The Emily Dickinson House surrounded by mini-houses painted with her words

We took advantage of the unlikely convergence from around the world of friends from the glorious (even if not actually the best) Amherst Class of ’92 to crash their Reunion this weekend. As usual the place was in verdant, classic-collegiate form, with fundraising officers disguised as trees and squirrels standing at the ready to accept Major Gifts from alumni overcome by sentiment. I felt the same as when I visited last September for a poetry workshop: these kids today don’t know how good they have it!

I was a bit concerned about being seen as a total out-of-sequence weirdo for coming to some other Reunion but, with the help of my trusty nametag to reassure people that they hadn’t forgotten I was in their class, all was forgiven. There is almost always a pleasant surprise at these sorts of gatherings made up, in the words of our class bard, by “Someone who lost their job in publishing pretending to be interested in the internet; someone who got tired of teaching in an underfunded public school pretending to think charter schools are not late capitalism at its most insidious but in fact the answer to our prayers; someone who used to build buildings out of wood and bricks pretending they’d rather build them out of recycled shopping bags, for less money; someone living in another country who spends all day buying vegetables at outdoor markets.” [This is a joke. But not entirely.]

The Kissing List

For me this was getting to see our friend Stephanie Reents read from her debut book of short stories that just came out last week, The Kissing List. If you buy only one book this year by an Amherst and Oxford graduate about the lives, loves and losses of women in their 20s, tinged both with Surrealism and chick lit, let this be the one! Actually, all cheap laffs aside, this is a great collection that is full of surprising and acute language, unstinting and humorous looks at life, and a lot more formal inventiveness than you might be expecting if you’re an average overeducated Jane to whom this is (literally) being marketed as something to put in your beach bag.

Fun fact about Reunion and this genre! Melissa Banks’ collection The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which probably made more of a splash than any other short story collection about young women’s (as opposed to teenagers’ or vampires’) lives, includes a name check of my buddy Bart (’91)’s ex-dog, Flora the bulldog! You can look it up!

Some say the world will end in fire...but surely not until this lovely Reunion is over?

From a Reunion perspective, the interesting thing about Stephanie’s book is how, as she described it, she was looking around on her hard drive a few years ago and realized that there were enough stories about young women’s lives that she could write a couple more and, as she more or less put it, put out a “fun, girls’ collection.” The choice to characterize her work in this way was just one of many different possible directions, although perhaps the wisest choice in terms of publishable avatars to assume. The career avatar I’ve taken on these days, the “academic administrator,” is not so very far away from the original choice I made, which was “Amherst English professor.” But being in the presence of actual Amherst profs and of people like Stephanie who have stayed on the creative career path, some of the differences stand out more, like the fact that as a matter of routine I say things like “going forward” in office discussion, and represent the glory that is MIT to executives at global manufacturing companies.

The Reunion question, “Are you happy with what you do?” (which actually only people who know and care about you will ask), brings to mind the sort of self-characterization that happens on purpose or “organically” (business-speak for “by accident over time”) for artists. In terms of my own career evolution away from poet-ephebe to whatever I am now, overall I am a lot happier in the current avatar than in the one I originally intended for myself. But I’ve been waking up in recent years–through writing this blog and (barely) getting back to writing poetry–to how important it is to reclaim some of the core aspects of those earlier, more passionate directions. We’ll see how effectively I have done so when the Class of ’93 gets together (Amy’s freshmen when she was an RC)…and ’94 (weren’t they cute as freshman)…and on and on.