Death and Tennyson on a conservative podcast

I somehow found myself watching an hour-long podcast with two conservatives. Yes, I know I should have been shocked, appalled even, but it was a conservation between a gray-haired Hoover Institution host and a bearded guy in a ballcap who looked fresh from a Nebraska farm, and was.

The host was Peter Robinson on Uncommon Knowledge. The guest was Ben Saase, Harvard and Yale grad, former Nebraska congressman, and short-time president of my university, UF in Gainesville. They obviously knew one another to judge by their opening friendly banter. My first question: How do they know each other?

Old colleagues, it turns out, friends, maybe. “Ben Sasse on Mortaliity, Meaning, and the Future of America.” Subjects that affect all of us, conservatives and liberals alike. I found out quickly that Sasse was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer that has spread to other organs and his spine. He says that he is doped up on morphine and winces in pain on camera. But he’s starting a new podcast, “Not Dead Yet.” And he isn’t. He even recites some poetry to close out the hour.

Two intelligent people talking about big issues. I like that. I miss it. Reminds me of watching William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” with my Dad. I now live frantic over the latest outrage. I stopped that for an hour. It was more than an hour. I interrupted the dialogue to go on the nightly walk with my wife and son. They walk, I drive my Golden scooter. It’s brisk outside, brisk for Florida, a cold wind from the north. We loop the neighborhood, trade greetings with neighbors, and we return, my wife to bed, my son to a rewatch of “Batman Forever,” and me for a snack and a return to the podcast.

Sasse is pretty fly for a white guy from Arlington, Nebraska. He jokes, testifies, gets clinical a few times but remains interesting throughout. His short tenure at UF was marked by controversy. Not sure if I can sum it up. I will leave it to the irascible Independent Florida Alligator to do that (full disclosure: I read the Alligator, support it, and spent two semesters there as a reporter in 1976).

The Alligator announced Sasse’s diagnosis on Dec. 23. That’s a usual calm time in the campus (off-campus in the Alligator’s case) newsroom, with student home for Christmas break. Sasse had this quote during the press conference: “Cancer is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all.” If Sasse sounds more academic than legislative, he closes out the interview with a poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ring out, Wild Bells.” Tennyson is a particularly good poet to choose for memorization due to his rhyme schemes and repetitions. An example:

Cannon to right of them,/Cannon to left of them,/Cannon behind them/Volleyed and thundered;/Stormed at with shot and shell,/While horse and hero fell.

“Charge of the Light Brigade.” I had to memorize it during seventh grade after-school detention. The nuns punished us in 1963 with poems but I discovered it was a way to store away lines from the masters to blog about in 2026. Bless you sisters.

Tennyson wrote “Wild Bells” in a tribute to a friend who died at 22. It ends with these two stanzas as Sasse recites:

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

 

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Sasse is a Christian. He talks about it in ways we used to hear more often. Light on judgements, heavy on redemption. But it was his comments on academia that spoke to me. At UF, he brought in colleagues to establish the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Campus ground-breaking for its building was held last month. Sasse has been teaching courses there and was scheduled to teach in the spring (don’t see him on the current course list).

I am suspicious of conservatives taking over universities and screwing around with them. We saw what happened when Gov. DeSantis set out to de-woke New College in Sarasota. DeSantis liked Sasse and was instrumental in his hiring. The search for a replacement at UF has gone on forever. One great candidate was rejected already due to his alleged interest in diversity programs at Penn State. Nobody with Gov D’s mindset has yet been found. Whether that’s because word has spread among potential candidates that they will be stepping into a minefield or whether the search committee is inept. Or a combination of those.

But, watching the Hoover podcast with Sasse, I agreed with some of the things the man said. He is disturbed by students deserting majors in humanities for more “practical” majors, majors that will lead to jobs. Sasse is akin to his liberal colleagues when he bemoans that and his arguments for the humanities is nearly the same. The humanities teach us to be good citizens. Sasse’s course title for this semester was “American Life.” A civics class? Perhaps. Here’s his quote from the podcast:

“We haven’t done basic civics for a really long time.”

Educators have been complaining about that for a long time.

Why don’t kids want to major in history or English? Not practical. But also, those classes have been “niche-efied,’ narrowed down to appeal to small slices of the humanities that narrow the focus of the major. I know from my three years in a state university MFA program that those niches and biases exist and it isn’t healthy for the system as a whole.

Our children and grandchildren are looking at the shifting swirling job market and want to know how to deal with that chaos and the one that’s coming. We don’t know what the jobs will be in 10 or 20 years. We don’t know if there will be jobs. Elon Musk says everyone will be rich so don’t worry about it. OK, Elon, go play with your rocket ships. To make sure we have a good grounding on the world, and to ensure we can keep a functioning democracy, we need better future prospects that Elon provides.

To get back to humanities. Learning the classics isn’t a right-wing plot. It’s something that will ensure our future. If we’re going to get Middle Americans to buy into college educations, we have to make some changes. Here’s Sasse:

“There’s no reason the taxpayers of the state of Texas or the state of Nebraska or Florida should subsidize somebody to teach in a discipline that isn’t wrestling with the big questions and isn’t preparing people for work.”

The humanities do that. It makes us wrestle with big questions and prepares us for work. Some of those questions and careers we don’t know yet. But the humanities will give us the tools to grapple with them.

To the barricades – patiently, part one

Antiwar protests on college campuses are in the news and it’s no longer 1970. In the spring of 2024, young people are objecting to Israel’s handling of the war and the ensuing mass casualties. They also are upset that their universities may be funding Israel’s excesses through investments and other business ties. There are also protests by those who support Israel objecting to a 19-year-old getting involved in politics and saying bad things about Israel. It’s as ridiculous to say that criticism of Israel is antisemitic as its is if you decry Hamas you are Islamophobic.

You don’t have to know every single thing about this war to go out on the streets and check it out. Young people gather for events all of the time. It’s exciting. Their friends are there. The police look amazing in their U.S. Army castoff riot gear and their giant riot trucks once used to quell disturbances in Fallujah. That’s a lot of adrenaline surging through demonstrators’ bodies and things happen. Still, most protestors have been peaceful. I cannot say the same thing about NYC and Boston cops.  

I am a Baby Boomer who saw his first antiwar protest in the spring of 1970. I was a ROTC midshipman and I went to the demo instead of the annual Navy Ball. My dorm friends were going outfitted with gas masks and scarves to take the sting out of tear gas and pepper gas. I went with them to campus where all the action was going to be. Tear gas flew and the S.C. state cops rushed the demonstrators applying their batons to longhair’s heads.

We fled into the dorm complex and ended up in a restroom being used as a first aid station. Men and women were jammed in and those with even a tiny bit of first aid experience helped administer to those with cracked skulls, eyes blinded by gas, and asthmatics struggling to breathe. One guy had been a medic in Vietnam this time the year before. Others like me had been Boy Scouts and knew enough first aid to patch broken scalps.

An ambulance arrived outside and I was drafted (Hah – drafted) to pick up the wounded in makeshift stretchers and carry them outside. One was my buddy Pat who’d sliced off the top of his index finger when picking up a broken bottle to throw at the cops. Yes, there were young people on this night of nonviolent protest who threw broken bottles at cops and picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back.

We were demonstrators once, and young.

End of part one

Elmore Leonard: great stories, memorable characters, and snappy banter

There’s magic in Elmore Leonard’s writing. In his novels, he tells a whopping good story and entrances the reader with the banter among characters. I can’t get through one of his books without laughs and a few sighs. Audiobooks do justice to his work and I’ve passed a few engaging hours with “Out of Sight” and “Tishomingo Blues,” among others that I’ve listened to driving through miles of Wyoming sagebrush. The wide-open spaces figure in Leonard’s early writing, when he wrote westerns as stories (“3:10 to Yuma”) and novels (“Hombre”). I’ve seen the movies, too. “Out of Sight,” “Get Shorty,” and Tarantino's “Jackie Brown” (based on “Rum Punch”) were delightful.

Just finished “Cuba Libre,” a bit different from most of his work. Cuba during the Spanish-American War is the setting. Just a snippet of Cuba’s long and violent history. I sometimes forget that Havana was capital of Spain’s New World Empire going back to the 1500s. It was a thriving city while Seminoles ruled the Florida Glades and panthers roamed the forests. Air conditioning was just a distant dream. Leonard sets some of his books (“Maximum Bob,” “Be Cool,” "Pronto" which led the “Justified” series) in South Florida. And why not – kooky characters and Florida are a match made in heaven and/or hell, depending on your POV.

“Cuba Libre” begins in 1898 with one of the main characters surveying the wreckage of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. I won’t tell you how it ends – it’s a wild ride, and worth reading. Intriguing characters encounter one another and all hell breaks loose. There’s an American cowboy escaping a shady past, a young marine from Arizona who survives the Maine sinking, a rich American expatriate, bad guys from Spain, barefoot Cuban revolutionaries, a hotel filled with U.S. reporters trying to drum up a war, many horses, and many, many guns.

Leonard keeps the story moving. Along the way, he violates all the rules that seemed important in MFA writing workshops. That’s something I’ve been learning reading historical fiction. Keep the story moving. No Proustian monologues. No settings in academia. I had just come from reading Ann Beattie’s stories featured over the decades in The New Yorker. Way too much academia. I liked the early stories better. They were leaner and meaner and more fun. Maybe they had the caring attention of a good editor? I did like the one story I read from her new collection which all center on the Covid-19 Emergency. I want to read the rest of those. Lauren Groff teaches writing at my alma mater UF yet writes amazing stories of Floridians in wild places. Check out her collection "Florida" that features a panther as cover art.

Look, I have an MFA in Creative Writing. I wanted nothing more than a career in the academy but that wasn’t in the cards. I still love teaching but take my writing cues from other sources, other lands, other time periods. The most fun I had recently was watching “White Noise,” a send-up of academia as well as American life. Don DeLillo – that guy can write and the folks who did the movie like it too. Hitler Studies! Airborne Toxic Event!

Go read Elmore Leonard. Plenty to choose from at your local library. Better get them before Moms for Liberty get their grubby mitts on them for the big book burning. 

Saturday Morning Round-up: Pretty Flowers, a Cornhusker Goes South, and Outrage in Tennessee

It’s mid-April and we’re experiencing our usual schizoid mix of warm days in the 70s interrupted by bursts of snow and cold. Humans are confused but bulb plants (amaryllis, tulips, daffodils, crocus) continue their rise into the sunshine. I have some nice yellow daffodils and purple crocuses emerging in my front yard garden. They are getting extra sunshine this spring because we took down the dying blue spruce on the house’s west side so the shade is gone. I’ll plant annuals in the gardens and maybe grow some cherry tomatoes to add some veggies to the mix. I’ve always wanted tomatoes in my front yard although critters may prove to be a problem. Wish me luck.

I volunteer at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens this afternoon. At the front desk, I am surrounded by blooming things, mostly tulips who have already passed their prime and gloxinias which are beautiful but eerily have no scent. The scent of orange and lemon blossoms drift in from the Orangerie. The Tilted Tulip Gift Shop sells the nicest smelling candles, their scents drifting my way even when they aren’t alight. April is when I see the first visitors with sunburns from walking around the lake or strolling through the gardens. They bear beatific looks and sly grins, as if they can’t believe they have survived another Wyoming winter.

My university newspaper, published five days a week and independent of the University of Florida since 1971, is having a blast goading the new UF president, a toady Republican named Ben Sasse. If the name looks familiar, it’s because Sasse retired from his seat as one of Nebraska’s two U.S. senators to take the job. We know Gov. DeSantis played a role in this since he is working overtime to sabotage both the public school K-12 system and the state’s public universities. The Independent Florida Alligator mocks Sasse for ignoring their reporters’ calls and e-mails. He’s kept a low profile since being heckled at a public gathering when he first appeared with his Cornhusker roots and started telling Floridians what to do with their flagship university. It doesn’t look good for him even with his nose firmly planted in DeSantis’s backside. I worked at the Alligator for two semesters in 1976 as a G.A. reporter, General Assignment because I arrived with no specialty such as sports or local government and I knew a tiny bit about everything because I was an English major, the academic equivalent of G.A. Good luck Alligator – we are cheering you on from Nebraska’s superior western neighbor.

Wyoming GOP legislators are no prize but they take second place to their colleagues in Tennessee. The GOP ran two African-American Democrats out of their seats because they had the temerity to join a demonstration at the state capitol. The demo was aimed at gun violence, the most recent murders happening March 27 when six people, including three kids, were gunned down at a Nashville Christian school. The Tenn. GOP like their national leaders have refused to do anything to limit access to automatic weapons. Instead, they send meaningless “thoughts and prayers” to victims’ families and scamper to Indianapolis for the national NRA convention (“14 Acres of Guns & Gear”). I’ll close this out with a quote from U.S. Army special counsel James Welch when hectored by Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a congressional hearing. From the History Channel web site:

“Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” It was then McCarthy’s turn to be stunned into silence, as Welch asked, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” 

Happy graduation, Annie. You did it!

Annie Shay, happy graduate (LCCC photo)

Daughter Annie graduates from Laramie County Community College on Saturday.

We are so proud of her. It has been a long haul. She struggled with learning disabilities in elementary school. She was diagnosed with epilepsy when she was eight. During teen years, she struggled in school, the learning part and the socialization part. She began to depend on drugs and alcohol to get her through each day. She was bipolar and we sought help but nobody seemed to understand it. She spent months in treatment centers in Wyoming and Colorado. She was able to complete some of her school work but fell too far behind to graduate. She earned her G.E.D. and started school at LCCC. It was too soon. She decided to major in music and spent many hours rehearsing and singing with the school's choirs. She has a beautiful voice but is not so confident around colleagues and audiences. 

She dropped out and soon was off again to treatment centers, this time in California and Illinois and Utah and finally back to Colorado. The years passed. She was diagnosed with bipolar and personality disorder. Meds didn't seem to be the solution but she kept at it, finally underwent ECT at a hospital in Boulder. She improved and returned to Cheyenne to live with Chris and I and go back to school. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

That's one thing she always wanted -- an education. Through it all, she spoke of that often. She enrolled again at LCCC. She depended on the Help Center for guidance. She struggled at first. Nevertheless, she persisted. She passed her classes and discovered that she liked school, maybe for the first time. That's one thing that people don't always understand about community colleges. They allow all kinds of learners to get a second chance. May be you aren't ready at 18. Maybe you get married young and find out 20 years later that you want an education. Maybe you're a military veteran looking for new directions. 

I was a university dropout, a scholarship student at a big university who lost his way. I worked and traveled. Four years after graduating high school, I enrolled in the local community college and started in the fall of 1973. My classmates had already graduated from four-year universities and were negotiating adulthood. I felt a bit lost. But the classes I took were wonderful. Contemporary American Literature. Public Speaking. Art History. The teachers were terrific and somehow I was interested in each subject. At night, I worked as an orderly in the Substance Abuse Unit at the county hospital. The nurses locked me in with the alcoholics who had been scooped out of the gutters or arrested for raising a ruckus. This is where they came instead of jail. Many had been to jail. We played cards and smoked. They told tall tales, most of which were true, I suspect. I learned a lot. On quiet nights, I studied. On wild nights, we orderlies wrestled rowdy drunks. That was some year. By May, I had enough credits to graduate and returned to a four-year university where I graduated in two years. 

We all have our stories. Annie now has hers. She is very excited about graduating. So very excited. In mid-June, she moves to Laramie to start summer classes at UW.  She will be thirty-something by the time she graduates. She worries about that, wondering if she will fit in with younger students, make friends in the larger context of a university, be able to excel in upper division classes. Chris and I worry. Annie is an introvert with ongoing psychological issues. She likes her time alone but sometimes too much time alone is bad for her mental health. 

Nevertheless, she persisted. 

Happy graduation, Annie. Enjoy it all!

P.S.: Annie posted a blog today from her POV. Read "How I got here -- graduating from college class of 2022" at WyoGal. 

Boring old college lecturer responds to "The Chair"

Watched the last episode of "The Chair" this week. I laughed, I cried. Various faculty and administrators and students pissed me off.  All in all, a good investment of six Netflix hours. 

I have never served time on a college faculty and I've been an adjunct at community colleges. I was an undergrad English major at one community college and a land-grant university in the Palm Tree South and a grad student at a land-grant university in the Rocky Mountain West. I never got within spitting distance of a small liberal arts college such as Pembroke. 

But Pembroke's people seemed familiar. As a grad student T.A., I experienced some of the same frustrations of Pembroke faculty, those f*cking f*cks referenced in The Chair's (F*cker In Charge) desk sign. Some faculty members were old and stuck in their ways. The Literature, Composition and ESL faculty didn't like creative writing faculty and vice versa. The administration was always targeting the English Department for cuts due to the fact that we all speak English so why in the f*cking f*ck do we need an English Department? Shouldn't it be the  'Merican Department since we all speak 'Merican here? 

All an MFA grad student could do was teach our two sections of comp, keep our heads down and write a lot. We had regular classes to attend on top of writing workshops. And, in my case and some others, I had a family to support. 

One of my favorite aspects of "The Chair" are insights into faculty's families. Dr. Ji-Joon Kim has a daughter who is as argumentative as faculty ("You're not my real mom"). Dobson's wife died and his only daughter went off to college. No matter he gets stoned before and after class, and sometimes doesn't show up at all. Dr. Joan Hambling gave up her personal life and career advancement to prop of the fragile egos of male colleagues. She is working on a relationship with a college IT guy who is as much as a wise-ass as she is. Dr. Rentz (Bob Balaban) chats with his wife before a college event and we find out that she gave up her academic career to raise three kids. "Someone had to cook dinner," she says as she urges her aging husband to wear his Depends.

My daughter, an English major, is watching "The Chair" but I don't think she's finished. After a couple episodes she was angry at the students, which I thought was interesting since she is a student and a Millennial. I was angry at the students too but possibly for a different reason. They didn't want to learn Chaucer and Melville? I fondly recall my red-haired prof at UF who taught us Chaucer in Middle English. She spoke it like a native and there were times I imagined her as The Wyf of Bathe. 

The Pembroke students just didn't want to learn it the old-fashioned boring Boomer lecture way. They liked the way Moby Dick was taught by Dr. Yaz, a Millennial who approached it in a new way. By the end of the final episode, I was depressed about the state of academia. No surprise -- I was a boring old lecturer and probably still am. Back in my day, etc., etc., and so on. 

Part XI: The Way Mike Worked -- The long road to a career as arts administrator

Arts administrator.

Nice alliterative term. Features the noun arts, which we all know is a right-brain function, with administrator, which is decidedly left brain. I always felt that I had some of the left and some of the right. I wasn't artistic, but I did enjoy the arts, as in the kind of art you see at galleries and museums and that which you see on stage in the form of theatre and music. My music tastes were shaped by the '60s and '70s, preferring rock and roll to the classical, what used to be called "longhair music" before there were actual long-haired hippies rocking out to Led Zep. My father loved classical music and played the loud stuff: Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Ravel. 

Dad loved the bagpipes.The only concert he ever took me to was the Black Watch, the military band that used to scare hell out of Native Africans, Afghans, and any other peoples the Brits yearned to subdue. He played bagpipe records too, probably to escape a house filled with squabbling kids and a frazzled wife. I was usually reading. I can still read when it's noisy. All through my childhood, my father played his stereo at night.

While studying creative writing at CSU in the late '80s, I supposed that I would teach if my fiction didn't start bringing in the dough. I was a teaching assistant, teaching freshman comp and eventually, creative writing to the young and restless. Much to my chagrin, I discovered that an M.F.A. in 1990 could land you a teaching job at a community college and maybe as a college adjunct. But I set my aims higher. I applied to colleges and universities all over the U.S. I snagged a couple in-person interviews, too, at the Modern Language Association conference in late December in Chicago. They bore no fruit. Too cold. I didn't stay at the conference hotel right by the waterfront but one that I could afford a few blocks away. 

During the three-day event, I encountered many young people engaged in the job search and, when they had a few minutes, attending some of the pedagogy sessions. I went to a few of those. The one I remember best featured Chicago hard-boiled crime writer Sara Paretsky. I'd read a few of her books and she was fascinating and funny. She talked about the movie being made based on her novels, V.I. Warshawski starring Kathleen Turner. She cracked up the audience when she told how the male director tried to talk Turner into showing a bit more skin as she battled the bad guys. Paretsky wondered then if Hollywood might not be ready for a female private eye. The talk filled me with joy until I again ventured outside into the snow and wind. I'd been living in Colorado for 12 years and knew snow and cold and wind. But there was something evil in the wind that howled off of Lake Michigan. 

In 1991, I was 40 and possibly unemployable. I started thinking that I might have to go back to the corporate world. I was broke and had a family to support. What to do?

That's when I started thinking of life as a working artist. The prospect filled me with dread and by the spring I was up to my cerebral cortex in depression. I'd been depressed before but never like this. I couldn't sleep and couldn't concentrate in class. We took off for a spring break trip to Tucson. I sat in the back seat; Chris and Kevin sat up front.  At one rest stop in New Mexico, I bolted off into the scrub, headed for God-knows-where. Eventually I stopped and returned to the car. Chris and Kevin were concerned. I was just a bundle of angst.

It wasn't much of a spring break. My psyche broke, or was breaking. On our way home, we stopped for the night at a cheap motel in Albuquerque. I was created a few miles away in 1950 after my newlywed parents partied in Old Town and then went back to their cramped apartment and had sex. It was about this time of year, too, mid-March, when the crab apple trees were trying to bloom and snowstorms collided with the Sandias. That was happening right this moment, the mountains squeezing fat snowflakes out of a Pacific Low. In my angst-ridden state, I didn't feel like driving or doing much of anything Elsie but hunkering down to wait out the Apocalypse. We waited through two nights. And on the third day, I arose from my somnambulist state and drove us the 500 miles back to Fort Collins. In this state of anxiety, my heart raced and I imagined scary things that would never come to pass. If one snowflake fell, by God, I was going to park this thing and never get out. But it didn't and I didn't. My wife wondered if I had flipped my lid. My son was confused by Dad"s odd behavior. We got home, eventually.

At this point, my experience with therapy consisted of three talk sessions with a therapist in training at UF Health Services. I was 26 and had just broken up with a long-time girlfriend or she had broken up with me. I was depressed and confused. After walking by the Health Services building a half-dozen times, I went in and asked for an appointment. I met with a guy who may have been younger than me, and we chatted. I quit after three sessions because I started to feel better. Not really -- spring was in full bloom and I found many outdoor things to do including spring break at the beach. Nothing like a little suds and sand and surf to ease a person's psyche or at least preoccupy it.

Back to 1991... A week after the trip to Phoenix, I was in the office of the campus psychiatrist.  A real shrink, not one-in-training. He sized me up pretty quickly and put me on a small dose of Prozac, a mind-altering drug. He warned me that it would take a month or more for me to feel its effects. I asked him about any unwanted side effects. Reduced libido, dry mouth, weight gain. I figured I could live with all of those, for a short time at least.

On a nice spring day, a guy I knew from my Denver church shot down his estranged wife in front of her workplace and then killed himself. The Denver Post article about it said that the killer had been under the care of a psychiatrist and was taking Prozac. Experts quoted in the article debated the pluses and minuses of the drug known generically as Fluoxetine. I read all of it but didn't have to as I knew that Prozac was involved. During our next session, I asked the psychiatrist about dangerous side effects such as murder. He took my question seriously but advised me to be cautious when reading about antidepressants because a lot of misinformation was circulating and the Internet was in its infancy. I stuck with the program and gradually, as spring turned to summer, I began to feel better.

I signed up for the arts education project at the Colorado Council for the Arts (now Colorado Creative Industries). They planned to send me to a small town in eastern Colorado for a semester to teach writing in the mornings and model my writing skills in the afternoon. I'd get paid a stipend and would stay at a teacher's house. I could see my family on weekends.

That summer, I worked on my thesis, taught composition at AIMS Community College in Greeley, and served  as the English Department rep to the CSU Fine Arts Committee.  I learned how to stage events, some of them quite big. I was charged with bringing writers to campus. Over the course of 18 months, I worked with Gwendolyn Brooks, Etheridge Knight, Maya Angelou, Linda Hogan, David Lee, Larry Heinemann, and others. It was a thrill to meet some of the writers I had read. As I shepherded them around campus, I had some one-on-one time with them, asked them about their work, tried to get tips to help my own writing.

I brought Etheridge Knight to the Larimer County Jail where he coaxed a group of inmates to try out their poetic voices. Knight had been a jailbird himself, and a heroin addict after being wounded in the Korean War. He spoke from a deep well of experience. I spoke to Heinemann about the voice he used in Paco's Story, winner of the National Book Award. When I picked the novel off of the library shelves, I was hooked by the voice, a dead grunt who addresses a man named just "James" ("This ain't no war story, James") and narrates Paco's tale in a "sad and bitter voice." I took David Lee on a tour of his old dorm which now served as offices for me and my fellow teaching assistants.  It was a thrill listening to the diminutive Brooks reciting the "We Real Cool" poem that's included in almost every 20th century poetry anthology:

All of this took time away from my writing and classes. But it was this experience that led me to my 25-year career as an arts administrator.

You just never know where life will lead you. 

Part V: The Way Mike Worked -- Serving Fish 'n' Chips in Shrimp 'n' Grits Country

We called her Mom. She insisted. Never found out her real name. Her husband Tally called her "dear" or "hon" in the Southern way. She was younger than Tally by a decade or so, or so she seemed. Tally walked a limp that we thought came from the war, World War II, the one that all of our father's fought in. He said it came from a gunshot, a disagreement among bootleggers during Prohibition. We had no reason not to believe him.

We met at Long John Silver's Fish and Chips across from the University of South Carolina campus. Mom was the manager. She had replaced our first manager who had been skimming a bit off the top of the nightly deposit. One day he was our boss. And then he was gone.

In October of 1970, I was one of a half-dozen employees, mostly students, at this fast-food restaurant named for the fictional pirate in "Treasure Island." Color scheme was the brown of "a dead man's chest" and the gold of new doubloons. Everything was fried in vats of hot grease that was a shimmering gold when new and a dark brown when old and ready to be refreshed but it was almost quitting time and the day crew could do it. All of us wore grease-spatter splotches on our arms. Meals were served in cardboard replicas of a chest of gold. Sides were fries and hush puppies. Condiments were tartar sauce and malt vinegar that the Brits allegedly used on the fish and chips they bought at street corner vendors in London. My co-workers and I tried to cook up extra food at the end of the night so we could carry some home for late-night greasyspoon snacks.

Fish-and-chips were a new concept in the South. Some customers ordered and then wondered why they got fries instead of chips. We had to explain that in England, fries were called chips. The potatoes were a bit chunkier over there, not flat or curved or crispy, but they still were called chips.

After avoiding work and most of my classes my freshman year, I decided that I needed a job. I had premonitions of bad juju to come. I could read the tea leaves that we used in our sweet tea. I could divine the stars. I also could read the grade reports sent home by the university. I was on probation after a lackluster freshman year. I swore to the Navy ROTC unit's marine major that I was going to do better, really I was. He looked at my grades and the report of my lackluster performance on my first-year summer cruise. I had sailed to Guantanamo Bay and back on the USS John F. Kennedy. I had neglected my duties.

I did, however, distinguish myself during a 1970 Fourth of July weekend leave in D.C. when my BFF Pat and I rescued his younger sisters and grandmother from a stampeding crowd at the Honor America Day Concert at the Washington Monument. The riot wasn't a reaction to another sappy tune by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir or another joke by Bob Hope. But a cloud of tear gas launched to disperse the Yippie-sponsored smoke-in at the monument. Pat's and my quick action didn't save any lives but we were proud of it nonetheless. Too bad that didn't show up in my midshipman record. I might have received a medal. "For valor in rescuing civilians threatened by a cloud of tear gas fired on pot-smoking hippies." Something like that. Later, Pat and I and his older brother Mike smoked a joint and talked about what a weird night it was.

When I returned to Norfolk, just before our ship sailed to Cuba, I called my girlfriend and she broke up with me.

I was looking for a new girlfriend when I returned to campus in the fall. I had a crush on one of my fish-and-chips coworkers. Kaley was pretty, blonde and had a wicked sense of humor. She also had a boyfriend, a Vietnam vet named Tim whose hair got longer and shaggier every time he came to pick Kaley up from work. The duo invited me to a party one night. I hung around Kaley and Tim as I didn't know anyone and my short haircut fueled my paranoia and everyone else's, or so it seemed. Tim broke out a syringe and prepared it, junkie-style. He shot up Kaley and then held up the syringe for me. I was almost stoned enough to say yes. But I didn't. Tim proceeded to minister to himself. They were soon in la-la land and didn't notice as I slipped out of the house and walked several miles back to my dorm.

The U.S. Navy revoked my scholarship in January and I was on my own. I could finally grow my hair and major in English. I kept working at Long John Silver's. When spring sprang, Mom and Tally asked me to come to their house and mow the lawn. Mom would feed me lunch. I agreed. It was the first of many trips to their house. By summer, the mowing of the lawn was an ordeal, with sweat streaming off of me and me pining for AC and a cold drink. One afternoon, stunned by Carolina heat, I went into the house. Heading for the bathroom, I opened the wrong door into a bedroom. It had a single bed, a shelf with photos and football trophies. The photos showed a young man in football uniform, in graduation gown, in army uniform.

"Our son Tom." Startled, I turned to see Mom in the doorway. She wore a sad face, unusual for her. She walked in and stood next to me. She picked up the photo of her son in uniform. "Missing in action. Vietnam. We kept his room ready for him but he hasn't come back. Three years now. Our only child." She replaced the photo. "Lunch is ready." She walked out and I followed. Mom and Tally were the same talkative duo they always were. Now that I am an old man, I recognize the relentless nature of sorrow. Sometimes, small talk over lemonade and sandwiches with tomatoes fresh from the garden are the only things for it.

A few weeks later, a traveling circus troupe came to town with a batch of purple haze fresh from the octopus's garden. We had a wonderful time. The circus people left town but I found my jacked-up self in the campus cafeteria babbling over breakfast to a group of exchange students from Hong Kong. They were very polite. And then I was at the university infirmary, knocked down by thorazine.

At the end of USC's summer session, I ended my college career and quit my job as a fish-and-chips wrangler. I left town. My plan was to live at my parents' house and surf until I got drafted.

Part IV: The Way Mike Worked -- This job stinks!

"This job stinks," I complained to Ronnie.

He looked at me over a pile of dirty laundry. Smoke from a Marlboro wreathed his face. He removed the cigarette and exhaled a big cloud. "Do what I do."

I stared. I was dense. "What?"

He unrolled the pack of cigs from his T-shirt sleeve and popped one out. He walked over to me, stuck the cigarette in my mouth and lit it with his Zippo. "Inhale," he said.

I inhaled. I'd smoked a few cigarettes before, usually late at night at a beer bash when anything seemed like a good idea: smoking cigarettes, skinny dipping in a gator pond, driving on sidewalks. In the summer of '69, I was a latecomer to nicotine. My parents smoked, as did most of their friends. Some of my buddies smoked. But I was a jock in high school and coach commanded that we not smoke. I wanted to do what coach said. 

"Watch me," Ronnie said in his Tennessee drawl. He gripped the end of the rolling container with its mound of laundry. You could almost see the fumes coming from the sheets and towels accumulated in 24 hours at the nursing home. "Let the smoke drift up into your nose -- that knocks out the smell." He pushed his cart out the laundry room doors and down the corridor, smoke trailing behind him. I followed with my load. Smoke rose from my mouth to my nose to my eyes. Within seconds, my eyes watered. I kept close to Ronnie, lest I run over one of the dazed oldsters wandering the halls. I was getting it -- the smoke blocked the smell. It also burned my nose and eyes, but it was a small price to pay for not smelling the smells of incontinent old people. I was 18, Ronnie my elder at 25. We were usually not burdened with inconvenient odors unless we let loose with a fart as we drove to our appointed rounds for the Acme Laundry (not its real name) of Holly Hill, Florida. But that was different. We were not old.

When we finally wheeled our loads up a ramp into the step van, our smokes were burned down to nubs. We tossed the butts on the ground as we returned to the truck cab. My eyes still watered as we continued on our rounds. Ronnie was already on another smoke. "See how easy?" he said. 

I just nodded.

I became Ronnie's assistant one hot Florida July afternoon. I worked in the laundry, loading washers and dryers with towels and sheets from old folks homes, beachside motels, and other businesses. I had left my job as bagboy at the Pantry Pride grocery store because I needed to make more money for my upcoming college expenses. The laundry doubled my salary. The work was tougher and sweatier than hauling housewives' groceries out to their station wagons. I hated the laundry, doubted I could make it to the end of August. One day, after Ronnie delivered a load to us peasants chained to our machines, he came over and introduced himself. He was a big guy with Elvis-style hair and tattoos. He looked like something out of 1955 instead of 1969. I probably did too, with my Howdy Doody face and short haircut. 

"My helper just quit," he said. "Want the job?"

"When do I start?"

"Tomorrow at 6."

"Six in the morning?"

He laughed. "See you then."

What a reprieve! Riding with Ronnie started an hour earlier but I didn't care. We hit the mainland businesses first as the laundry only started piling up in the late morning at the beach motels as the housekeeping staff worked their way through the rooms. Sometimes Ronnie picked me up in his muscle car as I had sold my own car as it was a POS after three years of hard use. We knocked off at 3 just as the world really heated up or burst into an afternoon thunderstorm. 

Ronnie just got out of the Navy the year before. He served a stint on a ship off of Vietnam and had accumulated some tattoos and a dose of the clap in the Philippines. He got a kick out of the fact that I was off to be a Navy ROTC student, someone who one day might be an officer giving orders to the likes of swabs like him. For now, he was the one giving orders. "You ain't no officer yet," he'd say if he caught me loafing. "Yes sir," I'd say. His response: "I ain't no sir -- I work for a living. That's what my chief used to say."

I think about my 18-year-old self. I was excited and scared to be off to college. I was sad to leave my girlfriend behind -- she was attending a school 300 miles from me. I loved her and I said so and she loved me, or so she said. What did we know? Our family home burned down that summer but all 11 of us survived. We lived in a small place while waiting to rebuild. Problem was, all the clothes I'd collected for college burnt up in the fire or were impregnated with smoke. Early in the summer my surfboard had been stolen and, for the first time in four years, I felt left out of the beach scene. 

About a week before I quit the laundry, Ronnie took me to his trailer for lunch. He wanted me to meet somebody. We got out of the step van and walked to the door. A woman answered. Ronnie introduced us.. 

"Hello ma'am," I said. 

The woman wore long gray hair pulled back in a braid, a pleasant face etched with tiny lines around the mouth and eyes. "Don't call me ma'am -- I'm Shirley."

"OK, Shirley." 

Ronnie planted a kiss on her lips and I suddenly realized this was his wife. I'd called her ma'am because I thought she was his mother. I was surprised and a bit embarrassed for me and for Ronnie. Shirley served us tomato and mayo sandwiches and lemonade. She as nice and had a good sense of humor. She wasn't really that old, maybe in her late 30s or 40s. Old enough to be my mother but not Ronnie's. As we ate at the trailer's tiny table, she asked about me, what I liked to do, my plans for the fall. 

"You got a girl?" She smiled.

"Yes ma'am..."

"Shirley."

"Shirley, I have a girlfriend."

"She's pretty, too," Ronnie said as he chewed. "Drives a Firebird."

"It's her dad's," I said.

"Your girl going to the same college?"

"No. We plan to see each other for football games, and during school breaks.,"

"That's good, hon," she said. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder."  She explained that she and Ronnie met at a Daytona bar after she left Georgia after a bad divorce.They hit it off and married after a few weeks. "Newlyweds," she said.

Earlier I had caught a glimpse of an unmade bed at the far end of the trailer. I imagined the two of them in that bed. I didn't want to but I couldn't help it. The trailer began to close in around me and I was relieved when Ronnie said it was time to get back to work. We said our farewells and that was the last time I saw Shirley. 

As we returned to our route, Ronnie, as if divining my thoughts, said, "She makes me happy." 

I just nodded. He drove the rest of the way in silence.

On my last day at work, Ronnie and I sat in the step van in a motel lot watching the waves break. A half-dozen surfers bobbed in the line-up.

"Those good waves?" he asked.

"Pretty good."

"We could have brought your surfboard with us on some of our runs. You could have done some surfing."

I told him that my board had been stolen. 

He nodded. Handed me his Zippo. On its side was a U.S. Navy emblem. "Going-away present."

"Thanks," I said. "I may try to give up smoking."

"No matter. You can light some of your marijuana cigarettes with it."

I laughed. "They're called joints, Ronnie."

"No matter. All you kids smoke it. My shipmates did. A lot of the guys in Vietnam. I tried it a few times. Just made me tired. I'll stick with beer and whiskey."

I thanked him again.That afternoon, I said my farewells to Ronnie and the laundry. My girlfriend picked me up. A week ;later, we said our own forlorn farewells during a last walk on the beach. 

Somewhere along the line, I lost the lighter and I lost my way. Shall I pin the blame on marijuana cigarettes? It's more complicated than that. 

Blogger's Note: I changed the names of the characters in this piece and the name of the laundry. I had to reconstruct the dialogue because it was 49 years ago and I wasn't taking notes. Most of the rest of the story is true. 

Another blogger's note: The Laramie County Public Library kicks off the fall season with the Smithsonian exhibit, "The Way We Worked." Sponsored by Wyoming Humanities, the exhibit "engages viewers with a history of work." It opens Sept. 22 and runs through Nov. 13. Grand opening is a "Hands-on History Expo" on Sept. 28 where you can "dial a rotary phone, draw water with a hand pump, enjoy old-fashioned refreshments (make your own ice cream!) and much more." You can see antique tractors, a wheat-washing machine and an old-fashioned library card catalog. I viewed the exhibit-in-progress yesterday. Great display of tools used to mine, log, and build railroads and dwellings in the West. I finally understood the difference between a dugout and a sod house or "soddie." One thing I know -- I would have gone stark-raving mad living in either one. 

Dear White People: Columbia University wants to know what you think about the issues of the day

Columbia University's Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE) wants to find out what white and partially-white folks in Cheyenne think about their role in society.

They came to the right place as Cheyenne is mostly white and partially white, ethnically speaking. The latest census figures for Laramie County, Wyoming, shows that 89 percent of the population checks the Caucasian or "white" box under the question about race.

I haven't yet received the results from DNA testing from ancestry.com, but I can attest I am probably all-white, or at least mostly white. I would love to see a percentage come back showing I am partially sub-Saharan African or Latino or Asian. But anyone can look at me and say, "Damn, I've never seen anyone so white." If I didn't have freckles where I was kissed by the sun, I would be so white that I would glow in the dark.

One more thing. I could be a little Basque on my maternal grandfather's side. He came from Ireland but had a very un-Irish name in Hett. Some genealogical research by my cousin showed that the name probably was de la Hett, possibly from the genes of a Spanish Armada sailor or maybe one of the French soldiers who occasionally ventured into Ireland to join the Irish in a doomed uprising. Ever read "The Year of the French?" I'm not giving anything away to say that it ends badly.

So I am European of the northern variety with maybe a dash of southern Europe.

Which brings me back to the Columbia University INCITE study. At the county Democratic Party convention at LCCC a few weeks ago, flyers circulated that promoted a survey for white people. Here's the basic text:

Columbia University is conducting a study here in Cheyenne on race and ethnicity, specifically about how white or partially white people think about their own race/ethnicity. If interested, you can take their survey by going to www.cheyennestudy-columbia.org/participate/ 

How could I resist? I went to the site and filled out the survey. It included questions about race, religious preference and political affiliation, among other things. I checked "none" for religion. This is a tough one for me. I do not go to church. But I spent my early life in churches and catechism classes and Catholic schools. I spent much of my adult life working hard at being a Catholic who believes in the social justice gospel. It was a losing battle. So I don't go to church. Shoot me. Fortunately, the bill to allow firearms in churches did not make it through the crackpot legislature this year. But it may in 2019.

I invite my fellow Cheyenne residents to fill out the survey. It would be fun to skew the results in favor of liberals. Imagine the eggheads at Columbia looking at their results and deciding that Cheyenne, Wyoming, was the most liberal place on the planet, more so than Boulder, Colo., and San Francisco and some of those college towns in Vermont. Wouldn't that be an eye-opener?

So take a fifteen-minute break and fill out the survey. You'll be glad you did.

Old photo recalls 1970s-era campus hijinks

This photo by renowned photog and my college housemate Bob Page shows ritualistic behavior in collegians circa 1975. In the mid-70s, it was all the rage to put hats on dogs. The dogs thought the hats made them look smart so began to apply in droves to major American universities such as University of Florida. Soon, canines pushed not-so-bright humans (example at left in photo) out of popular classes in the English department, such as "Romantic Poets: Proto-Hippies Blake and Coleridge" or "No Man is an Island: John Donne Goes to Vietnam." Problems developed later when scores of Canis familiaris went wild during graduation's cap-tossing ceremony, mistaking the flying caps for frisbees. Chaos ensued, leading directly to Donald Trump.

What I learned in graduate school, part one

It seems as if I've read hundreds of critiques about M.F.A. writing programs over the years. They usually fall into two camps.
No. 1: I spent three years and tens of thousands of dollars on an M.F.A. program and all I got was this lousy diploma.
No. 2: Grad school was worth it -- I learned more than I thought I would.

Alas, I've read more of the former than the latter. They usually are written by young people who have joined the system without much life experience which, of course, is what it means to be young. Does this 65-year-old retiree remember how it was to be 19 or 21 and flummoxed by a university system -- any university system? I was an overachiever, a scholarship student, who crashed and burned after two years at a major American university. The fault was my own, although I spent many years blaming the university and the government and my parents and the phases of the moon. I am an ex-newspaper reporter and satirist who loves it when people take on any system. Doesn't mean the writer is correct in his/her critique. It's fun to be pissed off in print and get attention. 

I'm going to say some nice things about my M.F.A. program. Stop here if you prefer to read the negative over the positive. You may learn something but no guarantee, just as there is no guarantee that an M.F.A. program will make you a stellar writer and a denizen of the Literary World. 

Before I begin, let me thank writer Marian Palaia who wrote a recent essay, "The Real World vs. the M.F.A." for Literary Hub at http://lithub.com/the-real-world-vs-the-mfa/. If fact, you can skip this blog and go read Palaia's piece, as it covers most of the same ground that I do. She's close to my age (pushing 60) and earned her M.F.A. as an older student, older even than I was at 41. Such a wonderful essay that I'm ordering her novel and reading it. The least I can do for a fellow writer.

I liked these lines from her essay:

I do not advise waiting as long as I did to get an MFA, if you are sure that what you want to do is to write. What I do advise is gaining some awareness of the world, and of the people in it who are not like you, before you go into a program.

At 37, I had met a lot of people not like me. Gang-bangers, corporate CEOs, jocks, cabbies, political activists, druggies, yuppies, loonies, etc. I had held tons of jobs, some temporary gigs as hospital orderly and warehouse worker, to full-time jobs as corporate editor and newspaper reporter. When I began to look around for creative writing programs, I had one goal in mind: become a better writer. I had written articles on teen-age swimming phenoms to automotive fan belts. I'd written a novel, which earned me an agent but not a publisher.  My agent advised me to quit my job, go down to my basement and write full-time. I knew that hunkering down in my basement with my typewriter was a bad idea. I could see myself typing, the clatter of the keys clanging off of the basement walls. But I could also see myself wandering the basement rooms, haunted look on my face. Not good for an introvert depressive to be alone all day in his basement. Visions of Emily Dickinson, tormented in her attic. Ernest Hemingway and shotgun at his writing desk in remote Idaho.

I also wanted to meet interesting people. I guess you can do that anywhere. But writers, even in academia, should be interesting, right?

Thee first interesting person I met was writer and faculty member John Clark Pratt. My wife, son and I were in Fort Collins looking for a rental. I decided to drop into the CSU English Department. Dr. Pratt (I could call him John but he'll always be Dr. Pratt to me) was the lone M.F.A. faculty member hanging out in the Eddy Building on a July afternoon. He welcomed me, told me a bit about the program, which only began the year before. Only later did I learn that Dr. Pratt was the author of "The Laotian Fragments," a pilot in Vietnam, and one of the country's experts on the literature of the Vietnam War. He helped establish the CSU library's special collection on Vietnam. In the late 1980s, it featured unpublished manuscripts by veterans, published works by some well-known writers and an assortment of notes and research and ephemera. You can visit it still. Might even be online now.

When school began in late August, I met the rest of the faculty and my fellow students. For the most part, the faculty was closer in age to me than the students, but I had expected that. John Calderazzo was the creative non-fiction guru, A world traveler, he wrote mostly on environmental issues and wrote an excellent book on volcanoes. He'd been a free-lance writer for years, writing articles for corporate, real estate and automotive mags to make extra cash. We free-lanced a real estate piece together, since I also was on the lookout for extra cash.

David Milofsky was a novelist and short-story writer. He'd just left a position with Denver University to take the job at CSU, and commuted from Denver. Milofsky had been an investigative reporter in Milwaukee and still had that hard-bitten city reporter attitude. He was my adviser as I liked his fiction and he liked the fact that I was a bit older than the other students and not so naive and wide-eyed. Poet Bill Tremblay was from Jack Keroauc's hometown and played football before turning to poetry. He was more coach than academic. Mentor to many poets and the faculty member that you knew would turn up for every student reading. I worked for him as student editor of the campus literary magazine, the Colorado Review.

Mary Crow was the other poetry prof. She may have been the most academic of the bunch. She traveled widely, was bilingual and made sure that students got a taste of writers from all over the world through the visiting writers program. Receptions were always held at her house, potlucks where us budding writers got a chance to gnosh and chat with writers such as Paul Monette, Linda Hogan, Tomaz Salamun, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Mary talked me into being the M.F.A. student rep to the university's Fine Arts Program, which led to my career in arts administration -- more about that later. Leslee Becker was a fine short story writer and quirky human. She mentored us short story writers and also LGBT students in the English department.

One of my four semester-long workshops was with short story writer Steve Schwartz. I learned a lot in the workshop, but possibly the best info I got from Steve was about the Colorado Council on the Arts' Arts Education program. I applied, was accepted, and next thing I know, I'm signed up to spent a month in Peetz on the prairie as a paid visiting writer. The goal was to mentor high school students for half the day and write the other half. I never made it to Peetz as a writer/teacher, The students never knew what they missed, and neither did I. My job in Wyoming would place me in charge of a visiting writers program called Tumblewords, brainchild of the Western States Arts Federation (WESTAF), then located in Santa Fe, now in Denver.

Most of these writers who also were teachers are now retired, as I am. A new crew took over, which is the way of things. I learned so much from them, and I was able to work with them in new and interesting ways when I found my calling.

In my next installment, I'll talk about all the good stuff I learned during my three years in the M.F.A. program. Stay tuned...

Slate asks: What if UW President Tom Buchanan had given a speech defending "Carbon Sink?"

From an Oct. 31 article by Michelle Nijhuis on Slate Online about the "Carbon Sink" brouhaha at the University of Wyoming (the controversy that wouldn't die):

The University of Wyoming, like most public universities, has a mission statement that calls for academic freedom and free expression. University donors are supposed to further that mission, not try to restrict it, and university leaders are supposed to defend it.

What if President Buchanan had given a speech...? He could have acknowledged the reaction to Carbon Sink (taking care to first learn its name), and acknowledged the economic and political power of the coal industry in Wyoming. He could have acknowledged the science -- some conducted at his own university -- that demonstrates the connections between coal power and climate change, and climate change and forest decline. And he could have said that while coal is useful and important, it’s equally important to not only acknowledge its costs but also work to reduce them. He could have pointed to existing university programs aimed at doing just that, and called on the legislature -- and the industry -- to fund more.

It wouldn’t have ended the controversy. But it might have opened the conversation.

Nijhuis also explored another controversy over public art, this one at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. A student group demanded the removal of a Thomas Hart Benton mural that shows KKK members in robes. The KKK almost took over the state of Indiana. Benton was just trying to show his state's history, major warts and all. This controversy ended when the UI President made a speech, refusing to remove the mural, calling on UI students and faculty to use it as a teaching moment. Which they did.

Imagine that?

This Liberal Arts grad in Wyoming urges Florida creatives to come to a place where they are valued

Florida's Gov. Rick Scott and his hand-picked education commission want to charge creatives more college tuition than science and math majors. Students in creative fields at the big Florida universities, such as UF (my alma mater) and FSU (the enemy campus in Tallahassee), will pay more than students pursuing high-demand fields, such as ag and engineering and medicine. Read all about in the Huffington Post.

I have only one response: Go West, young creatives. In the Big Square States, we value your contributions. Thus far, Colorado and Wyoming and New Mexico and Utah are not talking about charging higher tuition for budding painters than they are for budding lawyers. Sure, tuition is rising, but the Colorado governor (himself a creative sort and an arts supporter) and legislature have said nothing about charging a higher rate for a poet than for a pediatrician. This is a good thing, as I would like to see more writers and musicians attending Colorado State University in Fort Collins than fewer. Sure, I want the pre-med people too, and the computer tech and agronomy majors. We need creativity in all economic sectors. But to charge more? Absurd.

I earned my master of fine arts degree in creative writing from CSU in 1992. I parlayed that into a career in arts administration. Along the way, I've published my own work and continue to do so.

I'm also talking about the University of Wyoming in Laramie. For the first time, according to the UW President's special assistant Mike Massie. campus enrollment has crept above 14,000. 14,000? That's the number of business majors at UF. And, a few years ago, UW embarked on an amazing building boom. Know what the coolest new buildings are on campus? Visual arts and the expanded library. Anthropology, too, and business. The performing arts building will soon get a multimillion dollar overhaul. And so will one of the oldest buildings on campus, the one that houses the English Department and humanities. The English Department! That includes the fine creative writing program, too, a place that boasts fine writers such as Alyson Hagy and Brad Watson and Jeff Lockwood, who's a bug scientist (entomologist,, for those non-English majors) and a fine writer. There's also a slate of visiting writers that will knock your socks off: Salman Rushdie, Francine Prose, John D'Agata, Rebecca Solnit, Don DeLillo, etc. 

Come West, young creatives. We won't stigmatize you or your passions. It will still remain difficult to find jobs, English majors. No guarantees! You still will have student loans to repay and you still must eat (unofficial Wyoming state motto: "You can't eat the scenery"). But a blue ribbon state commission will not tell you that your dreams are worth less than others.

A word about campus censorship. And this is especially important for visual artists. You may have heard about the removal of Chris Drury's environmental sculpture, "Carbon Sink." It truly was a cowardly act, removing a sculpture just because it offended the state's coal industry. We are a conservative state with some heinous attitudes. We have our own birthers and fundies and "Don't Tread on Me" loonies. But what the heck -- you now live in Florida with the likes of Rick Scott and Marco Rubio. The Florida Panhandle is about as redneck as it gets. And you don't have to read Carl Hiaasen's Miami Herald columns or his funky novels to understand the lamebrain nature of the Florida legislature. If you're going to be embroiled in an arts controversy, you may as well come West where the air is clean and you can escape to nearby mountains for solitude and inspiration.

The Front Range is also known (by some) as the Silicon Valley of Craft Breweries. While I shy away from encouraging indulgence in spiritous substances, I also know that  where there are microbrews, there are artrepreneurs and mountain bike shops and nifty bistros and high-tech start-ups. Scientists have yet to prove the axiom: "Which comes first, the microbew or the creative economy." I do know that they go together. When it comes to overindulgence, it's a fact that the craft beer community polices its own. So, if you want to get drunk and cut the fool, you can go back to Florida, get your Parrothead on and drink Jimmy Buffett's crappy beer. Sorry, Jimmy, I love your music but dislike your books and beer. Can't do everything well, even if you do have a mighty platform to operate from.

In my next post, I'm going to share helpful links that can illustrate to you creatives what "Out West" has to offer.

BTW: Go Gators! Beat the Dawgs!

You can "harumph" all you want, but a generational shift is underway in the arts world

Argentango is one of the many artists and
arts groups seen on Old Town Fort Collins
street corners during "Streetmospheres."

Way back in the previous century -- 1998 I think it was -- Fort Collins, Colo., sent out the call for a new motto. The old one was getting frayed around the edges.

The city received lots of ideas. But this is the one I remember best: "Fort Collins: Where Cheyenne Shops."

It was meant tongue and cheek and wasn't adopted. Without looking it up, I cannot tell you the current motto of F.C. This points out that they are probably unnecessary and a waste of the citizenry's time. It also illustrates the fact that there are any number of truisms attached to a city that probably don't belong -- or won't fit -- on its web site banner. I can think of several for Fort Collins:

• Where Cheyenne and Laramie shop
• Where Cheyenne and Laramie teens go to party and see indie bands on weekends
• Where Mike Shay and his beloved wife go to dine
• Where Wyoming craft beer fans go to refill their growlers
• Where Cheyenne people go to marvel at a vibrant downtown that doesn't have a huge hole as its centerpiece
• Where Cheyenne people go to get their hail-damaged cars repaired because we can't wait until February 2013 for an appointment

I could go on, but won't. The whole shopping thing is not as true in 2011 as it was in 1998. Cheyenne has many of the same big box stores that line College Avenue in Fort Collins. We have chain restaurants by the score. Our arts and entertainment offerings are growing.

But we live in the era of thriving downtowns. Fort Collins has one of the best in the West. It has that odd diagonal parking scheme in the middle of the street. It has galleries and funky shops and concert venues and sidewalk cafes.

You just can't get this in Cheyenne. Cheyennites say that it's just so much easier to travel 45 minutes to Fort Collins (or 90 minutes to Denver) than create something similar in our own downtown.

Harumph, harumph.

Part of that is a generational thing. Cheyenne gets high marks from Old Codger Magazine as a great place for retirement. Low crime rate! Low taxes! Low energy level! Cheyenne gets high marks from Old Military Codger Magazine as one of the top ten places for military retirees. Military base amenities and two-for-one hip replacements at the VA! Retirees of all stripes have a future (albeit a limited one) in Cheyenne!

Zzzzzzz....

Meanwhile, down in the city named after a fort that never existed, young people gather. Hipster.com recommends F.C. highly for its many hipster hangouts. Bust Your Head Wide Open mag calls the place one of "America's dream towns" for its active outdoor sports culture. The signature label at New Belgium Brewery is Fat Tire and it's brewed by wind power and tended by goatee-sporting brewmeisters. Almost 30,000 young people attend CSU and many grads stick around to start businesses in a town known for its entrepreneurship.

So it's only natural that Fort Collins entities have banded together to create the Arts Incubator of the Rockies. Those of us at the AIR meeting this past week in F.C. were anything but hipsters. Our median age may have been 45. But we're all looking ahead rather than behind. Our futures depend on it.

Traditional art forms are on the decline, and have been for at least a decade. Symphonies, opera, ballet, art museums, and all the rest see declining attendance. The audiences that remain are older. Expenses continue to climb. Even a math-challenged person such as myself (age 60.9163) can see that this is a losing proposition.

On the other hand, art schools continue to crank out record numbers of artists and writers and musicians. The supply side is thriving. The traditional demand side is shrinking. But a survey by Julliard shows that only 10 percent of music grads stay in the industry. Wonder how other university departments would look at such dismal statistics. "UW School of Geology: 90 percent of our grads work at McDonald's!" "CSU Veterinary School: Only 10 percent of our grads have anything to do with animals!"

Beet Street in Fort Collins is trying to breathe some new life into both the creation and the presentation of the arts. They are joined in this regional endeavor by the CSU School of the Arts and the City of Fort Collins. They were partners in a successful National Endowment for the Arts' Our Town grant that brings $100,000 to the AIR effort. The Western States Arts Federation in Denver and nine state arts agencies gathered in F.C. last week to discuss our involvement.

In Saturday's post, I outlined some of the core and potential programs that will be addressed by AIR. The major physical effort will be the renovation of the old Carnegie Library into a regional arts center.

We toured the building on Thursday. It's one of a cluster of historic buildings in City Park. Next door is the sprawling county library, which once was housed in the Carnegie Building, as was the case in hundreds of American towns and cities.

Exhibits, archives and storage for the Fort Collins Museum are now crammed into the Carnegie. All of it, along with the staff, will move to the new 47,000-square-foot Fort Collins Museum and Discovery Science Center by the summer. This new public-private partnership will feature interactive exhibits that blend history and science. It also has a new Digital Dome Theatre that is part planetarium and part IMAX

Meanwhile, back at the Carnegie, Beet Street's Beth Flowers tells us about the plans for the space. It will feature physical classrooms, a virtual learning center, an AIR resource center, Beet Street offices, black box theatre, gallery and other public spaces. The city owns the building so will maintain and manage it. CSU will conduct community-based continuing ed courses as well as classes that will feed into its new minor in Arts Business and Leadership and Master of Music in Arts Leadership and Administration.

"Bronwyn's Factory" by UW Prof Ricki Klages was 
selected from 1,200 entries for the prestigious
Manifest Press's inaugural
 International Painting Annual.

Yet to be decided is how neighboring states fit into the equation. We spent two days last week discussing options in the newly renovated Lincoln Center. Wyoming trains scads of artists at its lone four-year public university and its many community colleges. How will AIR serve them? The University of Wyoming could have its own CSU-like "A" for "Agricultural" on a mountain if one were close enough to campus. And that "A" could stand for "Arts." UW is in the midst of a complete revamping of its arts infrastructure. The massive new visual arts building, located strategically next to the award-winning UW Art Museum, will open in January. The old fine arts building will get a complete renovation over the course of the new two years. The English Department's creative writing program (ranked No. 30 in the nation by Poets & Writers mag) continues to be housed in the oldest building on campus (go figure).

Beefed-up endowments bring amazing performers, artists and writers to campus. Internationally-renowned dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones wraps up his UW residency this month. Rebecca Solnit, Camille Dungy, Colson Whitehead and Salman Rushdie have taught young writers the past few years. Visual artists such as Jesus Moroles, Deborah Butterfield and Ursula von Rydingsvard have taught at UW and their sculptures have been featured on campus.

But the problem remains. UW does not have an arts administration degree program. And students still get a limited exposure to the business side of the arts. Some will get teacher certification and teach. Some will go on to master's and Ph.D. programs and teach. May others will want to make a living as artists and will have to figure it out for themselves.

We in Wyoming have an option that other regional players don't have -- we're right down the road from the AIR project in Fort Collins. Those arts business courses will be nearby. Some will be offered online, too. But since you're already traveling down snow-clogged roads to go to the hookah bar, why not take a workshop while you're there?

At last week's meeting, we talked extensively about ways that state arts agencies such as the Wyoming Arts Council could help sponsor AIR courses. Wyoming students could attend physical classes in F.C. Or maybe some of those courses could be offered at UW in some sort of cooperative agreement with border rival CSU. We talked about a partnership among regional land-grant universities -- all of our states have one.

We have hundreds of talented artists in Wyoming. We also have a problem with our college grads moving out of state to start careers in Denver, Salt Lake City, L.A., and Portland. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could find ways for our homegrown creatives to stay in Casper and Pinedale and Evanston? They will need business acumen to do so. Luck helps, too. But what's that famous saying about luck? "The harder I work the luckier I get." Maybe that should be: "The smarter I work the luckier I get."

We all need to work smarter in tough times. AIR could be one of the ways to work smarter. Wouldn't it be great if Cheyenne could claim a new motto that said: "Cheyenne: Where Fort Collins buys art and attends arts events."

Music on Cheyenne's Depot Plaza

I'll keep you posted on AIR developments. Also get updates on the Wyoming Arts Council blog.