Oral history interview with Tom Kirby-Smith, Jr., 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Tom Kirby-Smith Jr.
INTERVIEWER: Linda Danford
DATE: September 10, 1990
[Begin Side A]
LD: Tom, when did you come to UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]?
TK-S: I came in the fall of 1967.
LD: And that was after the college had become coed? Is that right?
TK-S: Yes, it had just been—I forget how many years, but it was a very small percentage of men in
college at that time.
LD: About how many were you teaching in a classroom situation?
TK-S: Well, the first year that I taught, '67, '68, it seemed to me that I had a couple of freshman
classes that had nothing but women in it. And I really only became aware of there being any
men at all the next year when I had a triple section of freshmen that met twice a week and
then divided up into sections with my two teaching—or assistants, anyway people with
assistantships—and that was seventy-five students. I think there were about five men in that
class. And they'd huddle together in the back of the room and whisper among themselves.
They were sort of troublesome because they were very defensive and lonesome. [laughs]
LD: But there was a feeling of that there was kind of a—like when Vassar [College,
Poughkeepsie, New York] went coed—that it was something of a novelty or an adventure
for a male to come to UNCG?
TK-S: Well, there was some, a few men, who felt that way. I'm afraid that most of them were
students that hadn't been able to get in somewhere else and had been accepted in an effort to
bring about the coeducation. Now, as it happened that year, I had a very bright student,
who—I've never understood why he came here, unless his idea was that he was going to be
in a situation where there were a hundred women for each man in the school. That's all I can
figure, or let’s say twenty to one. But after one semester he left, and he was able to transfer
to Bard College [Annandale-on-Hudson, New York], which is not easy for most of our
students to do. So I never asked him why he was here. He'd been to some expensive prep
school, but he was a very unusual—mostly you had these—well, the boys tended to be very
poor students in comparison with the women.
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LD: Did you find your women students to be quite good?
TK-S: Yes, I mean, at that time. It was just then, and only for about two or three more years that the
school still had some of the character of the old Woman's College of the University of North
Carolina graduates. I had the impression that many of these women had mothers or aunts or
somebody that had been here. That's just my impression. And we were still, at that point
gathering in from around the South. There were quite a lot of women who'd thought of
Woman's College of the University of North Carolina as a good place to go, but not too far
from home and not expensive, especially to go from other states—from Mississippi and
Georgia, South Carolina. But mostly, I think, I had Carolina—very good students. A certain
number were—a large portion of them were good students, and I was able to teach—I'm
afraid I taught rather, especially in that survey classes, I taught a pretty demanding course to
start with and expected a lot of the students.
LD: Did the—were there facilities for men on campus to live? Did they have dormitories from
the beginning, or were they just accepting them?
TK-S: I don't know what they did when they [laughs]. I really don't remember. I didn't know where
they stayed.
LD: Were you conscious of them doing anything in particular to encourage men to apply besides
lowering their standards?
TK-S: No. At that point, you remember, it was my first year of teaching, and I was trying very hard
just to stay ahead of—well, the first two months I was here I graded one thousand papers in
two months because I following the guidelines for professional English classes, which at that
time was nine papers a semester, and I didn't pay much—I was just trying to get through my
work. I didn't pay much attention to what was causing the circumstances.
LD: What curriculum changes—weren't there curriculum changes going on about that time?
Where I was they were getting rid of the requirements and going to distribution
requirements.
TK-S: There's never a time when there were not curriculum changes. [laughs] Except—now, at one
point I wanted to get around to saying this, I might as well say it right now. I think one of the
strengths of our graduate writing program is that we've never had a curriculum reform.
[laughs] Or rather, the only one that had occurred, it took place a year or two before I got
here, that is when the MFA [master of fine arts] degree established. It was thought desirable
to require the students to take the aesthetics course in the philosophy department. And that
was dropped, but that was more than twenty years ago. And as far as I can remember, that
was about the last change that we ever made. So we don't waste time on curriculum reforms.
LD: Would you talk a little bit about that program over the years?
TK-S: Well, yes. Well I think I just have to talk about it from my point of view and not from
hearsay, and I really should—and I would like to—I really ought to go back and look at
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where paper or documents that might be around that might remind me of particular things
that were going on, but I've been thinking about this since you said you were going to come
in and do this interview. And I came into the—I began to get mixed up with the MFA
program at an especially difficult time for the program because it wasn't very—well, I don't
even know exactly when it was first authorized, but there had not been many degrees granted
at all. And there were not many students. As a matter of fact, I didn't even know that the
program existed when I came here.
LD: Oh, I thought you came here because of it.
TK-S: No. I came here because—well, because I needed a job. I was offered a job. But also I knew
that there had been a lot of—I knew that the campus and the city had been hospitable to
writers and that there had been a lot of writers around. And, yes, I always liked to think
about how about two years before I came here, I kept in correspondence with Joe Bryant [Dr.
Joseph A. Bryant Jr., English professor], whom I had as an undergraduate teacher. And I
thought I was complimenting him one time because I know I said in a letter, "I think it’s just
wonderful the way that you have all of these fine writers on your faculty, and you don't have
one of these awful MFA Programs." [laughs] But—so I just thought that they were being
hospitable to writers, which indeed was the way it was initially.
Really the program came into existence here because—for example, back in the
1930s, [husband and wife] Allen Tate [American essayist, social commentator, poet laureate
consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress] and Caroline Gordon [American novelist
and literary critic] had been hired jointly onto the faculty. And Randall Jarrell [American
poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and a consultant in poetry to the
Library of Congress] had come. Now I'm just rattling off the old history of the connection of
the school of writers when it was—when the whole school was a much smaller operation.
But anyway, when I first got here—well, to start with my first year, I didn't have
time, as I said, to pay any attention to anything much that was going on around me because I
was trying so hard to prepare my classes and keep up with my paper grading. I was just
plugging away at that. But I did begin right away to make friends with and—with people
connected with the writing program, especially Jim Applewhite [American poet, English
professor]. And as soon as I got here, [Robert] Bob Watson [poet, English professor] invited
me and some of the writing students, some other people over to his house for a party, which
was very, very nice. And so I did go to the poetry readings and the fiction readings and the
parties, and sort of hung around with the writing students and the writing faculty just because
it was agreeable. I mean, [unclear] with some of the faculty. Jim Applewhite was an
instructor just like me on one-year contracts. Fred Chappell [author, poet, English professor]
was, I guess, had just been made an assistant professor. But I said I got here or I began to get
involved with the writing program at a rather bad moment in its history. And what I mean is
this—that the Vietnam War [Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam,
Laos, and Cambodia from November 1955 to the fall of Saigon in April 1975 fought
between North and South Vietnam and their allies] was getting under way seriously. And
deferments were becoming unlikely, less and less likely, and especially for a young man who
might say that he wanted to write poetry. And also something happened—something just
went wrong with the publicity or recruiting or something, but I remember that the second
year I was here there was a considerable consternation at the end of registration period
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because only about four or five people showed up to—or maybe it was just four or five new
people, but very few graduate students showed up to enter this program.
LD: How many would have been a normal number, I mean?
TK-S: Well they were hoping—expectation was at least to get eight or ten, which is a modest
amount, but what this meant was you only had half and maybe some of the people that most
wanted to come did not even show up. So the program began to look as if it were very
anemic and somewhat flattened. And also it was a somewhat confused year for several
reasons. I'm talking now about '68 and '69, because Bob Watson went off to—he was in
California that entire year, I believe at San Fernando [California] State College. So he was
gone, and Fred Chappell had been gone for the entire previous year, so he was just coming
back. The Chappells had been in Italy, and Joe Bryant had just left, just before that year, to—
Joe left one year after I joined the faculty to go to head the department of English at Syracuse
[University, Syracuse, New York], so you have Watson gone, Joe Bryant leaving, Fred
Chappell just coming back in. And so I remember the official arrangement for the second
year that I was here was that Jim Applewhite was named acting director of the MFA
program, which Bob Watson had been doing, and then I was teaching the—going to teach
the graduate poetry writing seminar. Well, there were other things as well. This was only
about two or three years after Randall Jarrell had died, and Peter Taylor [Pulitzer Prize-winning
author] had only left the year before I came, so, you see, the program had lost its
best known faculty. It had—I mean everybody was gone, all of a sudden. And there seemed
to be no students hardly. I mean it was as if the whole thing had evaporated just at that point.
So several things happened. One thing was even though Jim Applewhite was supposed to be
directing things, Jim had always, when they were together at Duke [University, Durham,
North Carolina], been a kind of a junior partner of Fred, and so Fred really began to—when
there was action to be taken, we would discover that all of a sudden Fred had taken all of the
action without consulting anybody, which usually it worked out in a more or less desirable
direction, but anyway it was—that was somewhat confusing. I didn't—Jim was usually kind
of preempted in his role. And, in fact, with regard to admissions apparently, I think Fred saw
that the program needed students no matter what, so—I really can't document this, but as
best as I could tell, he simply got hold of every application that came in from anybody, took
it in and informed—and remember at this point we had an acting head of the department. We
had no regular head of the department. And we had an acting head director of the program,
and so Fred just admitted everybody who applied. So the result was that for the next two
years, we had students, but we had some very odd characters. I mean some people with
extraordinarily low IQs [intelligence quotient]. [laughs] I won't name—we still had some
good people, but—however this did add to the number of people in the program and
eventually we became more selective after this. I believe that's the way things went in 1968,
'69. Is there anything else?
LD: Well, how was the program structured? Don't you bring writers in for periods of time? What
is the format for that? How would you describe the program to someone who wasn't familiar
with it?
TK-S: Well—yes, we follow the pattern that—I'm not sure to what extent we established it or
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followed something that might have been done somewhere else, but to some degree we
probably established it because we were one of the earlier writing programs. But visiting
writers are usually brought in, either just for a reading or, more commonly, at least to
conduct one workshop or group of tutorials and do a reading. Or, best of all, to stay up to two
weeks and meet both with the workshops and with the students and perhaps even with some
of the literature classes at times. And sometimes these things just evolve in an ad hoc way.
For example, when Bob Watson was gone in 1968-69, his salary was available to the English
department, and so the way that it was used was Arturo Vivante [Italian-American writer]
came as a fiction writer that year and stayed in the Watson's house.
LD: For the whole year?
TK-S: Yes, for the whole year. But also May Swenson [American poet and playwright] did not
want to come for a whole semester, but she was brought in for four separate week-long stays,
which made it possible for her to meet this rather small poetry writing class that I met the
rest of the time and get to know them over the course of the year, and that worked very well.
I don't think that's ever been done again, just repeated week-long visits by one person. But it
was a kind of a compromise arrangement. And in this case I thought it was rather interesting
that—I think that both of these people—yes, Bob Watson was responsible for bringing both
of these people because he had met—and Watson used to go up every summer to
Provincetown [Cape Cod, Massachusetts]. He had met Arturo Vivante, who had a house at
Wellfleet [Cape Cod, Massachusetts], And then I guess he had met May Swenson by mail as
a result of her having—I think she had done a nice review of a book of Bob's, and he had
written to her and gotten in touch with her. And I have to give him a lot of credit for having
seen much sooner than I was able to see what a very fine poet she was and what a good
addition she was to the program, particularly since, at that time, she had hardly done any
teaching.
You think of that, ordinarily, as a lack of qualification, I suppose. But with writers, a
writer who’s done very little teaching is likely to—a writer who has done a lot of teaching
and a lot of visiting of writing programs is likely to be blasé and somewhat cynical. And if
you get someone who is inexperienced but a good writer, they will just be direct and fresh. It
was the same thing when Bobbie Ann Mason [American novelist, short story writer,
essayist, literary critic] came here. Apparently her manner in class was rather unpolished or
not exactly awkward, but more direct than you find from someone—not being taken by
someone whose had a lot of experience.
Well, I was trying to remember about when I thinking about the first year that I was
here, I realized that I wished that I knew who was responsible for bringing the writers who
came in the first year that I was here, and I think it must have been Joe Bryant because it
seems a little odd to me now because the first year I was here Guy Owen [novelist, poet,
editor, critic, teacher], who was at North Carolina State [University, Raleigh, North
Carolina], was coming over. He wasn't spending much time on this campus, but he was
coming over and teaching the fiction writing seminar. This was the first year I was here
because there was nobody in fiction at all on the faculty at that point. That seems very odd
now. But Guy Owen came over and taught the class some, and then Frances Gray Patton
[American short story writer and novelist] taught it some, but we really didn't have a fictional
writer in residence. I didn't pay much attention to that because, as I said, that was '67, '68,
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and I was just too busy with my own work. And I didn't know a thing about the program
itself, but now I wonder if this arrangement was not something that Joe Bryant had set up
without really—I don't know, I've never discussed it with Bob Watson, but it just seems
unlikely to me that he would have. He may have acceded to it, but it seems like an odd thing
for him to have arranged. So I really don't know who set it up. I think that Joe—the reason
that I sort of suspect that it may have been his idea, I believe that he thought that—well, I
don't believe that he valued Bob's literary judgment as highly as he should have and may
have. And I'm just speculating here, but I think he may have had made these arrangements
on his own. I do know that when Bob made the arrangements for the next year, we had much
more interesting people, or so I thought. Guy Owen was—he's a nice man, and I suppose he's
a successful novelist. I never did think his poetry was very distinguished. Anyway, in terms
of the history of the MFA program, it almost collapsed about '67 or '68 and then got going
again, limping along through the various budgetary crises and continuing Vietnam War and
the disruption, though we didn't have much of that on this campus, but certain amount of
campus disruption, and then finally became somewhat more soundly established, I guess
you'd say, in early, about '72, something like that.
LD: What other writers since then do you remember particularly well as being very effective or
writers who kept coming back more than once? Arturo Vivante. I know has been back.
TK-S: Well, May Swenson came back several times, the last couple of times just for readings,
really.
LD: She's deceased now, isn't she?
TK-S: Yes, she died last December. Well, we did have this annual series of visits from Allen Tate
that because of his steadily increasing age and problems with his emphysema, you were
always worried about what you were doing to him by bringing him here.
LD: Where was he living at that point?
TK-S: He had retired from the University of Minnesota [Minneapolis, Minnesota], and he'd built a
house in Sewanee [Tennessee] and retired there, where he was initially welcomed with open
arms. But Tate was such always such a political activist in any literary politics and always
running around and arranging things, contrary to what some people might want. And then
just after—within just two or three years there were a lot of people that were not so happy
that he had settled there. I had expected him to be here for the entire year the second year
that I was here, and I believe that it had been planned that he'd be here, but that's when he
retired and built a house and did not come. And I do remember being told triumphantly by
the—Charles Harrison, the head of the English department at Sewanee [University of the
South], went something like, "Well, we've got him," he said, and a few years later the
Harrisons were just—who were also living right next door to the Tates—were very unhappy
about what they had got. However, for short visits—well, actually I just think that Tate was a
wonderful asset to literature, and he always drew a tremendous audience for his readings
here—probably the largest audiences for any readings because he had kept up acquaintances
around town or there were people who counted themselves as friends. He had come back—I
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don't have a list of all of his stays in Greensboro to look at, but he had been here for a year-long
stay just about three years, two or three years before I was here. As a matter of fact, he
barely escaped being killed because right here in one of these offices or one of these shelf
units just fell off the wall and fell right on the desk where he eventually sat, but he wasn't
there at that time. Some way he stored all of their books in, well—he— [laughs]
LD: Wouldn’t that have been infamous? [laughs]
TK-S: Yes. Well he would come for, I guess it was two-week visits, and be put up in the Alumni
House for that length of time. If you want a good account of what his presence really was
like, Fred Chappell did write a fine poem called, I think Afternoons with Alan, that just
describes his—they’re watching a professional football game together and he’s talking, and
he really did, it is a good likeness. It's a kind of a portrait or sketch or I think I sort of—yes, a
sketch of Tate. That's much what it was like. He was such a good guest. I mean he was
always—well he could be, as anyone who knew him knows, extremely charming. He'd
always—apparently even as a boy he was known for his extraordinary politeness, and he
was always a very amusing, but frank too. Indeed, you always felt that after having enjoyed
his company so much that probably you were being summed up in few not-so flattering
phrases in some other company or your defects were being assessed, but the thing is that I do
feel that his assessments were usually accurate. I'm trying to remember—well, once we had
him over for breakfast on the morning at the King Cotton Hotel—was going to be imploded.
I guess we invited him. We wanted to see if he wanted to go down and watch it collapse, but
he didn't want to. I guess we had him for post-implosion breakfast. He kept referring to it as
the "Last Days of Pompeii." [laughs]
LD: Where was the King Cotton Hotel?
TK-S: It was right down there on the, I think it is the present site of the Greensboro Daily News
Building, the new building.
LD: The new one?
TK-S: The new building.
LD: The O. Henry was still here when we moved here in '76, but—
TK-S: Yes. It was a good implosion.
LD: I think that was the last hotel, big hotel, to be torn down. Do you have any—what about the
Greensboro Review [creative writing program literary magazine]?
TK-S: Yes, I had jotted down Greensboro Review just in order to remind me of some of the things
that had been going on in these earlier years.
LD: Was this a faculty responsibility to edit the Greensboro Review, or was it—?
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TK-S: No. As a matter of fact, from some people's point of view, there came a time when from
some people's point of view the faculty moved in and stole the Greensboro Review from the
students, but now you'd really—to get the very beginnings of it, you would have to ask Bob
Watson or Fred Chappell, but it was mostly a student undertaking. Let's see, the first editor
is, yes, Lawrence Judson Reynolds [1967 MFA], known as Shorty Reynolds. And well, Tom
Mullineaux [?], who died, committed suicide some years ago, was a favorite student of Peter
Taylor's. These two fellows, went around, actually sold subscriptions in advance to faculty
members, somehow got enough money to print it. I believe the first issue was set up on an
old IBM compositor tape-fed thing, that was over in the Elliott Hall, I think, or something
like that. And then it was put on offset plates that are probably—unless they have thrown
them out, they're still over in the university duplicating office because I found they were
there and had some extra copies of the first issue run off at one point, when I thought we
were going to sell lots of back issues, sell sets of back issues to libraries. So the students
mostly put it together. I do remember Fred Chappell's talking once about them—everybody
walking around and around and around some table. I guess they were picking up the
signatures, anyway picking up the pages. And I noticed that this first issue was stapled, and
so I think they've just ran off.
LD: What year was that? The first issue?
TK-S: '66, I believe. Yes, May of '66. And then the next year David Ackley [1969 MFA] edited it,
and at that point it began being printed somewhere in Chapel Hill, I think. The numbering of
the early issues was very confusing. Eventually, what I did at one point, was just abandon all
of that and just count up how many issues had been printed up to that point, and then called
and I found that there were six issues, so I called the next one that came out seven, and it
kept going since then. Because, at first you see, there were efforts to call it Volume I, but
then the money would run out, and there wouldn't be a number two, and then Volume IV.
And number one—then all of a sudden it was something that was just caught in the middle
of it, all of something called number four, and so I figured out the order and then just took
off from that, and ever since then it’s just been a serial because we never knew when funding
was going to fail, and we couldn't keep to a regularly yearly schedule.
LD: Sometimes they came out in the summer, spring, sometimes in the winter?
TK-S: The aim was always to get one out approximately in December and one out approximately in
April or May, but often they would be months behind. I think in the end we may have
managed an average of two issues a year. And the time that we completely ran out of money
just—we just had like three hundred dollars. I was able to—all we were able to do was to—
well what we said is all that we've got three hundred dollars, so I talked to the people at the
Sewanee Press, where I was having it printed then, at a below-actual-cost figure, and found
out how much it would cost to put together something that was stapled and sixteen pages
long, and we could afford that. And so we just—I put the two graduate assistants to work. It
happened to be exactly ten years into the magazine’s life and had them—I've still got some
of the file cards here that I used for scratch paper, but just had them do a ten-year index, and
we tried to pretend that this was our Number Twenty. This resulted in several cancellations
from libraries [laughs] when they got this with our Number Twenty.
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LD: Was the purpose of the magazine to give a forum to students, or did you solicit work from
outside?
TK-S: Initially it was for students in the writing program. Well let's see, if you—you can look at
the—let me just look at the names that appear on the front. To start with, I believe those are
all current or recent students in the program.
LD: That was in 1966?
TK-S: '66. And the same thing still true in '68. Let's see, there's Noel’s [Callow Kirby-Smith, 1970
MFA, wife] name as a student. And still these are all current or recent students. Maybe, I'm
not—I don't think Bob Foster. I'd forgot that he'd ever published anything there, but he—let's
see what the note says about him. He was a graduate student, I don’t think in the writing
program, but yes, it just says he was from Greensboro and teaches English at The University
of North Carolina at Greensboro. I believe that he was a teaching assistant. But he was a
student here. Now beginning with what is called—oh, this actually precedes the one I was
just looking at. Now here you do have Doris Betts [Class of 1954, but did not graduate; 1990
honorary degree], but again, she had been an undergraduate here and was thought just
printed or invited, I imagine, to contribute something because of her connection with the
school. And still I see all students. But now, I think it was about—well I'm looking at
number seven once again.
LD: 1969.
TK-S: I still see all students. And this was still a student-edited issue, number seven. Although I had
nothing to do with the production of this. I was just a faculty adviser and didn't have much to
do with it at all. As late as 1969, and still all students. It was about this time though that
when I look at the editors that—let's see, now here’s spring of '70—now here I see X.J.
Kennedy [American poet, author, translator], who is a famed poet but who had taught here
back in the '60s, and was probably invited by either Fred or Bob. And we have Eleanor Ross
Taylor [American poet, Class of 1940, honorary degree 1976, wife of writer Peter Taylor],
who had never been—well I guess she was a graduate of the school. Yes. But—who had
been living here, of course, when Peter was here. And then we got a story from Arturo
Vivante, but still in every case there's a close connection with the university. Once again,
let’s see, winter of '71—here we had some students who began to—that were still student
editors, but they had begun to solicit some poets whom they were interested in who had no
connection with the program and, in fact, had never been here as visitors or anything. I'm
talking about Greg Corso [American poet], Charles Simic [Serbian-American poet]. James
Tate [American poet] did come to give a reading, but I don't think he had come yet at that
time. Alan Wier [American writer, now professor at the University of Tennessee] was a
student elsewhere. So here, along with the students—Frederick Candeleria [American poet].
You have poets who had probably not yet reached the age of thirty that the students—this
group of students was interested in and were soliciting, and so there was that change that
year.
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LD: Is the Greensboro Review a poetry review exclusively, or does it also deal with short stories?
TK-S: Oh yes. Oh no. No, No. It's half—it's a least as much fiction, really. In terms of pages, of
course, it’s more fiction.
LD: When did the faculty steal it?
TK-S: Okay. All right. This seems to have occurred in the middle of 1971. Oh yes, I remember—let
me see, I think there's a little—you can see the ad that the Review has always carried for our
writing program. Well this you see in italic, very small italics, upside down at the bottom of
the ad, there was some little mysterious joke of the students, "Remember the Piedmont
school." And the editors, the student editors—remember, look at the date—'71. This was
three years after the student riots at the University of Paris. It was after the uprising at
Columbia [University, New York, New York], we were beginning to get a certain amount of
rebellion, activism, feistiness, and things happened. For example; a year or two before this
Ed Middleton [1970 MFA], who had been one of the editors, tried to print his own poem in
the magazine with the—the poem—the title had nothing to do with the poem, and the title
just said, Fucking the Colorado River. [laughs] So we were supposedly operating under
joint editorial decision, student and faculty, and we tried to reason and say, "Look, we are
depending on grants from the chancellor's discretionary fund." And I remember saying,
"Look Ed, when you go to a—you don't pee on the carpet." I remember I was trying to
explain to him that we didn't—but they took it as censorship, and they were being
suppressed and so forth. And then we had a group of students who came down here from
Cornell [University, Ithaca, New York] all at once who sort of hung together. I'm talking
about Mary Feeney [American poet] and Andy Greenburg [?]. And, although I have to say
they did do a remarkable job soliciting some of these names that were to be recognized as—
who were in the process of gaining considerable recognition as a poet, so also—. Let's see,
what were some of the issues that came up? Well, for example, they would do things—at
one point we had a free list that one of the things that the Greensboro Review had been used
for was to advertise our program to writers, administrators to—. There was a list of about
sixty or seventy people that we just sent copies to free. Those editors concluded that these
people should pay. And anyway they sent a very—well, just an obnoxious letter to our free
list people saying, "You owe us; pay up!"
LD: Was this Feeney and Greenburg?
TK-S: Yes. And—or somebody on their staff, anyway. And so we got these angry letters pointing
out that this was contrary to federal law, et cetera. And then they were—I remember one
time that they all showed up uninvited at a party. They showed up drunk or stoned and
uninvited at a party at the [Randolph] Bulgin's [English professor] house, and wanted to give
me a big hassle about something about the Greensboro Review. It was just utterly
unpleasant. I had just gone over to meet my friends, and they—actually, Fred Chappell
brought them all in from the Pick Wick [Bar] is what it was. He had just come from the Pick
Wick to the Bulgin's party, and brought all of these students and, one of whom got sick and
threw up, and anyway—. So there was a sort of a seizure of the magazine at that point, and
so the next time it came out the—all of the faculty members plus a couple of students—or in
11
this case, just one student assistant were put on the masthead as the editorial committee, and
I was put on as coordinator, which is purposely weak-sounding.
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
TK-S: —at that point, and there were—how there were various sorts of problems just then, and I
did want to explain more completely the reasons why the editorship was changed the way
that it was. And I have mentioned how we had these problems with some things that student
editors had done, and in addition to that though, just at that point that—let's see, it was '70-
'71, we were trying to arrange more regular, permanent financing. What I mean is up to that
point the magazine had gotten by through a combination of annual grants of different
amounts from the chancellor's discretionary fund and then some grants from arts councils
and few donations, but there was no regular budget for it. And so I made up a rationale that
compared the Greensboro Review as a resource for the writing program to dance studios
practice rooms, theatre—a forum for the work of the students in the program and felt that it
could be financed out of instructional funds. And so by making this case repeatedly for a
couple of years, we did get the support of Mereb Mossman [sociology and anthropology
faculty, dean of instruction, dean of the college, dean of faculty ,vice chancellor for academic
affairs], eventually, for this idea and also Robert Miller, when he first became dean [of the
College of Arts and Sciences]. And so we got a couple of thousand dollars a year to keep the
magazine going. But since this was coming out of the university’s instructional budget—
well, we discovered that the people that we were trying to arrange for the funding with, the
administrators, I believe, were somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of students
administering. Something in the instructional budget, and there was that too to take into
account.
LD: That led to the faculty taking the responsibility away from the students?
TK-S: Yes, that had something to do with it. And there were other reasons, as well. Anyway, ever
since that point it’s been—we've had a faculty editor. Though right now, Jim Clark [1978
MFA], who is the editor or manages all of the magazine along with all of the other
enterprises of the writing program is—. His current position is not a faculty one. It has been
changed to— what do you call one of those things, SPA [subject to the state personnel act]?
LD: Student assistantship?
TK-S: A staff sort of position. I always forget the acronym from that. Exempt from, what is it? EP,
ESP? Well, never mind. But in the history of the Greensboro Review and the writing
program—since then, it’s been a joint enterprise. Actually, at this point the students do a
great deal of the editing. We have a kind of cooperative arrangement. For example, this
semester, I am being responsible for the poetry that goes into the next issue of the magazine.
But Claudia Andrews [Emerson, 1991 MFA] and Kathleen Driskell [1991 MFA] are joint
poetry editors, and they are currently reading everything that's come in since the previous
issue in making their choices. And then sometimes it depends on who is working with the
12
student editors. Sometimes they will just serve as a preliminary screen—. And then someone
on the faculty will make the final choice, but my own preference is to—I like to read
everything that comes in. I mean, there’s thousands of poems, but just in case, for various
reasons, in case it’s something that I think that has slipped passed them, although their
judgment is excellent, I would like to have the option of retrieving that and then also there’s
the possibility that I would see somebody's name whom I knew or who had contributed years
ago to the magazine and I might want to write them a little note instead of their just getting a
rejection notice, something like that. But, it’s a very flexible kind of an arrangement. I think
one thing that has—one policy that is still in effect, that has been very helpful to the
magazine, is that we do have a policy that no member of the faculty may contribute to the
magazine. And its only—well, in one case Tony Fragola [professor of media studies] won a
prize in a contest that we offered, and he was not in the English department.
LD: Does that ban just apply to the English department faculty or to anybody?
TK-S: No, it’s to anybody. It's very helpful, so when if someone in the philosophy department takes
a fancy to write a poem, you don't have to insult their poem. You just say, "We have a
policy. [laughs] We don't publish anybody in the university." And then also it completely
keeps the magazine chaste. If nobody in the English department can put anything, we can't
be accused of using it as a vehicle for our own work, and—
LD: I take it that the poems that Noel had in the magazine were prior to you getting married?
TK-S: That's right. She hasn't had anything in since we got married.
LD: That applies to spouses as well?
TK-S: Well, it need not. But I can't think of anything—oh, well no, actually—I'm afraid that—.
Well, I'll just go ahead and put it this way since it’s a frank interview, but I'm afraid that Lee
[Zacharias, North Carolina author] published a couple of Michael's [Gaspeny, her husband]
stories [laughs] in the magazine some years ago when she was the editor. But, no, there's no
policy.
LD: But it’s a gray area where spouses are concerned. I want to ask you—actually because I
know this is interesting in terms of UNCG's history as a women's college—when you and
Noel started to date and see each other, she a student, was that awkward on campus at all?
Or was that already—
TK-S: Well, I never asked anybody.
LD: I probably should ask her this question because I think actually she said that you did feel
some pressure to be discreet. There certainly must have been prohibitions earlier about
faculty fraternizing with students.
TK-S: Well, I suppose. We were close—we were about the same age, so—[pause] I don't know. I
really don't remember worrying very much about it.
13
LD: But she was a graduate student too.
TK-S: Well, after, I guess, her second year in the program, I did not act as a—I never was in a
position to give her a grade or anything. I did not—I don't think I signed her thesis or
anything like that, I think. But I don't know.
LD: Well, that issue certainly does come up from time to time. It's come up since I've been here.
TK-S: Yes.
LD: Well, anyway, I want to ask you about something else. I was interviewing Lois Edinger
[School of Education faculty], and she mentioned in the earlier '70s, the state legislature
asked—told all of the universities that they had to draw up guidelines for speakers. There
was a speaker ban. Do you know anything about that? Do you remember?
TK-S: I believe that it was earlier than that. I don't remember having been affected much about that.
It had been—being much affected by that or worrying about that. It had become—as best as
I can remember, it had become a kind of notorious civil liberties infringement that—
LD: Do you think that it was earlier than the early '70s?
TK-S: Yes, I think it was middle '60s. I think it coincided with—about the time—it was about 1965,
the then almost unknown Jesse Helms [United States Senator from North Carolina] caused
commotion over at Chapel Hill because there was someone there who’s in the English
department who gave the assignment to their class to rewrite the argument of To His Coy
Mistress [metaphysical poem by Andrew Marvell], and there was some obscene rewritings.
And some students complained; then he got on his radio station [Editor’s note: He was a vice
president of Capitol Broadcasting, Raleigh, North Carolina.] there and made a big issue of it.
And I think that coincided—it was about the same time there was this kind of retrogressive
movement in North Carolina with regard to—that affected free speech, but I don't ever
remember being much worried about the speaker ban.
LD: And it never affected the bringing of any writers to campus that you heard of?
TK-S: No, we have never had any—I would say we've had more problems caused by writers
themselves than by anything—and the university really has never—I can't recall a single
instance of anyone or any sort of interference, or complaint, or—
LD: But you've had writers who have complained?
TK-S: Well, no, I mean we've had writers who misbehaved and whom we would want—who were
just troublesome to deal with. And well, poet Alan Dugan [won Pulitzer Prize for Poetry];
he's a kind of tough. I'm afraid I just have to use the ethnic—he's kind of a tough Irish mick,
and he would conduct his interviews, or his tutorials, here in the McIver Hall. He always had
an open beer on the floor next to his desk, and he managed to get into some kind of very
unpleasant altercation about getting his paycheck written. I don't remember—there was some
14
commotion he had gone over himself, to the business office and to see—it was some kind of
shouting or something that had occurred. I wasn't quite sure as to what it was, but I'm just
trying to think if there was—I can't think of any instance on any level, of there ever being
any effort to interfere with or even to advise us about with regard to any of the content or
views or anything having to do with visiting writers.
LD: How is the curriculum in the English department? Has the English department's curriculum
changed or emphasis in the years you've been here?
TK-S: Well, I mostly have been concerned either with just undergraduate courses that I've been
preparing or with the graduate writing program, and I've just been an observer of what goes
on with the rest of the English department. But to me, the most remarkable thing to observe
has been the way in which the directions that the graduate program, especially the PhD
program, have taken in the English department since I've been here. Because the program
was only just being approved. I remember having a conversation in 1967 with Jim
Applewhite over in the cafeteria, and we were agreeing that we—well, I guess I'll go ahead
and put this on the record. We were agreeing that we were unable to see what advantage it
was to anybody for our department to offer a PhD in English. I mean it was clear that there
was already an excess of these creatures stalking the academic world, and we didn't—or
couldn't—see any reason why we should start manufacturing more of them. And I changed
my mind after a few years after I got very fond of some of our PhD's.
For example, Virginia [Acheson] Tucker [1964 Master of Fine Arts, 1973 PhD], and
Jane [Walters] Gutsell [Class of 1966, 1978 PhD] is one our earlier ones, and I began to see
that there was a place for our program in that it has worked very well to—in the case of
people who are valued faculty members at regional colleges and already have jobs, but
whose administration would be more comfortable with them if they had a PhD. And so that
has happened repeatedly. I directed a, in the end, dissertation for Suzanne Edwards [Ozment,
1982 PhD] about six or eight years ago. Suzanne had been teaching over at Lenoir-Rhyne
College [Hickory, North Carolina], and just as soon as she—. Well, what it was, they wanted
to make her head of the English department, but she didn't have the degree, so what she did
was immediately she received an offer from The Citadel [Charleston, South Carolina], where
she's been since that time and moved there. But there are quite a number of other examples
that other people in the English department who would be more able to document this use of
the program, the usefulness of it. Well, Whitney [Grove] Vanderwerff [1978 PhD], who’s
now the dean at Greensboro College, is one of our PhDs. And I think for a while Whitney
was sort of unhappy and wished that she had gone to Chapel Hill instead, but it has worked
for her with as, say, an administrative degree, something like that. But the emphasis in the
PhD program has really been—it has been odd the way it has shifted over the years. And
initially the idea was to provide a—was just to manufacture publishing English scholars, so
the first students that came in were put through this rigorous bibliography course and all of
these literature courses that was supposed to prepare them for the life of the professional
scholar, and that didn't work especially well. And there weren't that many good applicants
for such a program. And so, I guess about 19—after about three or four years, the rue and cry
was for linguistics, and so about five years was spent in the effort to turn it into a linguistics
degree, or an emphasis on linguistics. And then it appeared that that was no longer the
coming thing, and we sort of missed the boat on that too. And so the next thing was special
15
emphasis on composition and rhetoric and advanced rhetorical studies, and we're still in that
phase. And I just wonder what will come next, if this doesn't work out very well. But it’s sort
of a continual missing of the moving target.
LD: How many students does the graduate program have in one class every year? How many
come in?
TK-S: Well, just yesterday we were being told that there was something like twelve-fifteen new
people in this PhD program. Another thing that the PhD program has done that has been
helpful is for the foreign students, who needed a teaching degree back in their—back home.
It’s just frankly an easier degree to get than at some other schools. There have been some
instances of that. But for more particular information about numbers, you'd have to talk to
Denise Baker [English faculty] would be right on top of all that right now.
LD: Who do you think are some of the most significant administrative personalities that have
been introduced at UNCG since you've been here?
TK-S: [pause] Well, I suppose that [Chancellor James S.] Jim Ferguson certainly kept people from
getting at each other’s throats and did a great deal to keep the campus peaceful during some
unpleasant times in the '70s, early '70s.
LD: Was he chancellor when you came?
TK-S: I think he was just being made—or had just been made, by unanimous request of the
faculty—he had been made chancellor; he had been acting chancellor for a year or two, I
think. I don't have all of that history really straight. And then continued until when? About
ten years ago?
LD: '78 or '79, I think.
TK-S: Yes.
LD: So he would have been chancellor during the whole Vietnam?
TK-S: Yes, that's right. He bridged that whole—
LD: Do you think that the peacefulness of the campus was a result of him as much as the fact that
it was predominantly female?
TK-S: Yes, I think he did a great deal—I think he was the best person. In fact, I don't think that we
could have had a better person as chancellor for that period. I do think that something—
because he had to turn so much of his attention to various crises, and I can't remember them
all, but he was constantly having to solve, sort of work out, unpleasantness between different
groups or just keep things peaceful.
I think that it is too bad that there was no administrator in the late '60s or early '70s or
that the times were not right for it to—I think the major—well, the major missed opportunity
16
on the part of the university during the time that I've been here has been its failure to
establish itself, as—which it could have done, as the studio art branch of the University of
North Carolina. Even right now, apparently the art department at Chapel Hill has a very high
regard for the teaching, the studio teaching, in the art department here. And our writing
program is strong and their other—I gather the School of Music has a strong composition
program. And these things have, more or less, have survived and more or less flourished.
But, see what resources were put into—in the period of 1970 to1980—was the—well, the
business school [Bryan School of Business and Economics] was built up, and apparently is a
great success, at least the accounting part, I know accounting students that win in these—not
exactly contests—but they place very high in these standardized tests. But from my point of
view, this was more, from what I was told, I did not attend the meetings, so this is really
hearsay, but from what was quoted to me that Stanley Jones said (who was vice chancellor
of academic affairs then). What that indicated was that his feeling was that our arts programs
were good and healthy and strong, and therefore could—nothing need be done about them.
And we had a very hard time for ten years or more. It was a constant battle to get money for
visiting writers and to keep the Greensboro Review subsidy going. Anyway, I felt that the
priority was to—under what pressures, I don't know exactly—but the priority was to build up
the business school and simultaneously convert the university into an urban service
university. And that this opportunity to create a studio arts branch of the whole university
system was lost. Now I can't blame that entirely on Mr. Jones. As a matter of fact, I
remember his inquiring once even if anyone wanted to set up a School of Arts, and the
trouble is that such a thing would be administratively—were very ticklish. Our departments
tend to be rather—all departments are jealous, but I think that it would be especially
difficult—
LD: In trying to get them all to cooperate?
TK-S: Yes, or even to agree on one administrator or one administrative arrangement. Maybe
somebody might be able to do it, so that there was a very large problem there. Well, I just
remember, here's what Bob Watson—you should interview him. You might ask him about
this, but there was this project to bring the Unicorn Press to this campus, and in fact the
Unicorn Press, Alan Brilliant [publisher] of the Unicorn Press, somewhat over-anticipated
this and made the mistake of running a two-page spread in Poetry magazine announcing the
move of the Unicorn Press from Santa Barbara [California] to The University of North
Carolina at Greensboro, when in fact it had not been completed. Well, one problem was how
are you going to—which department is going to pay the salary of Alan Brilliant, if he is
associated with the university? And the whole move had—the whole idea had occurred
because [Gilbert] Bert Carpenter [art professor, director of Weatherspoon Art Gallery] had
had Alan as a student at Stanford University [Palo Alto, California] and knew him from
there, and so I think that Bert and Bob Watson jointly got this idea or they worked it out with
Alan that they would bring all of their equipment and that space would be found for them—
at that time it was thought in the new library for their equipment. Well, the meeting that I
remember Bob Watson telling me about the discussion went in this direction that Stanley
Jones said, "Well, where are you going to get a salary for Alan Brilliant?" And Bert
Carpenter had said, "Well, we'll just fire somebody." [laughs] And then he says, "Oh no, I
don't really mean 'we'll fire somebody'. I mean when somebody leaves, we will just leave the
17
position open." And then Mr. Jones said, "If a position like that should fall open, we have
other places in the university where we would like to use that money," expressing a clear
lack of sympathy with this idea. And—but for a—if this is to be part of the history of the
university, somebody else who was actually in the meetings should describe it. After—well
in the end the Unicorn Press did move to Greensboro, and, in the long run, I'm not so sure
that it would have been a good thing to have them in the university. I mean it might have
been a troublesome situation. I just—I can't tell.
LD: Perhaps to conclude, is there any general description that you can give of—well, I'll put it
this way—is there anything about the university when you first came that you miss? Or do
you think that things have gotten better?
TK-S: Well, yes, there are quite a number of things that I miss. I miss the old Faculty Center, which
still has terrazzo floors and beautiful paneling behind the—underneath the carpet and behind
the paint that's been put over. It’s probably walnut paneling. But anyway, I also miss the—
having all of those bright women in my classes that I had to start with. During the 1970's the
enrollment was increased and the SAT [scholastic aptitude test] scores of entering freshmen
went—well, someone should just read the statistics out that they dropped and dropped, and
the—. It seems to me that in the last five years we’ve had a gradual improvement. I think
students are better than they were about eight years ago, and in some ways right now the
students, the mixture of students, is very different from when I first came, but it’s, I think,
very interesting right now. Much, I think, is better, much better than it was ten years ago. I
think you have—again I don't know the statistics, but, for example, we have lots of—seems
to be the big contingent of students from New Jersey coming down. At least when I become
aware of where people are from, I'm surprised at how frequently they [unclear].
LD: So you perceive that they are mixed geographically?
TK-S: Yes, there's a bigger geographical mix, certainly, and fewer, students coming from the South.
There are some very good male students here now.
LD: And that was not the case when you first came?
TK-S: When they first began, as I was telling you before, the male students were very weak mostly.
At this particular moment, our writing program has got resources that it never had before in
the past. Now we have a whole in-house publishing operation right across the hall here that
involves not only—the Greensboro Review has just gone to desktop publishing, but also Rob
Langenfeld's [English faculty] English Literature in Transition journal is published out of
that room, and all of the administration of the program is out of that room. And it’s hard for
me not to look at all of the equipment—and the secretary, we have a secretary now, and that
reflected how in 1970 I was running this out of one of those cubicles down the hallway,136.
I mean just one cubicle, and—
LD: In addition to teaching?
TK-S: Yes.
18
LD: A full teaching roster?
TK-S: Yes, three or four courses. And no telephone. And so—we have this year with the budget
cutbacks, the visiting writer budget is not back somewhat. But on the whole, I suppose it
coincides with the favorable review that we got from outside reviewers of the program about
two or three years ago. And, well, that's really about all that I have to say. If you want to
come back in ten years, I'll talk about what's going on now and tell you the real truth about it.
[laughs]
LD: Thank you for your interview.
[End of Interview]