James Mcconkey Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing Award
Cornell University
Diane Ackerman:
I was supremely lucky when I went to Cornell as a graduate student, considering Jim McConkey, who died last week at the age of 98, was my advisor. And I notwithstanding recollect sitting in his role at Goldwin Smith Hall on my first day. Jim was wearing: a cornflower-blue shirt with an open collar. Not button-downward. There was nil buttoned down about him. I already knew from his books that he patrolled the skies through a telescope of his own devising, haunted the earth of Russian fiction, mucked out moo-cow stalls, had sampled the middle of prewar America, was someone who could exist "moved at a touch on betwixt serenity and pathos," someone who'd been to state of war and understood the reality of non only physical, simply moral injury.
In his books, wonder is the heaviest chemical element on the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny bit of it stops time. I loved all the poignant tripwires of retention in his books, and also the fine mesh of faintly remembered encounters, mishaps, moments of pride or embarrassment that leave indelible traces in i's life.
I likewise retrieve what I was wearing at that interview: a lavender blouse with ruffled cuffs. The blouse had a tiny burn hole from smoking, a habit I was trying to quit. An ash must take seared the nylon fibers, and the burnt border of that blemish felt like a scab. I did quit, but to this 24-hour interval, I'd know how to picture show ashes from a cigarette thanks to the body wisdom of "procedural retentivity," and I have a Kodachrome recollection of meeting Jim thanks to the untidily bulging album of "autobiographical memory"—a distinction I would later learn to appreciate in Jim's uniquely centre-opening and birthday wonderful Mind and Memory class.
Dissimilar some professors who taught "all that must exist learned," Jim tried to observe how a student learns best. It was just what I needed to flourish, because traditional schooling had never worked well for me. For case, as an undergraduate, I'd flunked Basic Logic.
A classic syllogism goes: "Johnny has a bat. All bats are blue. What color is Johnny's bat?" I panicked when that question appeared on an test, and I reasoned like this: "Well, if all bats are blueish, and Johnny has a shred of individuality, he'd want his bat to look different. Blue is traditionally the colour of sadness, the Virgin Mary, the sky—maybe he'd prefer a color that better reflects his mood or goals. I've noticed that shadows really aren't black, they're bluish. Would he desire a bat the color of shadow? Blueish is a color easily affected past changing light. Practise the blue bats appear lifeless at dawn, merely precious stone-like at high noon? Are all the bats the same size? Are they crafted of different woods, whose grain might blot the paint more deeply? What sort of blue is information technology, anyway—pearly, sapphire, luminescent?"
I was birthday likewise strange to pass Logic. But, in fourth dimension, Jim helped me realize that a gratuitous-associative, serpentine style of thought might be useful and have a power of its own. I'1000 sure I wasn't the but student whose optics he opened to the merits of cultivated idiosyncrasy.
I went to Cornell equally a poet with a miscellaneous muse. But I hadn't the foggiest idea how to write prose. I'd put one craggy sentence at the pinnacle of a page, one craggy judgement at the bottom, and I had absolutely no thought how to rappel betwixt them.
When, early, I took a Comp Lit grade that Jim taught, he wisely suggested that instead of writing essays, I write dramatic monologues spoken by characters in the books we were reading. I worked like the dickens on those poems and no incertitude learned more about character, plot, and fashion than I would have if left to my own naïve devices.
So, I'chiliad indebted to Jim, for that lesson among so many others, of "How will this person acquire best?" I've found it invaluable in my own education career, and likewise in a completely different arena, three decades later, in tailoring the standard aphasia workbooks to help my late husband, Paul Westward, regain linguistic communication after a stroke.
Something else I treasure about Jim is that, in an era when literary criticism was becoming more similar an human action of remote viewing, he encouraged exquisitely close readings, championed style, and showed how books tin shape i'due south boulder identity and choices. He simply wasn't strait-jacketed past literary vogues or labels. I've always admired him for being an -ist among the -isms.
And then, Jim began equally my advisor, taught me creative writing and literature, then became a member of my MFA and PhD committees. Then I took his Mind and Memory class, which warmed the cockles of my interdisciplinary eye, then I team-taught the class with him, and so we were office spouses, then I inherited the Mind and Memory course from him for a couple of years, and since then I've been honored to embrace him every bit a friend.
In all those different phases and stages of life, I've felt privileged to know someone so keenly nourished by literature, gifted with creative insight, full of curiosity well-nigh the world, sincerely caring, candid virtually having a social and ecology conscience, uxorious, wickedly smart but immoderately humble, down-to-earth, and to use a very erstwhile-fashioned word and concept, "decent." Jim was someone in whose easily the planet would exist safe. And there are precious few people yous can say that about. Non a saint by far, but perchance one of the 36 just men.
According to ancient theology, these few alone, through their good hearts and good deeds, go on the too-wicked world from being destroyed. There needs to be at least 36 in each generation. If there are, for their sake God spares all of humanity. The fable tells that they are ordinary people, non flawless or magical, and that most of them remain completely unrecognized—even by themselves—throughout their lives. Information technology'due south simply that they choose to perpetuate goodness, sometimes even in the midst of inferno.
In so many ways, my life was made abundantly richer by Jim's kindness, his books, his example, and his friendship.
Diane Ackerman is the writer of two dozen works of verse and nonfiction, including New York Times best sellers The Zookeeper's Wife, A Natural History of the Senses, and The Human Historic period, and Pulitzer Prize finalist, One Hundred Names for Dear.
He told a great story, on the page and in the classroom
Brad Edmondson:
I was 21. I wanted to be a writer, and someone told me that Jim McConkey was practiced at it, so I took his creative writing grade in 1980. I expected that he would cascade his wisdom into me equally if I were an empty vessel, as all my other instructors at Cornell had done. Instead, he told stories that veered from funny to pitiful to profound and then back to funny again. He held my attention with vivid images, and I kept listening considering I wondered where the story was going. When he was washed, the scenes he described stayed with me. Jim's stories helped me understand my emotions—he would have his audiences on tours of beloved, abandonment, despair, and hope, all brightly illuminated, in 10 minutes or less—and they were invaluable to me considering at that age, emotions tin can be baffling, roughshod masters.
Although he had a coincidental style, I always felt that I had witnessed a performance, and I wanted to figure out how he did it. I tried to emulate Jim'southward style past cultivating memories and viewing them from dissimilar angles, turning them over and over until something clicked and I believed that I had something worth proverb. He was a whole lot meliorate at this than I was, only he was as well unfailingly generous. He gave me the confidence to endeavour.
After I got a newspaper job in Ithaca, I would run into Jim at the grocery shop or at meetings. He always had the time to chat, and his stories had the same elliptical structure, but as I aged, they had a different event. After I experienced existent loss, or the complications of marital and paternal love, what I felt was more like recognition, as if nosotros were fellow travelers.
Jim'southward stories accept been with me for iv decades now. He retired in 1992 but kept writing until his wife died in 2013. He and Gladys were a team for 68 years. She was an accomplished editor, but he claimed, incredibly, that "they never had a reason to quarrel." He told me that after she died he could no longer brand the intuitive leaps his stories depended on. The last affair he published was a dedication to her in the foreword to The Complete Courtroom of Memory. In it he describes her funeral and how, equally she is being lowered into the basis, he realized that the torso, "encased in its white shroud, was shaped similar a carrot." He loved to use humor when his readers to the lowest degree expected it.
A twelvemonth ago I took Jim a spinach lasagna and invited another guest, a young poet who seemed awed by him, as I had been 38 years earlier. Matt Kilbane represented his fourth generation of students, and Jim rose to the challenge. Nosotros saturday with a neighbor, Michael DeMunn, who was Jim's companion and caregiver during his concluding years. Nosotros lingered at the table while Jim talked nearly hosting Eudora Welty at Cornell; the eccentricities of Flannery O'Connor, whom he had known at the Iowa Writer'due south Workshop ("she kept peacocks, you know"; and how he had been bowled over by Robert Lowell's reading of Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet. It was dark and cold outside when Jim recited for us the couplet Lowell had recited for him:
Upon those boughs which milk shake against the common cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where belatedly the sweetness birds sang.
He and Gladys loved that sonnet, he said, because it compares life to a burn that is consumed by the source that nourishes information technology. They loved it and so much that he put it at the end of Court of Memory. Life is precious because information technology is finite, he said.
This 1000 perceiv'st, which makes thy dearest more strong,
To beloved that well which thou must leave ere long.
I remember silence at the table as Jim's words, and Shakespeare'southward, sunk in. Damn if he hadn't done information technology again.
Brad Edmondson is a writer and business consultant in Ithaca, New York. He was the founding vice president of ePodunk.com and editor-in-chief of American Demographics magazine.
A magnum opus of the ordinary
Robert Wilson:
James McConkey was a novelist (The Tree House Confessions, 1979, among others), a biographer and memoirist (To a Distant Isle, 1984), and a critic (books nearly E. K. Forster and Anton Chekhov), but his magnum opus, Courtroom of Memory (1983 and 2013), was a work that is hard to characterize. When the starting time section of it was published in 1968 under the title Crossroads, it was mischaracterized by his publisher, McConkey would later write, equally an "autobiographical novel." Autobiographical it certainly was, but a novel information technology was not. It was a collection of what McConkey merely called stories, or narratives, or sometimes essays, that began in the present moment of their writing and explored some aspect of his past.
The pieces in Crossroads had to do with his wife and three growing sons, but too with the family he was born into. The work grew as McConkey aged, and past 2013 became The Complete Court of Memory, which included the contents of two more books and a number of previously uncollected stories published in magazines. Considering they were fabricated upwardly of the real materials of McConkey's life, or at least his memories of them, but were crafted and then beautifully in the mode of the traditional realistic short story, I thought of them equally nonfiction short stories. A number of these from the 1960s, '70s, and '80s appeared in The New Yorker, and I'm proud to say that most of the later ones, which McConkey chosen "personal narratives," were published in The American Scholar.
The Complete Court of Retentiveness is remarkably complete, the tape of a single, adequately quiet life (he was a college professor as well as a writer), begun in the shadow of nuclear state of war out of a need "to admit my love for my family and the sacredness I felt in everything well-nigh me." That word about, importantly, is meant in the British sense of "around," for this work is annihilation but an exercise in navel-gazing. The transcendence that McConkey discovers in the ordinary—commencement with a "wretched petty night stand" that he had made for his mother in shop class when his family was Depression-poor—and the craftsmanship of the writing, his artistry existence his continuing tribute to the meaning of his memories, have made this, for a long time, 1 of my favorite books. (At one signal I even tried to write stories in faux of McConkey's.)
I was lucky enough to meet Jim a couple of times, the latter 1 in his Greek-revival farmhouse in the country nearly Ithaca, New York, the firm beside a crossroads that in his books had get for me an well-nigh mythical place. Sometimes when yous dearest a volume too much, it is hard not to be disappointed past its all-besides-human writer. Just that was dramatically not the case with Jim. He was a adolescent 70 or so when I first met him and all the same puckish at just past ninety when I saw him once again. Even in his years since that visit, equally he struggled with the loss of his love married woman and one son, my wife and I discovered in telephone conversations with him that he retained his wonderful attentiveness to the earth about him.
Robert Wilson is the editor of the Scholar.
ballesterosbrion1994.blogspot.com
Source: https://theamericanscholar.org/remembering-james-mcconkey/
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