1
I first met Lynn Emanuel in 1984, that Orwellian year, at a writer’s festival in Brockport, N.Y. She was young, with one slim book to her name. She was smart and kind in her workshop, and I was knocked out by her reading, especially the intensity of her images, and her voice. When I was looking around for a place to study, I wrote directly to her. When I was accepted, she became the first person I knew in Pittsburgh in 1987.
2
In 1987, the program was still relatively new, the faculty were all younger than I am now, I believe. And it was friendly; everyone knew your name. It was a more open place in general. You could still smoke in seminars and, during the break, open the windows on the fifth floor and walk out onto the roof. We had some orientations in bars. Lynn had us reading Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, David Antin, Charles Bernstein, people we often hated and often admired. We had passionate arguments about narrative, about “theory,” about Lacan and Foucault and Italo Calvino. No one blinked an eye when some of us came out as gay, when some of us divorced, when some of us slept with others of us, some of us talked about getting PhDs; we dragged our complicated selves into workshop after workshop with proof we were alive. We were intensely alive.
3
In those days it was possible to have house parties where everyone, faculty and students alike, showed up, danced together, and had a great time. She and [her husband] Jeff had a wonderful house in Greenfield where, once a year, after a certain amount of respectable small talk, we pushed back the furniture and rolled up the carpets and danced like crazy people, excited to be surrounded by so many other people who had found a place to be something our biological families didn’t understand, to be writers!
4
Memory from one of those nights: "Start Me Up" by The Rolling Stones came on and a barbaric yawp rose up out of us. We were drenched by the end of the night. It was amazing to have been that young and happy in that city. When the Cathedral of Learning was still soot-black. When no one knew how Pittsburgh might, like Lana Turner in Frank O’Hara’s poem, get back up. We poets, many of us from similarly threatened places, thought maybe we were in the right place to test ourselves. It was dramatic, even cinematic. Lynn was our Frank O’Hara, Pittsburgh our Lana Turner.
5
Teaching memory: once, in one of Lynn’s workshops, I remember being so angry at a book I thought was badly written and emptily praised, I threw it in a garbage can during our discussion of it. It was as melodramatic a move as any I’ve seen from my own students. It was a challenge, a temper tantrum. I’ve never forgotten Lynn’s reaction. She didn’t miss a beat. She said, “Well, that’s one gesture.” And I got it immediately: Dismissal isn’t what we were here for. All the wind left my young male impulsive sails. I was embarrassed to have done what I’d done, to have realized I had nothing in my toolbox but tantrum. The class went on without me. Suitably chastened, the next week I tried harder to be more patient, more inquisitive, more humane. It was a moment I remember every time I teach something hard or strange or frustrating, when I have a student who loses his (it’s almost always a "his") cool and acts out his helplessness before a text. To make another gesture than dismissal without at the same time shaming that student. To stay open. To remember that being an artist is not only intellectual work but emotional, physical, and spiritual work. To remember how hard the process of being an artist (and a human) is occasionally. I was not always the most patient of students; I owe her an immense debt for putting up with my shenanigans.
6
Another, quieter lesson:
At a party at Chuck’s [Chuck Kinder, former Writing program director and faculty member], in a hallway where, drinks in hand, we were both talking about something or someone, Lynn said to me: “You’re so funny. Why isn’t any of that in your poems?”
I’m not sure I took a breath after that for years.
7
She was the Director of the Writing Program in the nineties. It was a time of change, as older faculty retired and the department as a whole began to shift.
I remember one scene with Jim Maher, the former and much-feared Provost, during one of his ten-year walkabouts: The faculty assembled on one side of the old, larger 501 commons room, with Maher on the other side, a large man in a business suit, a Dean or two flanking him, maybe an assistant keeping his minutes. The lion of the administration versus the flock of scholars is how I remember it, is how it felt to me. We were all nervous. Each director rose from his or her chair to talk about his or her program, and the provost listened calmly, without expression, until that person sat back down again. It was a bit like middle-management giving quarterly reports, I thought: joyless, mechanical, even pitiless. Until Lynn, who was then director of Writing, got up from her chair, and breaking the fourth wall of the proceedings, walked up the aisle, grabbed an empty chair next to Maher, and sat down right next to him and began talking to him as if he were not an unapproachable predator but a man who needed information. The effect on him was visible. He smiled at her. He squirmed just the tiniest bit. He paid attention to her and not to the room. She taught him what he needed to know instead of reciting the dull facts of successes and initiatives. It was a beautiful piece of political theater responding to a dull piece of political theater.
8
In 1998, when the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series was born, I volunteered to help with the work that she and Catherine Gammon were doing in their spare time. The next year, when they were looking for someone to take on the role of managing director, they hired me. We were creating a reading series that would be free and open to the public, which was a new thing then. We would invite writers the students and Pittsburgh might not know but ought to. We advertised and made media kits. This was before we could message each other instantly. We made phone calls and sent e-mails and were in constant communication with each other. We were busy, busy, busy with planning and worrying and thinking about what was next. John Edgar Wideman, Carl Phillips, Alex Kotlowitz were in that first year. It’s a long list. We picked them up at the airport. We drove them back to the airport. We worked on posters and flyers. We set up schedules a year ahead of time. We worried about cosponsors and cuts in the budgets. We woke up in the middle of the night, sure we’d forgotten some key thing. We gathered graduate students for lunches. We begged faculty to show up to events. When, in 2005, I had the chance to sail around the world for Semester at Sea, Lynn shouldered the work herself, a gift I can never repay. In 2008, we steered the series through the national economic crisis and its subsequent budget cuts. We were a good team because I liked managing extremely small details and Lynn had no trouble going to the Dean or the Provost if necessary to get sticky large details unstuck.
9
But it was also exhausting, and the work frequently took up more psychic space than it should have. It was easy some days, even some years, to lose one’s compass with all the work around us. Anyone who has run a successful reading series will know the constant low-level work, punctuated by high-intensity event performance, that is required. At the same time we were teaching classes, Lynn was in much demand on even bigger national stages, reading for prizes, giving readings and workshops, often coming back sick and certainly drained.
So here I want to praise Lynn’s artistic steel. Because as all of this was going on here in the department, she was producing one powerful book of poetry after another, each one an intense sculpted experience. Writers complain often about the ways that teaching or administrative work interferes with their writing work, and I feel lucky to have had Lynn as an example of disciplined artistic practice. She has always made time for her writing; she guards and protects her work with a ferocity I admire. She has been a superb role model not just for dedication but for cultivating and maintaining a sense of astonishment, intensity, power and beauty.
10
Throughout all the time I’ve known her, as a teacher, as a colleague, as a role model, as a boss and collaborator, and as a friend, she has also been a leading light in the poetry world. Whenever someone found out I was at Pitt, they’d ask me, "What’s it like to work with Lynn Emanuel?" People love her poems, her intelligence and intensity, the striking way she has of seeing and saying things.
She has taught too many poets at this point to name. She has taught me too many things to contain in this small set of suitcases.
11
I’m getting long-winded. This is the problem with prose I was hoping to avoid. I need to stop. There is too much to condense out of 30 years of watching her work, laughing and arguing, scheming and arranging.
When I heard last fall that Lynn was going to retire, I had to sit down for a second. She is the last of that original writing faculty, that community which was my first idea of what a writing community looked like, how a writing community might function. The half-joke I keep making is that, having lost my biological parents years ago, her retirement (and Dave [Bartholomae] and Paul’s [Kameen] retirements too) is a second loss, the loss of an artistic and professional parent. But it’s also the end, I think, of an older kind of community within this University which is increasingly concerned with paperwork and legal obligations, with information and data, matrices and assessments, to the detriment (one feels) of the individual students, the unruly imagination, a more organic understanding of knowledge. I know we’ll figure out ways to resist, as we always have, and persist.
12
But the loss part is ours. I breathlessly await what Lynn Emanuel, freed from her many obligations here, will create.
As the kids say now:
I. Cannot. Wait.
13
There is no way to forget her.
—Jeff Oaks
Senior Lecturer in Writing and MFA alumnus Jeff Oaks is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Mistakes with Strangers (Seven Kitchen Press, 2014). His poems and essays have appeared in Field, Missouri Review, Creative Nonfiction, At Length, and Tupelo Quarterly. He is the recipient of three fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.