I know it's gotten old. It was probably already old when I first started doing it, as an MFA classmate of Barbara Edelman's in the early 1990s. Having just spent a year in France and knowing Barbara was also a francophile, I'd intone the line from the famous poem by Jacques Prévert, rappelle-toi Barbara. To rasp all of those Rs felt good. I'm pretty sure I just did it a few weeks ago, too, during one of our weekly Zoom writing sessions; after 30 years' acquaintance—as friend, classmate, colleague—it's one of my tics I'm sure must get on Barbara's nerves.
But no one appreciates a good (or bad) pun more than Barbara Edelman, who retired from the Pitt English faculty this year after three decades of teaching. And even though I throw out that line from Prévert's poem mainly because of her name, I also do so because Barbara is one of the most avowed outdoorspersons I know—and she makes me think of rock-rappelling, where you alternate between feet against a bluff or cliff and feet in the air as you let yourself down to the ground like a spider.
Touch the rock—you remember; fly outward—you forget.
In her retirement, she will do more of the vigorous hiking, kayaking, and cycling that she's always done—locally and farther off, in the California where she once studied, lived, and worked (as an actor and an agent!), in the Northwest, in the Midwest where she grew up (in Carbondale, Ill.)—really anywhere she can get to, and she's gotten to a lot of places on this continent and abroad. One of her most recent adventures was in 2020, teaching writing with a group of Pitt students studying abroad in Sydney, Australia; she had big plans to stay on after the term's end, meet up with friends and family, and make once-in-a-lifetime treks, plans that were sadly cut short by the outbreak of the global pandemic. You can read about her and her students' experiences in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of The Fifth Floor.
She'll continue to write vividly about the nature she loves in a style that is all her own. She'll mesh this with sharp insights into human charms and foibles, brilliant mimicry of the noisy worlds we move through. I fell in love with her witty, tender, always surprising poems back in our graduate workshops—with Ed Ochester, with Lynn Emanuel, with the late visiting poet Belle Waring—and continue to be dazzled each week when we write together on Zoom. This coming fall, her second full-length collection, All the Hanging Wrenches, comes out from Carnegie Mellon University Press, which also published her first collection, Dream of the Gone-From City, in 2017.
A francophone might say of Barbara's poetry, "Ça bouge"—it moves, or more colloquially, it rocks. It does. She has two chapbooks as well, Exposure (Finishing Line Press, 2014) and A Girl in Water (Parallel Press of the University of Wisconsin Memorial Libraries, 2002). Individual poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, from Prairie Schooner to West Branch. She's read her work in France, and at various venues in the U.S., including The Actors' Temple in New York City and California State University, Northridge, where she earned an MA in English and studied poetry writing with Pitt alumna Dorothy Barresi. While still in the MFA program at Pitt, she was part of the Poetry and Drum Ensemble, which consisted of Pitt-affiliated and community poets and percussionists. And she is a fixture in the Pittsburgh literary community, having been a featured reader all over town.
Barbara is also a sometime playwright and fiction writer. Her one-act play, Charades, was produced in 1993 as a Pittsburgh New Works Festival winner, and her short story, "Fireworks," was published in Arts and Letters: A Journal of Contemporary Culture in 1993. She has frequently, and generously, been a contributor to The Fifth Floor and has published essays in national journals like Rattle magazine. And she has worked as an editor and grantwriter, embodying for her students the versatility of the writing life.
She has embodied this in her decades of teaching. She's taught at Carnegie Mellon, at Waynesburg University, in high schools and community arts centers—but has done the lion's share of her teaching in Pitt's Department of English, teaching across the Literature, Composition, and Writing programs. In Literature, she's taught many a section of Reading Poetry (did I mention that one of Barbara's party tricks is to recite entire poems from the canon or its margins?) and Introduction to Shakespeare (a trained actor, she'll recite from the Bard, too). In Composition, she's taught Travel Writing, Writing for Environmental Advocacy (a course close to her heart that she designed), Seminar in Composition, Written Professional Communication, and Freshman Engineering Seminar in Composition; she's a veteran consultant in the Writing Center, where she also coordinated the Writers' Café program for the past 10 years. And in Writing, she's taught Introduction to Creative Writing, Introduction to Poetry, Introduction to Fiction, Poetry Workshop, and Readings in Contemporary Poetry. With Barbara Weissberger of Studio Arts, she co-designed and taught The Book as Art. And she's mentored students through independent studies and Brackenridge Fellowship projects.
I've used the word "generous" at least once in this article. I'm going to use it again, because Barbara is one of the most generous colleagues I've known. When we lost our colleague Julianne McAdoo to cancer a few years ago, she helped to memorialize her by establishing the Writers' Café undergraduate prize in fiction in her name. I can't count the number of times she has been there for me through difficulties, and I'm not the only one who can say this. Perhaps her most generous gesture was riding around Pittsburgh's bike trails with me as I chugged on my 30-year-old Schwinn and she slowed her pace on her much more road-worthy bike so I wouldn't feel too schlumpy. Her generosity is matched only by her humility; you'd never know she'd hobnobbed with big Hollywood names or that she can throw a softball so hard it will sting your palm under the leather of your mitt.
With good fortune, though, I'll continue to write with her in our Zoom group, where she will tell us not to expect much just before she reads another draft that blows us away.
—Ellen McGrath Smith
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