers knew the importance of the “little magazine” in the history of American letters and wanted to further our efforts. Lending Nimrod the luster of their names and the excellence of their work helped to lift the unknown but clearly rising stars.

Moreover, particularly after 1971 when Nimrod evolved from 16 to 32 pages to an even more ambitious 92 and then 164, 204 or 224 page, perfect‐bound format, the journal crossed further borders in special issues on the Arabic Nations, Australia,

7 Canada, China, India, Latin America, the Soviet Union, and even The Arctic Circle, as well as searching out and presenting American Indian writers.

Nimrod not only reached out to other nations and ethnic populations, but also took on thematic subjects ranging from sports, medicine and food to science and literature—always demonstrating the relationship of poetry and prose to every phase of human knowledge and endeavor—and always searching for the new talent that would become the heritage of the next generation.

A detailed history of Nimrod is in process, a story that has lasted 57 years to this date as I am writing in June 2014. The 57 years were commemorated by a thematic issue in Spring 2013 entitled “Lasting Matters: Writers 57 and Over.”

Here, however, are a few highlights and personal stories from Nimrod history from 1956‐96. These stories create a topography that clearly reveals the depressions and peaks of tenacity. On all fronts, we were exploring an unknown jagged, mountainous terrain that required determination if not just plain stubbornness. It is also a story of politics and personalities.

Holding on No Matter What! 1956‐96:

There were four issues during 1967‐8 for which I served as co‐editor with Winston Weathers. Continuing the practice of the first ten years of the publication of Nimrod from 1956‐66, area writers and artists of excellence largely filled these co‐ edited issues: Ted Berrigan (see “Best of Nimrod” issue), Ivy Dempsey, Olivia Hogue (Marino), Manly Johnson, Charles Oliver, Dee Ann Potter (Short), Norman Russell, and others continued to appear and make their distinctive mark. In addition, emerging writers and well‐known writers from every state in the nation, as well as Oklahoma, also published with us, with a smattering of writers from abroad.

Then, in the winter of 1968, we published the first issue for which I served as editor‐in‐chief (at that time we were still publishing 3 slim, stapled issues per year: winter, spring, fall). It was an exhilarating and humbling experience — far more work than I had imagined it would be, though my task was lightened by having the good fortune of discovering in the acceptance files the intricate pen and ink drawings of the outstanding Chinese American artist, Harry Chew. The energy of line and complexity of image of Chew’s drawings, one used for the cover design, the other four within the issue, seemed to be a wordless expression of the content. Just what we always want!

This issue began our practice of organizing an issue around a theme, although this time (as in several issues after that) we derived the theme after the fact, simply by perusing the material we had already accepted instead of deciding on and announcing the theme beforehand. The theme arrived at seemed to reverberate T. S.

8 Eliot's and Henri Bergson’s phrase, “The Past Moment of The Present," and so it was entitled. It featured poems by Emilie Glen from New York (who is still sending us material), and a poem by Linda Pastan from Maryland who has since published more than 20 volumes, won numerous awards, and served as Nimrod's first poetry judge in 1978.

Nimrod’s “The Past Moment of the Present” (still a slim volume though it was 48 pages, a substantial increase from the previous 16‐or 30‐page issues), also began Nimrod's involvement with significant writers from abroad and included "A River's Loss," a portion of Karl Gunnarson's Som Drang in Finland, translated by A. Hjalmar Haglund and adapted by William J. Wiseman, Jr., winner of the Vereen Bell Award for Creative Writing who later became an Oklahoma State Representative.

Yet, as we readied for publication of the next issue, we received word that the University of Tulsa had withdrawn its financial support. We tightened our belts and looked for help. The University is not a monolith. Professors and other campus institutions rallied to our support, one of which was the official organ of the university, The Alumni Journal, which had a much larger circulation than we did.

At the suggestion of the very generous and independent editor of The Alumni Journal, Connie Cronley, the issue of Nimrod of October, 1968 (vol.13, no.1) was incorporated into the Alumni Journal. It was a separate section on contrasting yellow paper, with a lead essay explaining our plight. Thanks to Connie’s good faith, Nimrod kept to its schedule and proudly published S. E. Hinton’s short story “Rumblefish,” which later was developed into a novel and a few years later, a motion picture directed by Frances Ford Coppola. Susie (S. E.) best known for her novel, The Outsiders, had been a student in my creative writing class at the University of Tulsa. At that time, she was going through a long painful period of writers’ block. She wrote “Rumble Fish” In that class, the first draft of “Tex.” A horse lover, horses are featured in several of her novels. Lucky for me, since after the class was over we became fast friends. My daughter and I got to ride Susie’s favorite horse. And I was invited to appear in the subsequent film of “Tex” as a reporter at the scene of an accident. My starring moment was reduced in the film edit to a tiny scene that Matt Dillon, the real star, watches otelevision. Hey! I earned $250 and a long hot day on a dirt road in Catoosa as the accident scene in the film was shot over and over and over.

Companion material in that limited and amalgamated edition of 1968 included the fine poetry of Lennie Brown and Stephen Kennedy. The former died tragically of an overdose; the latter is now Headmaster of a private school.

The next year, funds were so low that we had to borrow a typewriter (a new‐ fangled Selectric) and produced, unfortunately, the ugliest issue we've ever published. Yet, that issue still contained excellent material. Between 1968‐1971, money dribbled in from contributions and increased subscriptions. And in fall 1969, an issue entitled

9 “The Finely Drawn Line” (vol.14, no.1) saw a renewal of grace and design. We were especially proud of this issue: an art portfolio by Navajo artist, R. C. Gorman (later also featured in Nimrod’s “American Indian” issue); an experiment in format by splitting the pages of one signature (a folded multi‐page unit) to form two tiny chapbooks for Dee Ann Potter's "String of Beads," and Alice Price's "Lake Poems;" the crystalline essay, "An Egg Illumined" by Otis Winchester. But, once again, we were courting disaster.

The issue began with a poem by student writer Steve Housel. This poem, "Nonbat," and Olivia Hogue's "The Funnymen . . . " chronicle the age, the age of drugs and dropping out and disillusion. This was the late 60's after all, and we felt we should represent the veterans and other protestors of the Vietnam War (1959‐1975) — especially those on our campus. But a four‐letter word, in quotation marks, mind you, almost brought about the demise of Nimrod and the end of an era for me.

It seems that the student art editor's mother, very proud of her daughter's achievement, had given a copy of the issue to her neighbor who also happened to be on the Board of Trustees of the University. He was not pleased. He threatened, in fact, to withdraw some thousands of dollars in contributions. I was called and asked to appear at President Twyman’s office. Always optimistic and unsuspecting, I was sure this was going to be the moment we would be told how wonderful the journal had become, how the University now wanted to give us money so that we could move ahead with alacrity.

The glowering face before me quickly relieved me of my delusion. President Twyman was one year younger than I — and that, in my own mind, was what saved me, gave me a bit of courage. When accused of ruining the future of the University because of one word, I was brought to tears. However, fighting back the tears, I was not only embarrassed but became very angry. I defended the questionably offensive word as part of the vocabulary of desperation of Vietnam War veterans and anti‐Vietnam War supporters. I added softly but firmly that, if President Twyman wished, I would get my hair done (an unusual occurrence) take my four children by the hands and go to the Board member’s office to show him how respectable I am. I was amazed at my own words.

To be honest, the incident was also exhilarating. I found my anger. I learned I could stand my ground. I found out that I had more at stake here in this editing work than daily plodding could measure. And the issue and the journal stood also — then as today — never printing anything for shock value or merely to fit into fashion, but never shying from controversy either.

10

Upswings: More Money, Pages, and Themes of Significance

Daniel Marder came to TU to chair the English Department in 1970, having been hand‐picked by Tom Staley, Provost at the time and editor of The James Joyce Quarterly. Ironically, he had come, he said, “largely because Nimrod was there.” Through Daniel Marder’s intervention, we received $1,000, an unheard of sum up to that point. We were off and running with a new format, extra pages, perfect binding, and, best of all, encouragement. Soon funding increased even more, though it was not a steady allowance. Though we have never had a development director, we took on that challenge as well and, in addition to trying to raise subscription funds and contributions from private sources, we began applying for federal and private foundation grants.

The first time we received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, I was overwhelmed. No one in our office knew anything about applying for grants. Naturally, we sought guidance from several sources at the University. We were told to ask for twice as much as we needed.

Somehow, I could not do that. Instead, I asked for $750. Contrary to what we expected, we received not half as much but twice as much — $1,500. I believe that the granting board of the NEA respected our honesty and detailed reporting but realistically appraised the situation and wisely decided that we could never grow by just covering expenses.

Whatever the reasoning, we began to depend upon the partial support of the Literature Panel of the NEA, despite the fact that the complexities of applying mounted. The second grant was for $3,000. The fifth in 1988, for $9,320, and during the following years we received as much as $9,600 per year.

Spring, 1971 (vol.15, no.2). With an increase in funding, this issue also displayed another increase in printed pages and made it possible to use a “perfect” binding (A squared‐off binding, even with a soft cover, is only possible with a minimum of 68 pages. This issue was 88 pages.) Nimrod also changed its publication schedule with this issue, so that instead of 3 small issues per year, we progressed to two larger issues that were more economical to produce and placed the journal in a position to be regarded as a book with greater prestige. But it was the content that really made the difference. Spring, ‘71 included: a fascinating story by Rebecca Kaveler; an illuminating essay on the creative process by R. V. Cassill, novelist, professor of creative writing at Iowa Writers' Workshop and Brown University, and founder of Associated Writing Programs; two more poems by Linda Pastan; and several new writers like Ronn Ronck, a TU graduate, David Hoskins, a native of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, and Albert

11 Goldbarth, whose poetry has now appeared in almost every major publication. In addition, the cover magic‐act, a hand‐executed lithograph of an egg balanced on the edge of a wine glass (symbolizing perhaps a balancing act we knew only too well) was created by TU Art Professor, Glen Godsey, who thirty‐eight years later contributed the computer visual art for Nimrod’s "Y2K.Connecting."

There was also an issue of Winter, 1971 (vol.16, no.1) that has on its cover a drawing of Isaac Bashevis Singer by Charlotte Stewart who was then Assistant Editor of Nimrod and was always a supportive and loving friend and gifted editor. Charlotte shared some of the most delicious early moments at the journal and one of these was meeting Mr. Singer. Dr. Daniel Marder had organized a multi‐cultural literary conference on campus which included not only I. B. Singer; there was also a tall elegant French Professor, Melvin Tolson, Jr. from the University of Oklahoma, who was the son of black Oklahoma poet, educator and politician Melvin B. Tolson (the topic of 2007 film “The Great Debaters”); a Latin American writer on the faculty of the University of Texas and me, describing my “innovations in teaching creative writing” for which I was becoming a bit notorious.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, émigré writer from Poland who still wrote his novels and stories in Yiddish, came from New York City to be the keynote speaker.2 Singer also came to my fiction writing class and charmed the students and me with his honesty, humor and depth. Concerned about the pressure of flying “at his age” (he lived another twenty years), he spent an extra day in Tulsa where I had the good fortune of shepherding him around to Gilcrease Museum where he looked out the huge windows facing the Osage Hills and said in his Yiddish accent: “I can just imagine the Indians riding over the plains,” just as a Japanese couple walked into the room. I thought it was hilarious, but I guess you would have had to be there to appreciate it. We also went to the park, and though it was spring, he wore his black fedora and long black coat but did love the fresh air. We searched for a yellow lined writing tablet with no left hand margin (since he wrote in Yiddish from right to left) and then we rushed back home to feed my three‐year‐old Jim who was certain that tiny Mr. Singer had stepped out of a book. Then, as I led him to the airplane, Mr. Singer said casually, "If you'd like to write this day up, feel free to do so."

What followed was a dash to my typewriter (with a request to my family to please give me a couple of hours). Fortunately, I have a good memory especially for what people say, and Mr. Singer's distinctive way of saying just seemed to flow on to the page. I wrote the piece as if it were a play, and printed it in Nimrod as if it had been an interview — all with Mr. Singer's approval. In fact, I sent him the completed essay

2 I. B. Singer had published 5 volumes of short stories or novels by 1970 including Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories, Enemies: A Love Story and Satan in Goray. He had already won the National Book Award for Children’s Literature went on to publish over 15 titles; win the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978.

12 and “interview” and then met with him in his apartment in New York City. To my amazement, he corrected very little. His only objection was a time or two when, in the course of the writing, he felt that I had given him too much of an accent. Singer also had a marvelous sense of humor (perhaps that was what helped him live to be 99). For example, he said: “I did not become a vegetarian for my health, I did it for the health of the chickens.”

In the 1971 issue we published the interview and the first of two stories that Mr. Singer submitted to us. Nimrod has, in its archives, the original copy of that story which contains hand‐written corrections by Mr. Singer. At our meeting in Singer's New York apartment, he asked me to go over the manuscript with him. After initial terror, I found that I did have some suggestions and that I was not hesitant to make them, since (I kept telling myself) after all, the story had been translated from Yiddish by a third party and we could blame her.

Isaac B. Singer's willingness to publish in Nimrod was certainly an exhilarating moment, and is another example of those established writers who through the years have generously agreed to focus attention on emerging writers by sharing pages with them.

One year later, Spring/Summer 1972 (vol.16, no.2), Nimrod published the “American Indian Issue” and again spirits soared. This time we decided on the theme beforehand, setting the stage for current policy. The American Indian Issue was the first attempt (in what became policy) to develop an idea or issue that was just beginning to capture the reading public's imagination. Here we were in the garden of academe and never before had we done research. The manuscripts had just come to us and all we had to do was detect the theme that was implicit in the selected material. To research, to find out what was out there, where we could help ‐‐ this was a new challenge.

But after all, this was Oklahoma Territory. Wasn't it the task of a literary magazine to reawaken historical awareness, to explore the contribution of Native Americans not only to the visual arts but also to the oral and written traditions of story and poem? We were well rewarded for our efforts: The moving correspondence between the members of the family of John Ross, Chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1828, published here for the first time through the generosity of his great grandniece who had carefully preserved the letters; music and poetry by Charles Ballard, Quapaw‐ Cherokee; poems from the Haida, from the Omaha, Osage, Akwasasne; an essay on dance by Moscelyne Larkin co‐founder of Tulsa Ballet (Shawnee‐Peoria‐Russian); the Indian footprints in prose poems of Norman Russell and Carter Revard; poems by Lance Henson, Cheyenne; John Knoepfle’s “Peoria‐Miami Free Form,” a concrete poem in three languages that circled on the page like an Indian ceremonial dance; and paintings, drawings, and sculpture by R. C. Gorman, Fritz Scholder, Alan Houser, Joan Hill, Ruth Blalock Jones — all soon to be well known throughout the world.

13 Lance Henson .. . ahhhh Lance Henson! One of the first to send his poetry for the Oklahoma Indian issue, he had written his cover letter by hand — a fairly undecipherable hand. I thought that the signature said Laura Henson and addressed the acceptance to Laura. Lance wrote back an indignant letter, typical of his macho manner. “I am a man. A fifth generation Cheyenne of the Dog Warrior Clan!” I apologized. Afterwards, Lance published in several issues of Nimrod. Subsequently, his first collection became a collector’s item not only here but also in Europe where he toured. By the time, Lance became a student at the University of Tulsa, I had learned my lesson. If I had a suggestion to make about a line or word in one of his pristine haiku‐like poems, I did not write on the paper. He came to my office, and I discreetly placed a finger over the suggested revision or omission.

The content of the American Indian issue demanded a new and more ambitious treatment. Hence, Nimrod's first 4‐color cover, reproducing a painting by Native American artist Joan Hill. She and her mother welcomed me into their home where they allowed me to pick the painting of my choice. That painting is now displayed at the Performing Arts Center in Tulsa, a marvel of earth tones and strong linear lines. The entire issue was printed in a harmonizing sepia tone instead of the standard black, with the intention of suggesting "stones and flowers, wind and quiet."

Though we printed 2,000 copies on the first run (the largest first printing we had ever attempted), the “American Indian” issue sold out and was reprinted. We sold it mainly in New Mexico, peddling our wares from the back of a station wagon; in New York through a periodical called "Akwasasne Notes"; and, believe it or not, we sold over 200 copies in Germany.

As I learned later, a German fiction writer by the name of Karl Friedrich May (1842‐1912) wrote a novel imitating James Fenimore Cooper’s depiction of the American Old West and included drawings of a romanticized American Indian like Chingachgook, the noble savage in all his garb, in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Thus began Germany’s fascination, which was adumbrated by State Department tours of select American Indians performing dances and a marketing journal, printed in Germany, devoted to American Indian beaded moccasins, drums and so forth. As with Isadora Duncan’s modern dance in the early 1900’s, Germans flocked to see the Indian dancers and Karl May became one of the most successful writers in Germany, though he is virtually unknown in the U.S. Obviously, the editors of Nimrod learned a great deal of supplementary information each time they approached a new theme or culture.

“Women in the Arts,” Spring/Summer 1973 (vol.17, no.2) was a groundbreaking issue, and though only 96 pages, attempted a historical perspective. During 1972‐1973, while we were acquiring manuscripts for Nimrod’s forthcoming issue devoted to women writers —mainly those who lead nine lives in one, who refuse to choose, who are attracted by the inexhaustible, stand in marvel at the all‐embracing— I

14 naturally thought again of Katherine Anne Porter, whom I had not seen since undergraduate days at the University of Michigan. I asked permission to reprint an essay from her Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, published by Delacorte Press.

We don’t usually include reprints, but this essay, which KAP had written in 1937, on Katherine Mansfield’s art, seemed absolutely essential to our issue. In it she speaks of how “Katherine Mansfield’s work is the most important fact about her, and she is in danger of the worst fate that an artist can suffer — to have her work neglected for an interest in her ‘personality.’” Porter also emphasized that descriptions of Mansfield’s work as “delicate” were also contrary to fact. Mansfield, Porter said, “cleared away all easy effects and tricky turns of phrase; and such mastership is not gained by letting the instincts have it all their own way…. She was as delicate as a surgeon’s scalpel is delicate.”

You can see why we felt it necessary to reprint this essay in our issue devoted to women writers. KAP not only agreed to the reprinting but when the Nimrod: “Women in the Arts” issue was published, Porter became a Nimrod patron and sent us $100.00. I flew around the campus waving the subscription form and check that she had sent, and reluctantly deposited the check in the bank — I treasured the signature more than the sum.

“Women in the Arts, contained, in addition to the Porter essay: a poem by Anne Bradstreet, 1650, first American poet; an essay about Dorothy Brett, close friend of D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, with accompanying paintings by Brett; and poems by other well known writers like Olga Brumas, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, and Linda Pastan, as well as 23 emerging writers including Carol Haralson, a recent University of Tulsa graduate, who went on to win the first Nimrod/Hardman poetry award in 1978, Ivy Dempsey who won the Oklahoma Book Award in 2004, and Judith Johnson Sherwin, who after numerous subsequent publications outside of Nimrod, went on to win first prize in fiction in the 2010 annual Nimrod competition when she was 75.

In addition to Porter’s generous permission to reprint and her donation, her mail envelope also enclosed a hand‐written letter that I had framed and is still hanging in my bedroom. Here is the text of that letter – a treasure indeed!

“October 2, 1973 Nimrod International Journal Miss Francine Ringold [hardly a “miss” with 4 children born before the end of 1971]

Dear Fran: The copies of Nimrod arrived this morning; I have my own copy of Spring/Summer 1973, and the Isaac Bashevis Singer number with that most beautiful touching portrait by Alfred Sundel. Could you tell me when and how I can get an original print of this photograph? And if I can I shall ask Mr. Singer to autograph it for me, for my collection in my Library Rooms in the University of Maryland. I am trying to collect portraits of all the loved and treasured artists of my life, a goodly company! I shall be grateful if I can purchase it.

15 I accept happily your invitation to a place among your advisory editors, and assure you I shall be pleased if you consult me occasionally – my interest is real. Thank you – Sincerely, Katherine Anne Porter”

She signed off but continued:

“Once, quite years ago, I spoke at a convention of teachers in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they appointed me Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, a lovely charade of course, but gave me my badge of office, a tiny gold laurel wreath which I have worn ever since, with a lasting warmth of remembrance. The sophomore glass of Thomas A. Edison High School, Tulsa Oklahoma published a paragraph from one of my talks there in Vignettes vol. 4 1959 – as follows: “Practice an art for love and the happiness of your life – you will find it outlasts almost everything but breath!” Yours, Katherine Anne Porter”

But again, she continued:

“I have used this as the theme of my Collected Essays… I tell you this because my little gold laurel wreath is dear to me for immense reasons of love: ‘The heart has reasons which Reason does not know’ [a quote from Pascal]

Then she signed the letter again, “Katherine Anne Porter” crossed out the “Porter” and wrote “Habit!” and re‐signed “KAP.”

When one combines all these personal details with an enormous respect for her writing, it is evident that the choice in1978 of Katherine Anne Porter as the designated title of the Nimrod fiction prize was inevitable! That choice, however, was five years after my initial correspondence with KAP, and there was still rich ore to be mined in 1973, a momentous year for Nimrod.

“Latin American Voices”(vol. 17, no.2) was the second issue of Nimrod to be published in 1973. Obtaining material for special issues was more complicated at that time — no Internet, no great wide web! But if there were not any virtual connections through the web, there were real connections, people who knew people, writers willing to intercede for us. The most generous of these was Ronald Christ then Editor of Review magazine and Director of the Center for Inter‐American Relations in New York City. I had seen Ronald’s name on many articles connected with the “Boom Generation” of Latin American Writers. The “Boom, the lightning that struck again and again from Argentina up to Mexico”3 because of writers like Argentinian, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicaraguan, Ernesto Cardenal, Chilean, Pablo Neruda, Mexican, Octavio Paz.

How could I approach so venerable an expert as Ronald Christ and ask for his help in rounding up writers for our issue?

3 Ronald Christ in his introduction to Nimrod: Latin American Voices, 1973

16

The telephone was the answer, the telephone so safe, so protective, and yet so intimate. But not just any telephone. I was in New York City visiting Isabelle, my Aunt and surrogate mother. One could never use the phone there; it was always busy at the appropriate hours to make a business call; Isabelle was always on it or awaiting a call in regard to the American Theater Wing for which she served as director. Out on the street, encased in the classic tall red and glass booth typical of the time, was an available phone. Trembling, I looked up the number for the Center for Inter‐American Relations and dialed. Only one receptionist to pass through and Ronald Christ was on the phone. I explained about Nimrod in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and that we were planning an issue devoted to contemporary Latin American literature. “Where are you?” he asked. “Are you calling from Tulsa?” “I’m around the corner in a telephone booth.” “Well,” he all but barked, “come up here immediately.”

The Center for Inter‐American Relations was housed in a former Rockefeller Mansion on 68th Street and Park Avenue. Wrought iron and glass doors, marble floors, a winding staircase led to Christ’s office. There he sat behind a huge ebony desk. He was not an old bearded scholar as I had expected but a young, clean‐shaven, slender man. He was wearing a suit but with white sneakers and he was smiling and holding out his hand. When I left an hour later, I was carrying an armload of books, addresses of agents, translators, and writers to contact. “Meanwhile,” he said, “I’ll contact several for you.” By the time I returned to Tulsa ten days later, I had heard from Robert Bly translator of Neruda, Suzanne Jill Levine, translator of Manuel Puig and Julio Cortazar, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who had worked with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. Others followed after my letters of solicitation and Christ’s endorsement. It was a heady time.

17 Nimrod also became involved at that time with the controversy over exclusivity. Robert Bly, Lewis Hyde, Donald Walsh and others endorsed the idea that each translation was a new poem, and a gift. In the Nimrod presentation of Pablo Neruda, we printed the translations of Bly, Mark Strand, and Donald Walsh, along side of the original Spanish, when space permitted. Obviously, we sided with the non‐exclusive approach. In 1973, Farrar, Straus, Giroux published a book of translations of Neruda by Margaret Peden. FSG claimed exclusive rights, but forgave us our sins. The concept is still disputed but I must admit that I tend to lean to Lewis Hyde’s emphasis of the poem as “a gift”5 that should be made available to all, no matter the language that he or she speaks. Since translation of a poem is such a delicate art involving not only accurate denotative equivalents but also a respect for rhythm and sound — why not permit different versions of the same poem? “For us,” said Octavio Paz, “translation is transmutation, metaphor: a form of change and severance; a way, therefore, of ensuring the continuity of our past by transforming it in dialogue with other civilizations.” 6 In essence, the translator becomes a collaborator in the creation of the original work.

If translation was a collaboration, we thought, why not devote an issue to other forms of collaborative writing that few people knew about but which was part of literary history and being reinvented in the present as, for example, “sympoems: poetry in dialogue.”

Fall/Winter 1974, “Collaborations” (vol.19, no.1)

The impetus for this issue was also largely the result of meeting and listening to a guest lecturer who came to the University of Tulsa in the spring — Matei Calinescu. A tall, dark, impressive poet on the faculty of the University of Bucharest, Calinescu was at that time serving as a visiting professor of comparative literature at Indiana University where he met translator and poet, Willis Barnstone, and began the experiment in collaborative writing that sparked and was featured in our Collaborations issue. “The act of writing in common is basically the experience of sharing freedom… a new dialogal consciousness is formed, with ego and personal inhibitions diminished… Each poet contributed his distinct criteria and experience; and with each suggested phrase, the words of one are modified by the other, in ways wholly deprived to a single writer in the act of composition and correction.”

Meeting Calinescu resulted in meeting Willis Barnstone, on the page and in person. Willis was a small energetic man who bounced from one publisher’s display table to another at the annual Associated Writing Programs conference — always with a manuscript in hand. He, like his amazing daughter Aliki who published her first book at the age of twelve, was a poet and a translator from several languages including Chinese and Spanish as well as a professor at Indiana University. That meeting resulted in publishing not only Willis Barnstone’s original and collaborative

5 Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Vintage Books Edition, 1979. 6 Octavio Paz, Nimrod: “Collaborations,” vol. 19, no.1, 1974, p. 64.

18 work with Calinescu but in his important contribution to our second Latin American issue and our Chinese issue where Willis’s son Tony Barnstone was also invaluable.

The infusion into our office of materials and knowledge about the historical roots of collaborative writing, and modern practices ranging from post‐surrealist games based largely on chance, to highly ornate schema involving English Renaissance practices, Japanese Renga, and particular methods devised by authors like Anita Skeen and Kay Clossen — all were invigorating and tantalizing.

The temptation could not be resisted: Charlotte Stewart, then the Managing Editor of Nimrod, enthusiastically took the lead in organizing a collaborative writing workshop in Tulsa, which we held at Gilcrease Museum. Leading the sessions were Anita Skeen and Kay Clossen, and Mark and Ruth Doty, who had written several volumes under the joint name, M. R. Doty. (I had met Mark a few months earlier at the Santa Cruz writing conference, a young, extraordinarily talented man, married to his former poetry professor at Drake University. In addition to his contribution to the Collaborations issue, Mark later agreed to become Nimrod’s 1999 Poetry Judge and, a few days after his appearance in Tulsa, was named the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.) Mark and Ruth stayed at my house during the Collaborative Writing conference. In the morning, I found a poem that Mark and Ruth had written and I have delighted in ever since.

Dear Francine,

This morning the dwarf has left her nightgown draped across your Spanish chair beneath the green paper grasshopper, the kite poised in mid leap to – where? Into the stillness of your house this morning, into the air where the dwarf we thought beautiful walked in this silky nightshirt? I love the silence of your street this morning, The wide leaves already negotiating, making truces quietly; there are no voices anywhere in this house now. I sense your children sleeping in upstairs rooms. I remember Everson telling you you were the eternal daughter, remember you saying mothers were the daughters always abandoned. Maybe someone else said that for you, Anita? It doesn’t matter. Yesterday we remembered we all speak for one another anyway, that words like oil‐color on marbleized paper won’t be separated, though the colors remain distinct they are swirled together like maps to new territory, wonderfully dense, confusing even, but I’m so glad we have these charts that we fold & crease & pull from our pockets, perhaps a little shyly, to compare maps to the treasure. Language not separable, the way you can’t pull from the whole any one part of the light & say, here, you see the way the radiance of this morning washes across the garage wall, so, while we pour a second cup of coffee?

19 Not without referring, tacitly, to all the rest of the dazzled body of light. Which is why I’m writing this letter this morning, in this silence in which you and Jim have just woken up, and Ruth can’t find her perfume in the bathroom & thinks maybe I’ve done something with it, and the voices of some birds whose names I don’t know are blowing in the open window behind your typewriter. All inseparable! And who’d want to examine all the individual pieces of this morning anyway, since in the fortunate glide of this whole of grasshoppers and small nightgowns and birds’ voices we can be a part of China, yes?, and I can write letters to you like Tu Fu to Li Po. Good morning Francine!

M.R. Doty

The results of the collaborative writing workshop were stunning. Individual voices found new strength and possibility by working together. Writers who had published little or never published before, were pleased to have their collaborative works published in this volume of Nimrod, along side of interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Boris Vian, “remaking chants” by Steven Crow, Sioux, and Lance Henson, Cheyenne, and a collaboration between Peter Stambler and the intimate portraits in music of Robert Schumann. Also included were translations from the Quechua, Italian, Mandarin, Spanish — a reminder of how translation is another and an essential form of collaboration.

The act of communion, reciprocity, and generosity, the act of “going out from oneself” to form new relationships, and new wholes, which this issue celebrates, was also blessed by a chance meeting with a master of intaglio, Jon Allan Dickey. His etching, “Elementum,” with its intertwining, swirling lines creating a portrait reminiscent of the profile of Whitman, which graced the cover of Nimrod’s “Collaborations” was the perfect complement to its contents, as was the hand‐done calligraphy by Maureen Modlish, a joining of an individual art form and the machine type of the rest of the issue.

Fall/Winter 1975 “Oklahoma Writers,” (vol. 20, no.1) was another memorable moment in Nimrod history. We had published Oklahoma writers in earlier issues. But they appeared along with fine writers from other countries and states, particularly from the states contiguous to Oklahoma, which seemed to be under‐represented in the publishing world. We had also published an issue devoted to American Indian writers (which, of necessity included native Oklahoma writers), and had begun to search out other cultures and focus groups that we needed to know more about and who needed a boost in readership: Latin American writers, women writers, etc. But it was becoming obvious that our own Oklahoma writers were being under‐served.

Could we devote an entire issue to their work – particularly now since our format had changed and we were printing not a slim 16 or 48 page stapled and folded pamphlet but a perfect bound 160 to 204 page book?

20 Looking back, it is particularly pleasing to note that the 44 authors included were not only fine writers in 1975 but continued to write and publish with vigor. Ted Berrigan, however, died in Chicago in 1983 but was recently celebrated for his inventive writing in a volume on the avant‐garde writers of New York, written by David Lehman. Berrigan like Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard was not of course a New Yorker. He was born in Rhode Island, graduated from Central High School in Tulsa and the University of Tulsa and was published in some of the earliest issues of Nimrod back in the ‘50’s.

Near the beginning of any list of authors, alphabetical or commendatory, published in “Oklahoma Writers” would be Jim Barnes, poet, essayist, academician who also appeared in the “Oklahoma Indian” issue and subsequent issues. Firmly holding up the end of the alphabet are Winston Weathers and Otis Winchester professors at the University of Tulsa whose collections of poetry, short fiction, and texts on writing are legend. And in between the previously published and the legendary, we applied Nimrod’s mission — to discover new writers. In this issue we presented: Harry Livermore from Claremore; Katherine Privett from Pawnee; David Ray, who grew up in an orphanage in Tulsa and went on to edit New Letters and write more than six volumes of poetry; Norman Russell, Dean of Mathematics and Science at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma, and a writer who has published more than 500 poems and several volumes of Indian Thoughts; and Carter Revard of Pawhuska, winner in 1997 of the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry.

Of other writers in the Oklahoma issue, Ivy Dempsey, Carol Haralson, Manly Johnson, Carol Merrill, Alice Price each continued to publish well, but to write even better, fulfilling the promise exhibited even before 1975, and pursuing a passion which they could not ignore. Carol Haralson, for example, won the first Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry in 1979, and also became one of the most sought after book designers in the country.

1976, Old People: A Season of the Mind (vol. 20, no.1) became the first in a series of issues devoted to writers 65 and over— clearly an obsession of mine.7 This issue featured well‐known writers and artists like Dorothy Brett, friend and champion of D. H. Lawrence; Archibald MacLeish, Poet Laureate of the United States; an essay about and paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe; and a second story written for Nimrod by Isaac Bashevis Singer . . . as well as many unknown or little known but emerging writers of a “certain age” including Mildred Arthur, Pearl Minor, Ruth Feldman and Margaret J. Smith.

Perhaps the most historically significant and certainly the most heart warming contribution to this issue is an interview with Acoma Chief, Wolf Robe Hunt, holder of the sacred position of “Delight Maker,” one of the highest clans in the Acoma tribe. The piece was complemented by photographs by John Van Voorhis. Wolf Robe

7 The issue also coincided with the work with seniors that Madeline Rugh and I were doing with the State Arts Council and Very Special Arts Oklahoma which resulted in Making Your Own Mark: A Writing and Drawing Guide for Senior Citizens.

21 Hunt, famed visual artist, writer (The Dancing Horses of Acoma), and silver craftsman, was captured in words and images as he works at his bench, chanting “in the old way,” casting most of his silver jewelry in sandstone and leaving it partially unpolished so it retains a hint of how it grew out of the stone.

Though the “Old People: A Season of the Mind” issue is largely a gathering of works of those over 65, it also includes writing about aging by several in an earlier season. So that as I scanned this issue after so many years, my heart jumped at a name that is not only of historic and aesthetic significance, but one which, like so many others, is a reaffirmation of Nimrod’s mission of discovery — Ellen Bass. Ellen was just starting out in 1976, but with a bang! A graduate student, with a small child, she had already co‐edited the seminal anthology No More Masks. We published two of her poems.

Twenty‐four years later, Ellen Bass was included in “Awards 22: Food for Thought,” 2000, having won First Prize in Poetry in Nimrod’s annual competition. We published four of her poems, one of which was entitled “Mighty Strong.” Then today, April 30, 2014, I picked up The New Yorker. There once again was Ellen Bass’s name and a stunningly casual poem entitled “Blame,” ostensibly about horseracing and its vicissitudes. Ellen has certainly won the race for recognition, and Nimrod was at the starting line.

1977‐8 New Black Writing: Africa, The West Indies, The Americas, A double issue: (vol. 21, no. 2 and vol. 22, no. 1).

Penny Williams, who later became an Oklahoma State Representative and then an Oklahoma State Senator, was a Nimrod intern in 1977. A returning student to the University of Tulsa, mature but with a childlike curiosity and spirit, Penny, sustained by her daily 6‐pack of Diet Dr. Pepper, became the individual responsible for the successful acquisition of materials for this issue. Undaunted by illusive contacts, she telephoned, wrote letters, researched and steadily pursued leads. The result: enough excellent material to fill a double issue. Writers at the beginning of their careers, and writers in mid‐career responded to her call. Dennis Brutus, Lucille Clifton (her blockbuster book of poems An Ordinary Woman had just been published), Tom Dent, Michael Harper, Charles Johnson (National Book Award winner for Oxherding Tale, a portion of which appeared in this issue before the publication of the book), Gayle Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Haki Madhubuti (who began writing poetry in prison under the tutelage of Gwendolyn Brooks), Colleen McElroy (who became another National Book Award winner and Chair of the English Department at Washington University in Seattle), James Allen McPherson (whose collection of short stories Elbow Room, which included the selection in this issue, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978) — and Andrew Salkey, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, Alice Walker and 70 other astonishingly unique and vigorous writers contributed previously unpublished work to Nimrod’s “New Black Writing”.

When Charles Johnson submitted his story “Oxherding Tale” for the “New Black Writing” issue, I had the audacity to gently suggest a few revisions. Little did I

22 know when my suggestions were made that Charles was not only a published author of fiction but a television script writer and a professor at Washington University in Seattle. Nevertheless, he took some of the suggestions, defended and kept the original version of other attempted edits. We had a good laugh over that incident when he came to Tulsa, thirty years after his first publication with Nimrod, to serve as fiction judge for the awards competition.

With drawings by emerging Black artists Benny Andrews, Felix Cole, and Gerald Harper of Oklahoma City, and an interview with novelist Toni Morrison, even then a senior editor at Random House and the author of three novels, “New Black Writing” made a significant contribution to the careers of writers who are still publishing widely in 2014, winning awards for their writing, and giving readers the stories and poems that sustain us.

“New Black Writing” was also the first of Nimrod’s issues which was choreographed and presented on stage at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center beginning a tradition of multi‐media live readings of our thematic issues.

1978: Downswing/Upswing: Separation and Divorce, Further Reversals, and Major Triumphs

Despite Nimrod’s often‐triumphant fulfillment of its mission of discovery and a steady rise in subscriptions, distribution, and aesthetic appeal, in 1978 a crucial decision that had been looming for some time was finely reached. Nimrod was told that it would no longer be welcome at The University of Tulsa.

The reasoning behind Nimrod’s separation from TU was never made clear. Certainly, there was competition for the limited funds made available for Academic Publications. However, early in 1977 an independent adviser had been hired to review campus publications and offer suggestions for improvement. The results of that report were extremely positive for Nimrod, with no suggestion that the University would do anything but benefit from its association with our literary journal. In addition, on December 5, 1977 a letter was written and signed by eight members of the faculty of the English Department. Sent to President of TU, Paschal Twyman, John Dowgray, Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Edwin Strong, the letter reiterated the support of Nimrod “at this time in recognition of the symbolic maturity of its twenty‐first year and its coming into the professional maturity of an international circulation . . .” The letter like the hired advisor’s evaluation went unheaded.

Given the history of “little magazines,” no one should have expected the journal to make a profit. As part of a tradition in American letters that included “The Dial,” “The Little Review,” of the twenties and were the first to publish James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and many others, in 1977 Nimrod was one of some 400 journals attempting to handle a deluge of unsolicited manuscripts with responsibility and discretion and to publish work that had a promising future.

23 Without doubt, the editors and advisors of Nimrod were fiscally responsible; they knew that our task had to include remaining solvent. Up to that point, the University had only made a financial contribution of from $300 to $1000 a year. Other funds were acquired through grants, fundraisers, and private donations. And by 1977, Nimrod was 21 years old, and had already outlived all but one of the historically significant journals — and even those only had an average life span of 5 years.

Nevertheless, political forces were at work. After 22 years residence, Nimrod was politely told that it would no longer be a part of the University. It couldn’t have been a worse time for me. I was in the process of my own and a far more crucial divorce; I had four children, had never imagined that my marriage might end in divorce. I fought depression, but was having quite a bit of trouble remaining focused.

Yet we survive, we survivors! For 17 years after 1978, Nimrod had a home at The Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. That transition was not without strife but yet it was not an insurmountable difficulty either. When the friends of Nimrod decided the Journal was worth saving, we approached the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa. Myrna Ruffner, Humanities Director at that time, became our strongest advocate — and we found a good home. The association with the Council not only gave us an office and equipment but added prestige to the journal. Moreover, the Council served as an umbrella under which we could raise funds and apply for grants as a non‐profit organization (501c3).

You may ask why we did not go independent as many small magazines have. Quite honestly, that was my decision. I strongly felt, having watched the history of literary journals that Nimrod would not survive as an independent entity — especially in Tulsa, which, at that time, did not have a tradition of supporting literary endeavors. The umbrella of the council was not only sheltering, it gave the editors self‐confidence and esteem in the community.

Years later we did a fund‐raiser at Harwelden, home of the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, during which dance, poetry, and music events revolved around the theme of “umbrellas.” It was a unique, imaginative and quite spectacular event and was organized by Chuck Tomlins of the University of Tulsa’s Fine Arts Department in his usual free floating and inspired manner.

The Council was also of benefit to Nimrod because of its organization. Though we did not receive any funds from AHCT, we were receiving in‐kind contributions of an office and typewriter and the benefit of their business acumen. We were required to present detailed budgets, and a mission statement; we built our own advisory and editorial boards. We were becoming more and more grown up.

Upswing: The Establishment of the Nimrod/Hardman Awards

24 Fortunately, it was also in 1978, and just before the transition to the Council, that Ruth G. Hardman established the Nimrod Awards program: The Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry, and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction. She also provided for an awards dinner which, at that time, cost approximately $4,000 and funds to pay two judges $2,000 each and $3,000 in prize monies (the prize funds were raised a few years later to $6,000; a $2,000 first prize in fiction and poetry, and a $1,000 second prize in each category). In addition, there were funds provided for travel and housing in order to bring the judges and winners to Tulsa and those expenses too were underwritten by Mrs. Hardman. The first awards dinner was held at Harwelden, a former mansion that served as offices for the Arts and Humanities Council. The material that filled the first Awards Issue was read, selected, and edited at The University of Tulsa. The first awards issue of 1979 was a product of a full collaboration between the two organizations and a talented and minimal editorial board and staff of two.

The somewhat banal and funny story of how, once again, Nimrod survived and even prospered is worth telling, if only for the fact that most people believe that such crucial events are the product of careful planning, austere regulations, and very serious negotiations. It goes like this:

Ruth Hardman was part of a small class I was teaching for the Continuing Education Department of the University. One day, just before class was to begin, I received a copy of our newest issue and ran to class with free copies for everyone— all twelve. That evening Mrs. Hardman called me at home and asked what she could do to help Nimrod prosper. I fumbled but finally sputtered out that I had always thought a small prize might attract and help support even better writers and increase circulation. She responded that she would talk to her son, Terry Kistler and get back to me.

Indeed she did! Intrigued with the idea of creating a prize for Nimrod, Ruth called her son, an investment counselor in New York City. Terry set up a meeting with the head of Academic Publications, Tom Staley and me at Ruth's glorious new apartment in The Esplanade and Terry came from New York to join in what was, for them, a social occasion. For me it was agony. Yet, the prospect of the prize and the treat of going to Mrs. Hardman's apartment were also exhilarating.

Always being an advocate of "show and tell," I packed my huge canvas satchel (the original "women's bag" that was covered with names of famous women authors printed in black on a russet ground), and headed off. I was casually dressed, I remember, and Terry was in a dark pinstriped suit —the last time I've seen him in a suit. Moreover, Mrs. H's carpets were white and thick. I was afraid of soiling them with the bottom of my canvas bag. It was heavy with sample copies of Nimrod. Where was I to put it down?

Ruth's graciousness eased my initial unease and we got down to the business at hand. To our good fortune, Terry was not only Mrs. Hardman's son and a financial wizard, he was also a poet, and at that time the President of the Board of

25 Poets and Writers, an organization with which I was very familiar, and which still publishes a magazine and author's directory filled with information for aspiring writers. He was quite positive about establishing a prize for emerging writers that would be administered by the Nimrod staff with the winning works published in Nimrod. I believe it was also Terry who suggested, and Ruth who championed, the idea of bringing the judges and winners to Tulsa so that the community could benefit from their live presence and inspiration in addition to the example of the work being published in Nimrod.

The naming of the prize was immediate and non‐controversial. I suggested Katherine Anne Porter’s name for the fiction prize because of her excellence as a short story writer and also because of my personal connection with her. Terry suggested the Chilean poet and statesman Pablo Neruda for poetry. I couldn't have been more pleased.

Katherine Anne Porter had been my instructor when I was a student at The University of Michigan. In 1952, when I was a sophomore and not really eligible to take the advanced class in “modern poetry” which KAP was offering, I received permission to take this class and audit another class which she was teaching. Most of my classmates were graduate students who were appalled by Porter’s insistence that “modern poetry was everything since John Skelton’s translations (1460‐1529) of early Latin lyrics,” and by her rather casual and very personal and idiosyncratic lectures. The text too was not “official.” Not finding in print a textbook that corresponded to her ideas, she printed her selections for us on the department mimeograph machine. It added up to a huge tome that I still treasure, rumpled though it is.

I adored her class, sat in the back, was very quiet and shy (believe it or not) and lapped up her stories about Yvor Winters and Allen Tate, and other greats of her acquaintance. She would run off for a weekend to give a reading in New York and return — often late— with and air of having been to the heights. On one such return to the campus, she entered the classroom in a fury. Katherine Anne had been to see her publisher and had flung on his desk the severely marked manuscript she had received from him in the mail. She recounted that she had told him, “I do not write with a red pencil!” The manuscript, in question, of course, was Ship of Fools (1962), later made into a film directed by Stanley Kramer that won two Academy Awards.

Porter was, except on this one occasion, soft spoken, usually dressed in pale grey cashmere or pastel colors to highlight her white hair, with pearls or amber beads around her neck – a tiny softly rounded woman of steel. In our class, KAP read poetry aloud beautifully. She encouraged individuality, and her standards were high. Again, the graduate students were outraged: what she said in class, they thought, and the papers she required would not be preparation for comprehensive exams. I still remember a paper I wrote for her that began, “Abe Fuller died last night.” I felt that Fuller’s suicide, which really had occurred the night before I wrote the paper, was intrinsically related to the poem “September 1, 1939” by W.H.

26 Auden, written on the occasion of the outbreak of World War II and first published in The New Republic (October 18, 1939). She loved the paper.

Nevertheless, I was sure that KAP had no idea who I was. A doctoral candidate was her assistant and graded the papers. I like to think that she read them. About five years after I graduated from Michigan, I went to a reading of “Pale Horse Pale Rider” that KAP was giving at the Westport Summer Theatre in Connecticut. Afterwards, I hung around the fringe of a circle that surrounded her, wanting to see her again up close and to get her autograph on a recording of her readings that I had purchased that day. Suddenly she looked up and said, “I remember those eyes!” Wow! No wonder I had the courage to write to her and ask for her permission to use her name for our fiction award and to reprint an essay in our women’s issue that she had written much earlier.

As to the naming of the poetry prize, Pablo Neruda's name and poetry were well known to Nimrod editors and becoming better known to readers from around the world. In 1973, just five years before our meeting to establish the prize, Nimrod had published an issue entitled “Latin American Voices” prompted by "the boom" in Latin American letters and assisted by Ronald Christ, then editor of the Latin American Review, published at the Center for Inter‐American Relations in New York City.

Neruda's poems, included in the Latin American issue, particularly those of the Elementales period, seemed to contain the Zeitgeist of the age: a thirst for simplicity and directness, an insistence that poetry is everywhere and about everything: a pair of "woolly socks," “bread, cheese, and manzanas,” or being hemmed in by "barbed wire.” "Life" Neruda said, is "a cool glass of water." Except, of course, when embroiled in the passions of love and politics.

At Nimrod, we were in love with Neruda, Neruda who was not only a prolific poet but the imprisoned and former Secretary of State of Chile. A political prisoner, a poet of love and the land, he remained unknown to many younger Americans until 1998, more than 20 years after the publication of Nimrod’s Latin American issue when the film, Il Postino, made his name a household word.

We had done our ground work, and so when Terry Kistler, Ruth Hardman’s son, made his suggestion, we jumped at the opportunity to name the Nimrod/Hardman poetry prize, The Pablo Neruda Prize.

From then on the creativity and financial contribution of Ruth Hardman’s awards program and Nimrod’s new home at the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa re‐created the journal, helped develop its prominence, increase its size, and circulation.

Obviously, it is neither one person, nor organization, nor even its staff that makes a magazine and develops it over the years. For Nimrod, it is also a passionate vision shared by over thirty unpaid editors, an advisory board of tireless and

27 talented folks and many, many financial supporters, including foundations, the University of Tulsa, and individual patrons and donors, without whom there would not have been a journal. Patrons like Joan Flint, Margery Bird, and Susan and Bob Mase never failed to bolster our treasury (such as it was). The additional contribution of the National Endowment for the Arts, which awarded Nimrod several grants over the years, cannot be valued enough.

The greatest tribute, however, should go to the dedication and hard work of the editorial board. Geraldine McLoud, for example, read and selected fiction for Nimrod for 30 years and once addressed 10,000 fliers in our first attempt at a mass mailing of promotional materials; Ivy Dempsey and Manly Johnson served equally long tenures for poetry; Charlotte Stewart steered us through 20 years as Managing Editor.

Moreover, though we are always trying to keep our viewpoint fresh, and thus add new readers and editors yearly in anticipation of the eventual retirement of our generous, hard‐working staff and board, the fact that at least 15 other editors, including our new editor‐in‐chief Eilis O’Neal and invaluable Associate Editor Diane Burton have stayed on the job for from 20 to 40 years has brought sound judgment and a consistently caring atmosphere to Nimrod that is seldom replicated.

From 1978 to the present, Nimrod has produced two issues within the fiscal year, each issue recently restricted in pages to 224. The first issue in October is the Awards Issue; the second in the spring is a thematic issue. Of the thematic issues, perhaps the most daring, even at that time, were the issues devoted to Arabic Literature, to India, “a wealth of diversity,” to China, and to the Arctic Circle.

1981 “Arabic Literature: Then and Now” (vol. 24, No. 2.)

Each moment in the discovery, planning, and distribution of this issue was unique and rewarding. The issue satisfied Nimrod’s need to learn something new, to enter a culture we had never before experienced, to meet Sikhs with their obligatory blue turbans, Islamists, and Arab Christians and many whose secular ties overshadowed their religious. Roger Allen, Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania served as Guest Editor along with Trevor Le Gassick of the University of Michigan. They provided introductory essays and a historical survey of Arabic Literature and enumerable contacts from the Arabic speaking world, whether the author was born in the Arabian Peninsula, Spain, or Transoxania, was still living in his or her home country or elsewhere.

I met Trevor Le Gassick quite accidentally while sitting in the lounge of the University of Michigan’s Student Union waiting for my son Jim to emerge from class. Roger Allen was suggested by Myrna Ruffner, then Humanities Coordinator for the Tulsa Arts & Humanities Council who had attended a conference in Aspen, the summer of 1980, devoted to Arabic culture. She brought back to Tulsa great enthusiasm, knowledge, and several contacts and immediately embarked on

28 planning a conference on Arabic culture co‐sponsored by the Council and the International Council of Tulsa with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and others.

Ultimately included in the Nimrod Arabic Issue were 23 celebrated authors of prose and poetry made available to the English‐speaking world by 16 skilled translators. The writers included: Mahmud Taimur and Najib Mahfuz of Egypt (who later won the Nobel Prize in Literature), Palestinian poets Rana Kabbani and Mahmud Darwish (in 2011‐13 collected as a token Arabic writer by almost every journal in the country), Adunis of Syria and underground poets like Muzaffar al‐ Nawwab who spent many years imprisoned in his native Iraq — each in translation and with snippets of the original when space permitted. Ranging from Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, each of the contemporary Arabic poems and stories in this issue appeared in English for the first time. The work of Muzaffar al‐Nawwab had never appeared in any translation before Nimrod’s publication.

Translators came from all over the country, and included Miriam Cooke, Mirene Ghossein, Rana Kabbani, D. Malouf, Michael Zwettler and others known worldwide for their ground breaking work. Photographs of Arabic sites graced the pages as did, when room permitted, the original calligraphy. Yet, mistakes were made — mostly by me. So it is when, with the best of intentions and a good deal of ignorance, one enters unchartered ground.

At the last minute, before going to press with the Arabic issue, I thought it would be appropriate and attractive to also place the author’s name in Arabic calligraphy along with the English at the beginning of his or her section. How good and seemingly simple ideas become fraught with catastrophe! We had received each Arabic name already translated into English. I gathered together about six Arabic students attending the University of Tulsa. The meeting was a disaster from the outset when I reached out my hand in camaraderie. My hand, to my confusion, was refused. I should have known better. Only one, a Lebanese student who had been thoroughly westernized and had no religious compunctions, volunteered to shake my hand and to write the calligraphy for each name. Unfortunately, he was unfamiliar with the authors’ original names that had already been translated from Arabic into English. Translation is always a risky business but when you go from one alphabet to another and back again, you are breeding disaster.

When the generous student attempted to translate the names back to their original, things didn’t quite match up, as I discovered a few months later when I gave a printed issue to one of the guests at a large conference on Arabic culture organized by the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. (Years earlier I had printed a page in Yiddish from a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer — upside‐down.) We collect these mishaps and try to laugh them off. It’s not easy.

Yet there were triumphs connected with this issue as well. How we obtained the cover illustration for our Arabic Literature: Then and Now is a story worth telling.

29 Despite a limited budget, Nimrod has always made every effort to display appropriate and excellent art in its issues. Tulsa has an amazing number of fine artists many of whom were nurtured by Alexander Hogue, revered Chair of the TU Art Department for over thirty years and a celebrated artist nationwide. Whenever possible, we chose a Tulsa artist’s image for our cover. But this issue demanded a treatment that would not only be appropriate but would immediately indicate the nature of its contents.

Researching for the proposed issue on Arabic culture, I had chanced upon a catalogue of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. which gorgeously displayed their exhibit on illuminated manuscripts from ancient Korans. I was struck particularly by a small manuscript belonging to a thirty‐volume Koran, executed in the first quarter of the fourteenth century and according to the description in the catalogue was: “Written in muhaqqaq script with Kufic employed in the illuminated chapter headings, and embellished with large gold verse‐stops containing the word aya and with marginal rosettes and chapter headings.” It was a glory of gold and black, blue and pale green and red. Moreover, in its original size it was 5 x 6 inches, perfect dimensions for our cover.

At that time, printers used what were called “color separations” a different gel sheet for each color, one overlapped on the other. I’m not sure if my description of the process is accurate, but I do know that it cost at least $250 in the 1980’s to make the separation and that doesn’t count the printing.8 Whenever we could borrow or obtain a color separation free, we were delighted. The telephone once again became my entrée. I called the editor of the Smithsonian publication — listed right in their publication, of course, no Google search, no “linked in” — and told her of Nimrod’s plans and our hope that she would lend us the separation. “I would love to,” she responded, “but unfortunately I just sent it back to the graphic artist who lives in London.” Always calm and eloquent, I responded with a shriek, “but I’m flying to London tomorrow.” And thus it was that after a sleepless and long plane ride I arrived at my London hotel, telephoned the graphic artist in question who had been alerted by my new friend in Washington, D. C. He sent a runner with the illuminated and illuminating materials.

We had a glorious cover! The verse on the manuscript page when translated into English states: “You cannot get the highest reward from God unless you spend from what you love and everything you are spending, God is aware of.” Leonard Randolph, then head of the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, commended the Nimrod issue and printed selections in the Humanities Journal of the NEH.

8 The act of decomposing a color graphic or photo into single-color layers. For example, to print full-color photos with an offset printing press, one must first separate the photo into the four basic ink colors: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). Each single-color layer is then printed separately, one on top of the other, to give the impression of infinite colors.

30

Seemingly Secure at the Council and Yet Another Crisis:

Early in Nimrod’s history, we had, to our delight and surprise, received a grant from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, for $1,500. After that success we applied for and received several grants, amounting to $9,000 each. We were flying high. Then came the evidence that we might have been reaching too high.

We grew accustomed to receiving grants whenever we applied for them. The first time we did not receive a grant was “crucial.” We thought that perhaps we would never receive funding from the Endowment again. It took a while before we recognized a pattern in the NEA’s gifting. There seemed always to be a break of one year after five consecutive years of being underwritten. But every year has its demands — some more, some less.

1985 “China Today” (vol. 29, no. 2)

To accomplish the particular demands of this issue, as I just mentioned, Nimrod had sought, once again, a grant from the NEA. When we failed to receive the grant, we were well into the planning for this issue that was to serve as the centerpiece of a cultural conference on Chinese culture co‐sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa and the International Council of Tulsa. We were not about to give up this issue because we did not receive a much‐needed grant.

Instead, we sought, at the advice of our advisory board, private donations and received a $5000 grant from a small oil company, Oil Dynamics Corporation, which was then doing business with China. Since the issue had already gone to press, these generous folks were not listed in the China issue, but we printed separate cards which were inserted in each issue, and the company received 200 free copies to distribute to their business associates in China as they wished.

Finding sources for the art, poems, stories and essays in that issue was not easy, especially since China was virtually closed to outsiders, but we profited from a one‐year “cultural liberalization” policy. For one year, 1985, with relaxed restrictions, authors and scholars experienced greater freedom to travel to and from China and to write about conditions in China — even if only in code. (Who is “the Sun” for example?)

Just as Nimrod’s Chinese issue was going to press in 1986, the Chinese government had reissued a ban on the publication of all books, magazines, and newspapers that did not have official government approval. The new controls, ostensibly aimed at the increasingly popular “yellow press” and books that featured sex and crime, clearly announced a shift back to censorship, a shift that was violently protested, shortly thereafter, in Tienamen Square.

31 But we had 1985, one year,and we used it. Tony Barnstone, son of Willis with whom we had collaborated earlier, was spending a year in Beijing at the University. He heard of our plans for an issue and volunteered to gather poetry for submission and write an article on contemporary Chinese poetry. With Tony’s help, contemporary poets still in China: Gu Cheng, Chou Ping, Bei Ling, Bei Dao, Tang Qi, and Mang Ke published with us.

Other dissident writers who had recently emigrated to the U.S. like poet Duo Duo and prose writer, Liang Heng found their way to our pages as readily as more traditional writers and long‐time U. S. citizens like Parker Po‐Fei Huang and Paul Lin. Celebrated scholars like James Feinerman, Director of the East Asian Legal Studies program at Harvard Law School, contributed an article on Chinese literary tradition, to which we added modern translations of legendary 8thC poet Wang Wei.

Once again, our thematic issue was produced in coordination with a cultural conference co‐sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Council, the Tulsa Council for International Visitors and funded in part by the Oklahoma Foundation for the Humanities. Through these associations, Nimrod was not only invited to produce a staged production of the China issue, but to invite several key people to Tulsa for the production and conference. Of these, the undisputed favorite and the one who made an indelible impression was renowned calligrapher, Wang Fang yu, born in Peking in 1913, a member of the faculties of Yale and Seton Hall, author of art books, dictionaries, and texts.

Wang Fang yu was known for a brush stroke that echoed “the forms and movements of nature,” and for his deft interpretations of the poetic line. He did not fail us. In Tulsa, he not only performed on stage with the readers, but since at that time all we had was a rear‐screen projector to magnify and reproduce an image on stage, he drew calligraphic images backwards, as the poem was being read, so that they would appear forward on the screen (truly!). In addition, this tiny, vibrant man — 91 years of age — gave a workshop on Chinese calligraphy, demonstrated ancient bone forms and modern techniques, allowed us to see and feel the link between graphic line and dance, music, and meaning. Moreover, it was Wang Fang yu who insisted that his stamp be printed in the China Today issue in red, and that one of his images be “photographed through a napkin” to simulate the snow, that another image “wake up” the reader with its bold, wide, black slashes.

Bold moves were not reserved for this remarkable Chinese Artist.

1988 “India: A Wealth of Diversity” (vol. 31, no.2) is, in fact, so diverse that we had an enormous challenge deciding upon a cover illustration for the issue that would immediately be suggestive of India. Ultimately, we decided on my robe, made in India. Ironing out, laying down, squaring off, and photographing a section of that fabric was a challenge, but well worth the effort.

32 “India” encompassed 15 states of this vast continent and as many dialects and representations of major language groups as possible, still being open to printing only the best material we received, even if our acceptances tipped the balance of representation to one language group over another. The final issue contains poems or stories from the Indo‐European group: Punjabi, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya; from the Dravidian language group: Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam; and a smattering from the Austro‐Asiatic group, which is now spoken by largely tribal minorities who also speak a mainstream language such as Oriya. In fact, according to Amritjit Singh, principle advisor for this issue, India displays almost universal multilingualism, while retaining the vitality of the original language of each region. Yet to retain that vitality in translation into English is a great leap. As Jayanta Mahapatra reminds us, “the inconceivable silence” that knits together the fragments of a poem, a life, and a nation elude us still.9

Of necessity, most of the writers included in India . . . came to us through translators, and in the mail. We did not have the pleasure of meeting the authors themselves. Meena Alexander, however, was in the United States during the development of the India issue and became a friend. Originally from Madras (Chenna) in Kerala India, a largely Christian and English speaking area, Meena published in several languages and eventually migrated to the U. S. and became a professor at Hunter College of the City of New York. I first met her, as pre‐arranged, at the Morgan Library and Museum (built by Pierpoint Morgan between 1902‐6 adjacent to his residence on Madison Avenue and 36th St.). On this my first visit to the Morgan, I was surrounded by illuminated manuscripts and marble pillars. It was impressive and a bit intimidating. The elegance and hushed silence gained an additional note of exoticism as Meena entered in her embroidered silk sari and whispered welcome to me in her lush melodious English, tinged with an echo of Hindi. We embraced with a formal delicate hug. Languorous and elegant, she sat, and after pleasantries showed me her newest book. We have been friends ever since. After the publication of the East Indian issue, Meena came to Tulsa for a reading at the University and at the Unitarian Church where the large audience was duly impressed with her poetry and her presence.

Whenever I think of the India issue, I get a mental image of the first time I met Amritjit Singh who became Nimrod’s Senior Advisory Editor for “India: A Wealth of Diversity.” I had contacted him before we were both to be attending the annual Associated Writer’s Conference in Seattle. We had planned to meet in the lobby of the hotel. It was densely crowded but he was unmistakable. A Sikh, he was 6’4” tall and was wearing the requisite purple turban. We found refuge in the stairwell and, despite the uncomfortable surroundings, the ideas and contacts began to flow. There were 22 other advisory editors and consultants for the issue, each representing a different religion or language group. Yes, it was complicated but well worth the effort. This issue of Nimrod was produced in coordination with the conference on “India: A Wealth of Diversity,” April 28‐30, 1988, a project of the

9 Jayanta Mahapatra,”The Quality of Mystery,” The Indian Post, Sunday, June 21, 1987, VII.

33 Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

1990 “From the Soviets” (vol. 33, no. 2) is another issue that was on the edge of political and social change and that spanned a continent and an age of transition. Published the year before the division of the Soviet Union into Russia, Ukraine, and so forth. Once again, this issue was produced in coordination with a cultural conference called “Focus on the Soviet Union” and would not have been possible without the assistance of our Senior Advisory Editor, Judson Rosengrant, as well as nine other talented, generous advisors. Of well‐known writers from the past and present in the issue are poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, Bella Akhmadulina, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky, a story by Isaac Babel, all translated from the Russian. Even more to the point of filling our mission of discovery is the inclusion of new young writers as yet unknown outside the Soviet Union; for example, Latvian poet Janis Rokpelnis, Dina Rubina, a fiction writer from Tashkent, Mara Zalite from Siberia, also the daughter of Latvian deportees, Lina Kostenko from Ukraine, Anahid Barsamian and Vahakn Davtian from Armenia, Nodar Dumbadze, a fiction writer from the then Republic of Georgia, and Fazu G. Alieva from Dagestan, the “Land of the Mountains,” an Autonomous Republic within the former Soviet Union.

Fazu Alieva’s first name means “firebird” in her native language, Avari. And here comes one of the little‐known stories related to the publication of each issue of Nimrod: Alieva had been invited to the conference in Tulsa not only because she was a poet and writer of fiction, but because she was Editor‐in‐Chief of a magazine called Dagestan Woman. Her translator, Birgitta Ingemonson, co‐director of Russian area studies at Washington University, was also to attend the conference mainly because Fazu claimed that she did not speak or understand English. However, Fazu, whose transportation was paid for by the Soviets, was insistent that she had to have a translator with her during her travels and when she was in Tulsa. The organizers of the conference were somewhat trapped when she sent a telegram saying that she was in New York and that her translator was with her and needed to have his fare paid for from Dagestan to the U.S. and from New York to Tulsa. Ultimately, that was arranged. When Fazu arrived, her “translator” turned out to be a handsome, six‐foot‐three college‐aged man who was her son, and could not speak English. Nevertheless, “Firebird” was a great contribution to both the conference and Nimrod’s Soviet issue. To free words, to free language, which is more than a mere linkage of words so that it becomes accessible to the language‐hungry the world over, is an enormous task—and it is also fun.

1991 “Clap Hands and Sing: Writers of Age” (vol. 34,no.2) — begins with a quote from W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium:” An aged man is but a paltry thing/ A tattered coat upon a stick, unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/ For every tatter in its mortal dress.” Clap and sing they did in this second issue of Nimrod produced in recognition of an expanding and productive senior population.

34 The reality of an aging America coincided with my pre‐occupation with older people. It was not surprising, therefore, that in 1976, somewhat ahead of the crowd, Nimrod had published “Old People: A Season of the Mind,” which featured Georgia O'Keefe, Dorothy Brett, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and that “Claps Hands” published in 1991, focused on seniors over 65 and was even more probing and expansive. The issue included an interview with 83 year‐old Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Kunitz who won the Pulitzer in 1955 and never stopped writing and gardening until he died in 2006, at the age of 100.

The issue displayed an abundance of other stars, writing original work past 65: Amy Clampitt who had published 5 full length collections by the time she was 71, though she had only returned to poetry when she was 63; Jane Cooper, Madeline DeFrees, Josephine Jacobsen (who was not only writing but taking care of her horses), Maxine Kumin (who won the Pulitzer in 1973), and William Stafford who had been publishing with us since 1958 — each represented the spectacular correspondence of the creative force and long life. There was no posturing by these prominent writers. For example, Bill Stafford said in his cover letter: “I’d like very much to qualify for the ‘Clap Hands and Sing’ issue: my bids at this time are enclosed.”

“Clap Hands” also included some of the best budding writers I have ever read, many of whom had stopped writing to raise a family or pursue a more financially stable career — and then began again: Helen Cline, Mildred Greear, Katherine Privett of Pryor, Oklahoma, Alfred Creager, Arthur Madson, Vera Terrell, and Mary Newell who exclaimed in her cover letter: “Ahhh — our chance!” The visual artists represented were also seniors: Florence Kleinsteiber of Pryor, Oklahoma contributed several drawings (there must be something in the water in that town), as did poet and painter May Stevens from New York and Elizabeth Layton, the grey wolf of primitive art. The cover painting was by 93 year‐old esteemed American painter Alexander Hogue, former Chair of the Art Department of the University of Tulsa. Several of these artists and writers had been discovered in workshops sponsored by the State Arts Council of Oklahoma and Very Special Arts Oklahoma. Many, avid followers of Nimrod’s yearly announcement of forthcoming themes, had just read of our intentions and plunged into the fray. They gave us inspired work and great hope for our own productive longevity.

Spring/Summer 1995 Points North: The Arctic Circle, (vol. 38, no. 2)

Perhaps our greatest fear when approaching this issue was that we weren’t sure of what we would find in the frozen north, if anything. Skeptics amongst our own advisory board asked: “Is there anyone writing up there?” or “Don’t their hands get cold?” My own ignorance of the areas that constituted The Arctic Circle was abominable. I studied the map, consulted experts and likely contacts in the arctic regions of Alaska, Canada, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Siberia, Sweden. In response to Nimrod’s call letters, poems, stories, drawings banked our desks like snow, teaching us to “tell time by the lake’s level,” to watch closely the rhythm of

35 the day and the long night, to look closely even in our own backyards for that ptarmigan or plover or other migrant from the magnificent barrens who has come to haunt our dreams along with the narwhal, the harp seal, and the incantation of new words like inuit, uinigumisuitung, yugellengetaq, ulu, chir, ukha and the ever present Sedna, Otter Woman, symbol of female power.

Of all the thematic issues Nimrod produced, this one consistently set us in a different world, and created an appreciation of the unknown and the power of the written word to transcend time and place, even the remote places and languages of Inuktitut, Sami, Chukchi, Yakut and others. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a recognition in this issue not only of ancient and once hidden cultures now struggling to preserve their languages and orthographies, but of Iceland, for example, that in 1994 still had the highest per capita publication of books in the world, and is so protective of its linguistic heritage that it refuses to cannibalize foreign words for new technology and concepts, and invents new Icelandic words instead.

In answer to those who asked snidely, “Don’t their hands get cold?” we presented the amazing Canadian painter Doris McCarthy who had forty years of professional painting behind her in 1972 when she made her first trip to the high Arctic of Canada — and stayed. In 1994, Doris was still painting en plein aire (yes, in the freezing cold) and wrote an essay expressly for Nimrod in 1994, in her eighty‐ fourth year, about the “openness of the world up there.” She spoke about one’s ability to see the “bones of the country,” to live reasonably well in the small settlements, and then sliding and slipping, hands gloved, supplies in a knapsack on her back and paints being warmed inside her jacket, setting out in the cold, usually fifteen or twenty degrees below zero, to capture the beauty of the bones of the land, “scraped by glaciers in many areas so that there is a rhythmic repetition of form and direction in the lower hills . . . and a variety of size and detail that are a delight to use in creating compositions that achieve inevitability without cliché.”

Through advisory editors who were often translators, like Lawrence Millman, author of Smell of Earth and Clay: East Greenland Songs10, we received original work from remote villages and outposts like Angmagssalik, only recently saved from extinction by the Danes. The Angmagssalik’s songs were designed to raise the dead; to protect a child from pain and injury; to capture a seal; and to capture a woman as well. His word for “song,” Millman tells us in his essay in the Arctic issue, “is the same as his word for ‘breath’.” Like the anonymous song “The Barren Woman’s Lament,” these small literary masterpieces have a dark side that seems an almost casual and ironic response to the realities of a life of deprivation but also an appreciation for those things we often overlook:

O rich summer warmth Like the flesh of a woman O sparkling day . . .

10 White Pine Press, New York, 1985, Copyright c 1985 Lawrence Millman.

36 O how it touches me So miraculous I lie down on the ground, sobbing

* * * *

For us, the editors of Nimrod, the growth and final birth of not only each thematic issue (like the ones mentioned above) but also of each awards issue has been an exhilarating time that came after months of waiting, of research, and planning and scrupulous editing. Whether we gathered and arranged after careful reading and selection, and with a subtle ghost‐organization apparent only to the discerning, manuscripts that came tumbling into our office “over‐the‐transom”; or ascribed a theme beforehand and sought out writing that fit the bill; or, as it often seemed, shortened our lives and weakened our eyes by reading the thousands of submissions for the awards competition — each printed publication had its unprinted back‐ stories (many of which I have already related that were connected to thematic issues.) Those stories constituted for me and Geraldine McLoud, Ivy Dempsey, Lisa Ransom, Ann Stone, and the late Manly Johnson an additional reason for holding on when the money and energy seemed to be gone. These personal stories were the spark that helped us slug through — the lives we touched and those that have touched us, the quirky often ridiculous passage to discovery.

From time to time we reminded each other of the occasion when we found this manuscript or met that person. The flesh and blood characters and serendipitous experiences surrounding the journal have largely remained the private memories of those of us who have worked with Nimrod for 20, 30, 40 years and more. Now, as they say, they can be told, and perhaps, rereading a particular issue, you will gain not only what is there, but now also what is in between the lines.

Aside from those writers already mentioned in relation to thematic issues, key names associated with Awards Issues also flash to mind: Jacob Appel, Rilla Askew (now reknowned for her four novels, her first published short story was in Nimrod, 1989); Francois Camoin, Rita Dove (way before she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and became United States Poet Laureate); Gish Jen, Timothy Findley, S. E. Hinton (see slim issue of 1968); Anne Forer, Sue Monk Kidd, Susan Landgraf (who was chosen Honorable Mention three times and never complained about not being a winner); Laura Lewis, Colleen J. McElroy (Published first in “New Black Writing,” 1972. Twenty years later, she served as poetry judge, when she was Chair of the Creative Writing Department at Washington University in Seattle); Colum McCann (who served as fiction judge twice and charmed the crowds with his Irish blarney and unadorned intelligence); Gina Oschner, Linda Pastan, Regina deCormier‐Shekerjian, Sharon Solwitz, Don Welch (who not only won Nimrod’s poetry prize, but took me for a long walk when I needed it and was largely responsible for convincing Ted Kooser, a close friend who was also from Nebraska, to come to Tulsa just a month after he had been named U. S. Poet Laureate). Though each of the above rate longer introductions, I’ll only elaborate on a few of the more unusual or complex connections with Nimrod.

37

When Linda Pastan served as our first poetry judge in 1979 and came to Tulsa for the Awards Conference, she reminded me that Nimrod had been her first publication in 1969. Now, in 2014, after the publication of over 20 volumes of poetry, Linda still gives us the first opportunity to publish a poem or two from a collection she is developing.

Anne Forer, fiction award‐winner for her story “Adolescence” published in 1983, Awards V, submitted her story typed on both sides of the page in almost one long sentence. The paper was crumbled and smudged, just like the author when she arrived in town to receive her prize. From the lower east side of NYC, she was an unusual type for Tulsa, and a rare talent for anywhere in the world. Late one night, the Nimrod editors were sitting around a long table at Harwelden, the home of the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa. When the first reader came upon Anne’s story, she wordlessly wrote her evaluation on the back and then passed it on down the table. We each read the story; there was no doubt in our minds that Anne was a winner.

In October, 1984, Nimrod published Wendy J. E. Stevens’ story “Mull House Blues” in “Awards VI” At that time, we had no idea how much the Nimrod KAP prize would mean to Wendy, a young writer of obvious promise, and to Nimrod.

Several months later in September 1985 Wendy was awarded $5,000 from the General Electric Foundation Awards program for younger writers administered by CCLM (Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines). Nimrod was awarded a $1,000 companion prize as the Journal that published her story. The presentation was made in New York City at the venerable New York Public Library on 42nd Street. The award included transportation and hotel accommodations for Wendy and for me. I had been raised (or bounced back and forth) in NYC but had never been inside of the Library, the magnificent edifice with Greek pillars and entry stairs reminiscent of ancient temples, as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 82nd Street. The room where the awards presentations were made to Wendy and five other writers and the magazines that published their work, was mammoth, about the size of a football stadium, but carpeted with Persian rugs.

Included amongst the other General Electric Foundation winners was Andrei Codrescu, Romanian‐born poet, essayist and novelist, who was also the editor of the avant‐garde journal “Exquisite Corpse,” and a commentator on National Public Radio. Yes, it was thrilling! But also a bit terrifying.

There was a clack of writers and admirers in the audience surrounding Codrescu, battling for his attention. Wendy had brought a close friend. I was alone. But gradually the room warmed and at dinner Codrescu, now seated next to me, suggested that I interview him for my comparatively minor radio show “Making Connections” when he came to Norman, Oklahoma to be a judge for the Neustadt

38 prize. And so I did! It’s always hard to tell where the “circle of exchange and recognition” (Octavio Paz again) will orbit.

Laura Lewis, was a winner in fiction for her short story “Verge” (a vigorous, often humorous portrayal of mother/daughter conflict in a Chinese‐ American family), published in 1990. She stunned the audience not only with her story but also when she appeared in Tulsa with her astrophysicist husband and their one‐month old baby. My husband Manly and I had met the family (the baby only 1 week old) in Berkeley, CA where they lived. Our meeting was not an accident. When I called to tell Laura that she had won the Nimrod: Katherine Anne Porter prize, she told me of the birth of her son, “the best prize,” and invited Manly and me to their home in the hills of Berkeley since, as I casually mentioned on the phone, we were going to be in San Francisco on vacation. What a delight! Two years later, the Lewis family invited us to their vacation home for a week on the picturesque coast of northern California. Obviously, I received many perks from my Nimrod friendships — after they had been selected for publication.

Babies of Award winners came to have an increasingly frequent presence, not only in the lives of our awardees but also in the Nimrod family who regarded each birth as their own. Sharon Solwitz was eight months pregnant when she came to Tulsa to receive her prize in 1986, for her short story “Altered Eagle.” Two months later we received the photos of her twins in the mail.

Birth and Death; the cycle doesn’t miss the Nimrod family. Early on the morning of the awards dinner of October, 1986, I received a call from a reporter at the “Tulsa World.” “Had I,” he asked, “ever heard of James Land Jones?” “Of course,” I replied, “he was the founding editor of Nimrod back in 1956.” “Well,” my inquisitor said, “He’s just been murdered in Georgia.” Jones had left Tulsa and become a favored professor at the University of Alabama and elsewhere. Most editors’ lives are fairly ordinary; apparently his was not. But the legacy he left rewards us still.

Back to births: Gina Oschner already had three children when she received second prize in fiction in 2001 for her story “Eda’s Fifth Dream”. Several years later, October 2003, Gina won first prize, and came to the awards conference literally dripping from the neck with a large fourth child named Natasha. Fortunately, her mother‐in‐law accompanied and took charge of the baby when Gina was teaching a class, as is the practice at the Nimrod conference where judges, award‐winners, editors, and other principles share their experience and talent with the attendees who now come from all over the United States as well as at least 7 counties of Oklahoma. There was never any doubt that Gina, from Salem, Oregon would keep writing. She is as prolific in her writing life as in her personal life, having published two short story collections and two novels in the eleven years since winning the second Nimrod award. (It should have been no surprise that in 2006 we asked Gina to serve as fiction judge.) She does not write about her domestic life (the only telltale sign of a mix of the two is in the naming of her fourth child, Natasha). The first prize winning Nimrod story begins in one of Russia’s grimy, disgusting toilets; her newest novel is entitled: The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight.

39

In contrast, Gish Jen, fiction award winner for her story “The Water‐ Faucet Vision,” 1987, does apply the complexities and humor of her Japanese‐ American life to a good deal of her fiction. When Gish (an adopted name because of her admiration for the venerated actress, Lillian Gish, and because Jen’s real first name is also “Lillian”) won first prize, the selection of her story, as a finalist, had been a unanimous judgment of the editors (which is not often the case). Scheduled to fly to Tulsa from Boston in October, she almost missed the awards conference and definitely missed her plane.

There I was, soaking in my early morning bath, when the phone rang. A desperate voice rang out with the news that there was a snowstorm in Boston and she had missed her flight. The airline said it was her fault for not leaving sufficient driving time. They would not refund her money. Amazingly, I did not just say get on the next flight. What I did say was, “If you are willing to pay me back for your flight, here is my credit card number.” I can’t believe that I was so penny pinching, but Nimrod had no funds to spare.

Gish did pay back the money she owed. I accepted it. There were no hard feelings. In fact, years later, in 2013 after multiple publications (three novels, including the hilarious yet serious, Mona in the Promised Land and one collection of short stories Who’s Irish, and many awards (Lannan Foundation, Guggenheim,and so forth) Gish generously accepted our invitation to serve as Nimrod’s fiction judge. All the gang of editors embraced her as a beloved old friend and she responded with warmth, she who was scheduled to give the Harvard lectures in two weeks.

In 1991, Awards 13, “Poems of the Body” by the inimitable Ruth Schwartz, presented an unusual predicament: if these poems should win first prize, would I place the “luminous body,” the “delicate sad penis,” on the first page of the issue? That had been our practice, to place the first‐prize‐winning poem on the first page. Ruth’s poems concerned her work at an AID’s hospice during the height of that crisis. They received front‐page treatment and no one tittered about body parts revealed (at least to my knowledge. Ruth, moreover, is remembered not only for her poems but also for her dynamic workshops and the interview we recorded with her for radio, now also available on CD. She spoke of the importance of including small things in one’s poems, of the significance of dailiness: housekeeping, child‐care, cooking, sewing — the totality of experience.

40 Sue Monk Kidd won Nimrod’s second prize in fiction in 1993, “Awards XV” (vol.37, no.1). The prize‐winning story is entitled “The Secret Life of Bees.” The Nimrod editors thought she should have won first prize. That often happens; the editors have no control over the judge’s designation of first and second prize. They merely guide the way by sending no more than 20 finalists, selected from a pool of often 500 submissions, to the judge for his or her decision. In this case the gifted Janette Turner Hospital had the task. Yet, as I teased Janette afterwards, this time we were right. Of course, there is no right or wrong when the choice is so difficult, the level of excellence so high. However, Kidd’s story “The Secret Life of Bees,” with its beguiling yet tough teenage waif, and strong, no nonsense Black adult friend, became the first chapter of Kidd’s novel and film of the same name and catapulted her career into high gear. As the end of 2014 approaches, Kidd is a renowned novelist with four novels and several volumes of inspiration books to her credit — and another film.

Not only first and second place choices but also Honorable Mentions are frequently cause for contention amongst the hard‐working, committed editors: Adelle Leiblein’s deeply felt and expressed poem printed in 1994, “Awards XVI” was designated an Honorable Mention. Excellent as that fairly short poem is, she had only submitted the one poem. The editors and the poetry judge felt that that was not a sufficient indication of the quality of her total work. Adelle understood our explanation and joined us for the awards weekend at her own expense.

We first met Timothy Findley, esteemed actor, playwright, and novelist, while working on the 1994 “O! Canada” issue. He had been recommended by Janette Turner Hospital, Australian novelist, then living in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, whom we had first published as an interviewee in the “Australian” issue of Spring 1993 . Over ten years, we published three of Janette’s stories and then asked her to serve as fiction judge. Her fiction is complex and imaginative, sometimes emerging from a photograph or painting. One novel, she told me about in our interview, grew from a famous painting of tortured figures seeming to be building yet struggling to climb out of the pits of hell. Yet her personal life seemed to be absent of anything thrilling or horrific.

Manly and I spent the 1993 Christmas holidays with Janette and her husband in a lovely house on a frozen lake near Queens College where her husband taught, and two of their children (one an adopted aboriginal girl) were raised. New Year’s Eve was a traditional affair where she and all her friends dressed in formal gowns and tuxedos and sat down to a six‐course dinner prepared by the host chosen for that year. Lucky for us that this year, Janette, an excellent cook, was the chef and organizer. They accepted us in the best clothes we had with us. It was a truly astonishing dinner and the conversation was even better.

At that dinner, Timothy Findley’s newest novel became the subject of animated discussion. Manly and I were unable to participate. Before long, however, we were on a

41 train, heading south from Kingston, with an introduction preceding us, to the remarkable home on a snow‐covered plain that Findley shared with his partner, the gracious and talented writer and actor Bill Whitehead.

Not surprisingly, books were everywhere. What was a surprise was the large old‐ fashioned fully plumbed bathtub that was set in the middle of the upstairs library. The best treat, however, was subsequently reading over seven of Timothy Findley’s novels (still prized possessions in my library) including The Wars and Not Wanted on the Voyage, and luxuriating in his memoir organized in dramatic scenes as befits an actor. We received two stories from “Tiff,” as his friends called him, which we published in Nimrod. He also came to Tulsa in October 1994 when he served as judge for the Nimrod Awards competition.

I don’t think any other judge, with the exception of Colum McCann, was as knowledgeable, approachable, and giving of time and suggestions to the writers at the conference as Timothy Findley. Adept at writing fictional meditations on history (The Wars), as he was at creating mysteries — The Telling of Lies, his first mystery novel won an “Edgar” in 1989 — “Tiff” could speak knowledgeably on an array of styles and approaches to writing. A great talent! An unfortunate early death. Why is it that so many of our greatest writers are alcoholics?

Not all authors are gifted writers and accessible human beings. These and so many others were. They and the experiences surrounding their relationship to Nimrod and the Awards Conference as well as the increasing numbers participating in that conference from an initial 25 to 252 speak of a commitment, and a hunger that will never be satisfied but always nurtured by those who care.

1996: Downswing/Upswing: Separation from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa; Re‐marriage to the University of Tulsa.After the enormous success of “The American Indian,” “The Arctic Circle,” “Clap Hands” “The Canadian” and “Australian” issues and numerous awards issues — all produced with the Arts and Humanities Council as our non-profit umbrella, the seeming catastrophe of 1996 was all the more daunting. Seventeen years of relative stability had, perhaps left us soft, unprepared for the decision of the Arts and Humanities Council to separate from Nimrod. Two events influenced that decision. The first, I believe, was the Council’s desire to shift course from actually having its own programs to providing an umbrella (a 501c3 non-profit status) for organizations that have their own arts programs. This emphasis has shifted back and forth through the years. The second was quite ugly and involves negotiations by a private person who, in the opinion of the Nimrod editorial board, was not qualified. She offered to buy — I kid you not— “buy” Nimrod and set it up under her direction with the existing editors acting as her “consultants.” It was pretty insulting and it didn’t work!

42 At that time, I uncovered the originally copyright papers for Nimrod, which indicated that the University of Tulsa still held the rights to the journal. Until that discovery I was walking around quoting Bertholt Brecht’s line from The Caucasian Chalk Circle, “The land belongs to those who till it.”

Aside from desperate quotation and a bit of legal finagling, it was clear to many in 1996, that Nimrod, in order to assure an orderly transition of editors and a healthy future, should return to The University of Tulsa where it had begun. I was 62 by then and thinking vaguely of retirement (a feat I didn’t accomplish until I was 79 — and even then only partially). Nimrod had spent 17 successful years at the Arts Council, and become well known for its broadening scope, elegant design, and awards program. But would TU welcome us back?

Once again, Nimrod shifted gears and survived. Frank Christel, then production manager of KWGS‐FM at the University of Tulsa, and I had a meeting with Dean of Arts and Sciences Tom Horne of TU. Allegedly, the agenda for the meeting was not to be related to Nimrod but rather to radio programs that Frank and I were undertaking. I took the opportunity to mention — quite lightly really — to Dean Horne that Nimrod was leaving the Council. “Does that mean,” said Tom enthusiastically, “that you could come back to TU?”

The rest is history! Over eighteen more years of producing two issues per year: An Awards Issue and a Thematic issue, each 224 pages or more — and all from our small office at the University of Tulsa. That history also includes days, months, years of reading over 3,000 manuscripts a year, selecting the best, most tantalizing authors, and conducting an awards program that brought to Tulsa top‐rated judges like poets W. S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Denise Levertov, and William Stafford and fiction judges such as Timothy Findley, George Garrett, Colum McCann, Gish Jen, Myla Goldberg, and John Edgar Wideman. These writers, who also served as judges for the awards competition, along with other specialists in the writing of mysteries, children’s books, young‐adult novels, and memoirs, firmly embedded Nimrod and its annual conference on the literary map.

The “Terminal Trust:

The invaluable contribution of Ruth G. Hardman has now grown into a day‐and‐ a‐half writing conference, staffed primarily by the judges, award winners, and editors of Nimrod. In addition to master classes, over fifty editors are available to work one‐on‐ one with registrants at the annual Nimrod writing conference (a feature of the conference added to its yearly program and not replicated at any other literary conference that I know of). The prize program that initially cost $7,000 plus expenses, has been raised over the years to $10,000 (a first prize for fiction and poetry of $2,000 each; two‐second prizes of $1000 each in addition to travel and housing expenses that

43 continue to mount. Moreover, the awards dinner costs have almost doubled despite donations of wine.

When Ruth Hardman was alive, she handed me a check for $16,000 or so in person. Once, she was so concerned that I might not get the check in time, she and her wonderful secretary Sue Flynn arrived on my front porch at dawn waving the check, Ruth still in her robe and slippers. Small wonder that when Nimrod returned to the University of Tulsa, and return we did, after 17 years at the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, there was concern that connection with Ruth might be broken. She and I were aging, still passionate about our commitment but obviously aging.

Brilliant and beautiful Courtney Knoblock, who worked for TU’s development department at the time, came up with an acceptable plan agreed to my Ruth and her son Terry Kistler: a “terminal trust” of $160,000 covering ten years of the awards program. Now, of course, more than ten years later, that generous sum too has been exhausted, so that each year Nimrod reaches out to balance its budget with renewed inventiveness and constant drain on the energies of Nimrod’s small staff. Yet we persevere, thinking up new ways of raising the necessary operational funds and those to fulfill the awards program. We offer, for example, reserved tables for $1,000 each create art auctions, seek donations from individuals and grants from federal, state, and individual foundations.

Clearly, Ruth Hardman’s gift did not end Nimrod’s shifting fortunes. But it did set us on a firm road upon which to build. The Nimrod /Hardman Awards competition, consistently attracts at least 1,100 submissions from every state in the union. Winning or being a finalist in that competition is a notable achievement, which opens doors for these writers and draws attention from editors of such annual anthologies as Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry.

Not only does the awards program nurture writers, it provides Tulsans and others who travel to join us for our annual Awards Writing Conference — from every county in Oklahoma and as far away as NYC and Los Angeles, California — with an opportunity to craft their writing and hear readings and creative ideas from well published and award‐ winning writers. Ruth’s gift also shares a large part of the credit for increasing Nimrod’s prominence, number of pages (from 16 to 224 pages per issue), and circulation.

Each person who publishes with Nimrod brings his or her gifts and passion for language, style, and story. He or she becomes a part of Nimrod’s growing family — a demonstration of the range and scope that we seek for our pages and in our lives.

44 A Glance Beyond 1996

Though this survey was only to cover 1956‐1996, I feel compelled to briefly add a few stories that confirm not only Nimrod’s continued achievement and dedication between 1996 and 2013, but also a particular young writer’s dedication to his craft and art:

The first issue published on Nimrod’s return to the University of Tulsa where it had begun 40 years before was, in part, also a celebration of the City of Tulsa and the very “idea of a city”: Spring/Summer 1996, “The City” (vol.39, no. 2). The issue included 60 writers representing 21 cities from Venice to Shanghai to Lima, from Sydney to Tel Aviv. The concept of city tells its story through the words of architects like John Novack; fiction mavens like Talat Abbasi, originally from Pakistan, and a translator in New York for the U.N.; Steven Bloom of Heidelberg, Germany; Michael Wilding, from Sydney, Australia; and poets including Pat Boran of Ireland, Roo Borson of Toronto, Canada; and Mahmud Darwish from Palestine.

The most poignant and daring story in the issue, however, was written by Philomena Hollingsworth, a director of student services at The University of Tulsa. Using the techniques of fiction, mixing present tense and flashback, this writer tells the story of her desperate drive to Oklahoma City after the April 19th bombing, in order to find her sister Diane, ultimately discovered to be one of the many victims of the bombing. This was Philomena’s first publication. No newspaper article or other media report reached the ability of this piece to make immediate and personal a city’s horror and despair.

Weaving together the diverse contributions of this issue were photographs from the “Documenting Downtown Project” conducted by artist Lavada Nicholls with her Holland Hall High School Students. Shimmering from the cover of the issue, is 9th grader, Adam Sober’s photo‐weaving of a Tulsa art‐deco building.

Moving from evolving an issue using contributions from sources outside of the U.S. and first publications of adults and young students within our borders, the very next year Nimrod once again briefly shifted focus to the prominent who might help to add even further luster to the Journal and its contributors (as we had done twice with Stanley Kunitz and William Stafford). In 1997, W. S. Merwin, arguably the most revered poet in the nation, agreed to be Nimrod’s poetry judge. When he arrived in Tulsa, his usually sparkling blue eyes were clouded over with fatigue. He had traveled from his home in Haiku, Hawaii to the East Coast to judge the Yale Younger Series contest and give a reading. Then he came our way. After meeting him at the airport, I asked if he wouldn’t like to take a nap (these were still the days when Nimrod friends and editors housed judges and winners in their homes). He gratefully bent his lanky frame into our guest bedroom and disappeared for two hours. My editorial commission was to stop all the neighborhood lawn mowers, hammers, and giggling children from

45 making noise. We serve many functions we nursemaids to the famous.

Bill Merwin was extremely grateful for his rest, gave a brilliant reading at the Awards Dinner and told all present how he had not been able to find a winner amongst the Yale Younger Series candidates but the quality of the Nimrod submissions presented many potential winners and made the choice difficult.

Another noted writer who lent Nimrod her skill, judgment, and delicate balance was novelist Anita Shreve, Awards fiction judge for 1998. Anita had just published The Weight of Water, her fifth novel, which parallels a historic 1893 murder off the coast of New Hampshire with the fictional lives of a contemporary couple. Relatively early in her career, she was also the winner of an O’Henry Prize, The New England Fiction Award, and others. She came to Tulsa not only as a judge but also to deliver a Humanities Lecture on the relationship of history and fiction (for which Nimrod received our only grant to date from the Oklahoma Humanities Foundation). Since 1998, Anita has published 8 other novels including A Pilot’s Wife (an Oprah Selection of 1999). Her novel Resistance, like The Weight of Water was made into a movie. All of this alone would have made Nimrod’s determination to bring Anita Shreve to Tulsa — quite brilliant! Best of all, however, was her warm presence and her detailed, illuminating presentation that benefitted from her multiple career as journalist, nurturing wife and mother, and teacher.

Once in awhile, as with the 1986 General Electric Foundation Award, Nimrod not only grew in stature from its association with well‐known writers and budding writers, but by receiving recognition from the broader literary community. Somewhere, sometime later in 1998 came the sterling invitation for Nimrod to conduct a public reading of material selected from its issues at the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park in NYC in October, 1999. When, unexpectedly, the director of the Arts Club called to deliver the invitation, his first question was “Do you know where the Arts Club is located?” I was silent and numb for a minute. Then when he began to explain, to his surprise I responded: “Of course, I am originally from New York City.” In truth, I had never been to the Tilden Mansion that now housed the Club, nor to the tasteful private park that fronted the mansion built in the 1880’s. It was an extraordinary opportunity for Nimrod, for the many editors who joined the venture at their own expense, and for me.

We scoured the New York area for writers who had published with us and were willing to join the reading at the Arts Club. There were many. They were not just willing but eager. The director of the Arts Club launched a full fledged advertising campaign when he heard that Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Meena Alexander, Alicia Ostriker, and Olga Broumas were going to join David Cook (Director of TU’s Theatre Department), Nimrod editors and poets Ivy Dempsey, Lisa Ransom, and me in the presentation. Even my Aunt Isabelle and Uncle John Stevenson attended. Nimrod’s young interns were star‐

46 struck.11 So was I. After the presentation, the participants had dinner under the Tiffany glass ceiling of the National Arts Club dining room and like royalty descended the carpeted staircase, hands stroking the shining walnut bannister. The next morning we loaded our issues for sale into a hired van and drove to Albany, N.Y. for the annual Associated Writing Programs Conference. A miraculous piece of timing, planning, and good luck.

Which, if one is honest, describes the history of Nimrod through its 57 years of continuous if conflicted publication.

In 2013, in Nimrod’s 57th year of continuous publication, and 17 years after Nimrod returned to the University of Tulsa, we conducted the 35th awards competition and published “Lasting Matters” (vol. 57, no. 1). It was on this occasion that Jacob M. Appel came to Tulsa having won second prize for his story “Paracosmos,” which some readers interpreted as bordering on fantasy and some saw as the deeply imagined but realistic life of a severely conflicted woman. (Once again, as with Sue Monk Kidd, I thought he should have won first prize.) We knew from contacts with Appel that he was a medical doctor, working at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.

Only Managing Editor (now Editor‐in‐Chief) Eilis O’Neal knew that Appel had submitted to the contest at least ten times before winning or even being selected as a finalist, since Eilis is in charge of removing the cover letter from the manuscript, numbering the cover letter and story with the same number thus hiding the author’s identity until after the judging. What no one knew until the night of the Awards dinner was: 1) Appel was also a lawyer; 2) he had submitted not only to the contest but in open submission. He said that he had sent stories to Nimrod 60 times and been rejected 59 times. Appel’s pursuit of publication with Nimrod gets better: “The first time I sent a story to Nimrod,” Appel said, “I was 16 years old. After three months of impatient waiting, I asked my mother to call and find out what was up. I also told my mother to please say that she was my secretary!” His “secretary” received an apology from the editors for the lapse of time, and was also told that the story had, unfortunately, been rejected. Appel, obviously, did not give up!

* * *

11 One of our interns, Jennifer, was 17 years old. She was brilliant but very shy and emotionally fragile. I took a chance bringing her with us (I am after all a mother) but at least I insisted that her father give us written permission. The level of success of Jennifer’s New York experience was something I had not foreseen. Perhaps it was the anonymity of being in a big city that she needed. The anonymity and diversity. She blossomed: bought herself a pair of inexpensive trendy high-heeled shoes from a street vendor (she was already almost 6 feet tall). With detailed instructions, she took a subway and found the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 82nd St. and Fifth Avenue and the Frick a few blocks from there. Then she continued to walk back downtown on Madison Avenue to the hotel on 22nd Street where we were staying. At the reading she was smiling and pleasantly outgoing at our information table. Today she has a graduate degree in translation and teaches at a college. These contacts with interns has always been one of the benefits for me of being editor of Nimrod. We grow together.

47 As for me, this overview of the passions, the projects or “births” as I like to call them, as they alternate with the experiences of deaths and disappointments in the 47 years I spent with Nimrod, has been an attempt to untangle the long skein of memory. When one is reviewing one’s life, the remote past is the easiest to reclaim, and the present or near present is more difficult to deal with. Perhaps it is because recent history has not yet taken on the quality of “story” of “myth.” But as we scratch harder for detail and story and gain distance and perspective, patterns emerge with startling clarity. As for births, I discovered in the process of writing and reviewing — there were never enough! The many births of children, projects, ideas, and issues — saved me. They were an indication and an assurance of a passion for life that would always resurface.

So, if you have the strength, keep reading.

48