The Lost and Found Department
It's not every day that you get e-mails from 3 different people that you haven't seen in over 25 years, but that's exactly what happened to me yesterday.
I put the Missing Persons link up on my sidebar last year, and waited patiently for people to find it via googling on themselves. Well, it paid off in spades on Monday morning when my best gal-pal from high school, Tatyana, dropped me a line. I haven't seen or spoken to her since 1979, so I was thrilled, of course. She's an English teacher and a published poet, living in semi-retirement.
Through her I located another former colleague from the school newspaper, Chris, who's been teaching Creative Writing for the past 18 years, and is an award-winning poet.
Finally, I got back in touch with Tory Paisley, founding member of Flipside magazine and guitarist for Low Budget, who's a Doctor of Musicology these days, currently teaching his little dumplings all about, you guessed it, punk rock! I'd say he's uniquely qualified to expound on that subject.
It's also interesting to note that all 4 of us wound up as educators of one sort or another, and at least 3 of us are also published authors and/or poets. I imagine that Tory, with a doctorate degree under his belt, has had a few papers published as well.
Our former newstaff advisor would be proud of us all, I'm sure. So Ms. Joanne Kropacek, here's to you, wherever you may be tonight!
Comments
You're right. It must be something in the water...I posted on the punk/education connection this morning. I'll out a couple more punk rock teachers here:
Tony Adolescent of the Adolescents and Kirsten Patches of Naked Aggression.
Posted by: Alice | April 6, 2005 2:19 PM
I am very proud of you!
Posted by: Sebastian | April 6, 2005 5:23 PM
Alice, I think it makes a lot of sense that so many of us wound up as educators. Punk attracted a lot of creative, passionate people, and those are the kind of folks who make great teachers.
Thanks, Sebastian...I'm proud of me too!
Posted by: MrBaliHai | April 6, 2005 6:22 PM
seems a lot like the seemingly counter-intuitive reality of so many hippies turning into captains of industry, punk being so anti-establishment and all. i think your assessment is likely correct MrB. which is a good thing since i don't think you guys would look so hot with safety pins through your noses at your ripe old ages ;) though i bet you're students would love it. my question is this: how do you guys translate that spirit into your works? and do you ever lay it all on the table for your students? like, "hey listen, in 81 i was..."
Posted by: Jmorrison | April 6, 2005 7:51 PM
p.s. any links to some of this poetry?
Posted by: Jmorrison | April 6, 2005 7:52 PM
I didn't actually know any LA punks who were into safety pins, jaime. I think that was more of a UK thing. However, I do remember X-8 figuring out that you could bend the tip of a safety pin with pliers, so when you clipped it on your nose it looked like it was piercing the skin. I think we only wore them to school to freak out our teachers and classmates. Nowadays, that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in most schools.
As for the poetry, Chris' third anthology, A History of the Only War, will be published in October. You can read an interview with him here.
Tatyana has some poems in an anthology she edited and published quite a while ago, looks like it's out of print now, unfortunately.
Tory's done a review of Cuban jazz and lectured on the social codes of French lute players in the 17th century.
As for me, most of the weird-ass, sophmoric shit I've written is right over here.
Posted by: MrBaliHai | April 6, 2005 8:29 PM