More than half a lifetime ago, before she was a renowned bioethicist—in fact before she had ever heard of the word “bioethicist”—Peggy Battin wrote a short story about a husband and wife who make a pact to end their own lives, together, when they get old.

It’s a beautiful, chilling story, and the questions it raises go far beyond what we are now only marginally willing to discuss in America. This isn’t about a physician writing a lethal prescription for a terminally ill patient. This is about what bioethicists call “preemptive suicide.” If you want a close-up look at the kind of unflinching ethical questions Margaret Pabst Battin thinks we should ponder, her story “Robeck” is not a bad place to start.

Battin is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and adjunct professor of internal medicine in the Division of Medical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Utah. It was only after she moved to Utah in 1975 that she began to steer her career toward issues of death and dying, but in the short stories she wrote while still in graduate school, she had already begun to grapple with end-of-life issues, spurred in part by a question her own mother asked in the last, debilitating stages of cancer: “Why should it be so hard to die?”

In “Robeck,” the elderly wife—faced with the prospect of an even older age filled with “despair, decay, continuing loneliness”—still wants to follow through with the suicide pact she and her husband had made when they were younger. The husband—faced with the realization that dying as an abstract concept is not the same as actually dying—changes his mind.

“Robeck,” written in the 1970s, wasn’t published until 2005, when it appeared among the philosophical essays in Battin’s book Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die. On a November afternoon three years later, Battin’s husband, University of Utah English professor Brooke Hopkins, was riding his bike down City Creek Canyon and collided on a blind curve with another biker heading uphill.

Suddenly, like the characters in her short story, Battin came face to face with how complicated living and dying can be, much more complicated than even a philosopher can imagine.

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Here’s how she once opened a talk to a group called Compassion & Choices, which focuses on planning for end-oflife: by drawing a line that went straight across a chalkboard for a few inches then sloped relentlessly downward, dragging on and on until it thinly petered out. This, she told the group, is our typical life trajectory. In the modern world— with its ventilators and pacemakers, feeding tubes and chemotherapies—our deaths are often a slow decline, full of protracted suffering.

After Battin’s talk, a woman with ovarian cancer spoke up. She explained that she had done a dress rehearsal of her future death, using a method she had found on the Internet: Placing a turkey baster bag over her head. The practice run was awful, she said, so instead she had bought a gun.

The trajectory and the turkey baster bag: this, in some form or other, is the backdrop for current battles over physician-assisted suicide and other “right to die” legislation as we try to sort out our 21st-century deaths. It’s an issue that has become more pressing as technology has become even more advanced and the percentage of elderly people and health care costs rise.

Battin has long been a proponent of “death with dignity” laws that give people some degree of autonomy in how and when they die. That’s what made her husband’s accident, as she says, “so overwhelmingly ironic”—because the accident left Hopkins paralyzed from the neck down, and the bioethicist who had championed the right to die had to let the husband she deeply loved make up his own mind about whether he wanted to go on living.

“I don’t think anybody said this to my face,” Battin says of people on the other side of the right-to-die issue, “but I’m sure they thought it: she deserves this, this will teach her.”

But Battin has not changed her view that people should have a choice in the manner and time of their own death. Instead, she says, what Hopkins’s ordeal taught her was that the choices are “much more complicated than I thought.”

During the nearly five years that Hopkins lived following his accident, Battin witnessed a series of vacillating emotions and experiences: his gratitude at being alive, his pleas to let his life be over, courses in great literature that he continued to teach from their home, moments of excruciating pain, moments of transcendence, and eventually his final decision that he couldn’t go on any longer. She realized firsthand that a severely restricted life can also have many moments of joy, and that a loving wife might in subtle ways encourage her husband to keep on living when he might want to die.

When, on the last day of July 2013, Hopkins finally asked his doctors to turn off the five technologies that were keeping him alive, Battin lay next to him as the ventilator was dialed down and his breathing eventually stopped.

“As hard as it was for me to have him make this choice to die, you have to respect it,” Battin says in her soft, measured voice. “That’s what it is to love somebody, to try to see it through their eyes.”

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How many philosophers does it take to change a light bulb? It depends on how you define “change.”

Philosophers are notoriously parsers of language and logic, and this intellectual rigor is what first drew Battin to the discipline, from the very first class she took as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College in 1959.

The first day of class, the professor walked in, sat on the edge of his desk, and said “You know, I look around at the world and I think, ‘all is water.’ ” He went on at great length and was very persuasive that water is the material substrate of everything, Battin remembers. At the next class, he walked in, sat on the desk, and said “You know, I think I was wrong. I think it’s air.” On the third day it was fire.

“What he produced,” Battin says, “was a skeptic. It was one of the best and most engaging intellectual lessons you could possibly have.”

After college, she worked, married, had a first child, and moved to California. Two weeks after the birth of their second child, in 1969, she entered the University of California, Irvine, to get her doctorate in philosophy—and, simultaneously, an MFA in creative writing.

She explains the dual degrees this way: “I liked the intellectual rigor of philosophy, but you can’t read Spinoza all day long. I liked the inventiveness of fiction, but you have to make it meaning-rich and rigorous; you can’t just feed on someone else’s struggles with their inner confusions.”

She sent her fiction to literary magazines and got lots of rejection letters. So, with typical moxie, she flew to New York and began the rounds of publishers and agents in person. At first she still had no luck. Then she called The New American Review (publisher of literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez and Sylvia Plath) and asked to speak to the editor.

“After a few minutes of silence, the voice on the other end of the phone said ‘Mr. Solotaroff will be happy to see you. He has four minutes,’ ” Battin recalls. Luckily, she was calling from the phone booth in the lobby. Later that year, M. Pabst Battin’s “Terminal Procedure” was published in The New American Review. And the next year it was published in Best American Short Stories 1976.

By then, Battin was divorced and living in Salt Lake City, hired by the University of Utah’s philosophy department for a one-year appointment. She had written her doctoral dissertation on Plato’s theory of art, and she thought she was headed toward a career focused on the ancient philosophers and aesthetics. But as a new, temporary hire, she was assigned to teach Intellectual Traditions of the West (ITW). One of the other new hires for ITW was Brooke Hopkins, who had joined the U after five years of teaching at Harvard.

And then, three things happened: she fell in love; she gradually began merging her prior literary interest in issues of death and dying with her academic pursuits; and she won a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for Independent Study and Research, one of just six in the country, for work on the ethics of suicide. Within a week of the award, her temporary job became tenure track. She would eventually win the U’s most prestigious award, the Rosenblatt Prize.

“You know, people have been dying for a long time,” Battin deadpans. “And such a large percentage of them, too. So I’m not the first person who ever thought about death and dying.” But she was among the first, and the most prolific, thinkers in the emerging field of bioethics—a mash-up of theoretical ethics with the practicalities of day-to-day medicine and science.

Battin’s personality dovetailed with this practical approach. “She’s by no means an ideologue or inflexible,” says Arthur Caplan, founding director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University. “She’s always been a person who’s been tuned in to the specifics of a case.”

At the New York-based Hastings Center, which is often credited with starting the field of bioethics and where Battin is a Fellow, president Mildred Solomon describes her this way: “She has comprehensive talents you rarely see all in one mind.” Philosophers are well known for being analytical, Solomon says, and Battin is “deeply analytical.” But she is also able to see how logical arguments “play out in messy and emotionally rich human contexts. That’s very unusual.”

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If you could look inside Peggy Battin’s brain, perhaps it would look something like the inside of her house.

There are stacks of paper on each of her six desks (seven desks if you count the dining room table). On the stacks there are sticky notes, and there are sticky notes around every inch of the doorframe in the kitchen and inside each kitchen cabinet. Upstairs there are stacks of paper leading from one bedroom to another, a trail of research and pondering.

She keeps paper copies of every draft of everything she is writing or has written. In a stack on the windowsill is the 16th draft of a chapter she began in 1995; eventually it will be a book about the ethics of reproduction, tentatively titled Sex & Consequences.

“Sometimes I joke that what I really need is to move into an old motel,” she says, “so I could have a different room for each project.”

The topics she has published about include: death and dying, age-rationing of medical care, ethical issues in organized religion, the ethics of religious refusal of medical treatment, drugs and justice, disability, aesthetics, and ethical issues about infectious diseases. That’s a total of 20 books authored, edited, or co-edited.

Battin’s latest book is The Ethics of Suicide: Historical Sources, published in the fall of 2015. It’s 720 pages in teeny type—but even that wasn’t enough to handle all the research amassed by Battin, her 46 consulting editors, and 27 research assistants. So she proposed a partnership between the book’s publisher, Oxford University Press, and the University of Utah’s Marriott Library in what became a first-of-its-kind publishing venture. While many books have associated digital archives, this is the first time QR codes have been embedded in each entry in the print edition, linking directly to expanded primary sources and interactive features online.

Battin didn’t set out to write such an exhaustive investigation of suicide. When she started the project four decades ago, she was simply filing away photocopies of interesting historical references. “You can’t just throw them away— they’re too interesting and too hard to get ahold of (this was, of course, pre-Internet)—so you put them in a file drawer,” and eventually the file drawer goes from ancient Egypt to the present. “And then you say, well, what about Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Islam? So now there are more file drawers. And then you say, what about these oral cultures that didn’t have written records, the Maya, the Aztec, the Inca?”

The book, notes Battin, “takes no sides” in these historical debates about suicide, instead presenting primary sources that give a variety of pros, cons, and neutral discussion on topics that include suicide as sin, suicide as heroic choice, physician aid in dying, Buddhist monks who immolate themselves to protest a war, and jihadists seeking martyrdom. The book, she argues, “challenges monolithic thinking about suicide.”

Battin has spent 39 years, off and on, working on this book, and even longer immersed in thoughts about death and dying. She has never been suicidal herself, she says, which makes it possible to devote so much time to thinking about what others might consider morbid topics.

She is, she says, an optimistic person. More than four decades after writing “Robeck”—which has now been turned into a play by Salt Lake City playwright Julie Jensen and will be produced by the Salt Lake Acting Company in the fall of 2016—she can imagine an America in which everyone “has a full range of choice about how they’d like their own deaths to go.”

Or, at least, “that such an outcome would in principle be possible.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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The student arrives late, frazzled and out of breath, and takes a seat around the table. The topic today in Jack Newell’s graduate class in educational leadership is Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, a book that, on the surface, is about fly-fishing. When it’s her turn to speak about her favorite passages, the woman turns to an earmarked page, and then another, starts to speak, then stops. A minute goes by. She says nothing. Newell waits. Some of us fidget in our seats.

Finally the woman says, “We’re going through a process in our school district, a pretty major district improvement.” She’s a school administrator in the Salt Lake Valley, and she says she has just come from a meeting with a likeable employee who isn’t performing well. Newell leans slightly towards her. “How would you describe the feelings you’re experiencing?” he asks. She pauses and then realizes why a book about fly-fishing has brought her to tears—because, like the characters in the book, she finds herself face-to-face with the responsibilities and limitations of trying to help another person.

“Teaching with your mouth shut” is the way former students have described Newell’s classroom style. It always has been more about listening than lecturing, as students sort through moral quandaries and difficult ideas.

The buzz in America these days is all about STEM courses (those in science, technology, engineering, math), and Newell doesn’t underestimate the need for skilled workers. But he still holds out for an education that is broader and deeper than that. Too often now, education focuses on amassing credits, beefing up résumés, and getting through college as quickly as possible. But the ultimate goal should be this, he says: to become ethical, effective, and caring citizens, “so we can live in a society where blindly following our chosen ideologies and pursuing our self-interest isn’t good enough.”

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Newell is a professor emeritus of education at the University of Utah. When he arrived at the U in 1974, he was 35. He was hired to be dean of students but soon was appointed to a new post, dean of liberal education, charged with revamping the University’s graduation requirements.

For years, undergraduates had been required to take a somewhat random set of “general ed” courses in addition to courses in their majors. The new “liberal ed” program required a more focused selection of classes designed specifically to challenge students to become thinkers. That’s the premise behind the term “liberal education,” which of course is not how to become more like Nancy Pelosi but about teaching students, as current U Honors College Dean Sylvia Torti PhD’98 says, to “thrive in ambiguity and complexity.”

University of Utah professor emeritus Jack Newell teaches students in an Honors College course held at the Donna Garff Marriott Honors Residential Scholars Community.

So Newell began searching the campus for professors “who had that glint in their eyes.” What he envisioned was an environment in which these passionate teachers would create captivating classes and feel they had a common purpose: “that we’re doing something really, really important, together, and it’s bigger than departmental assignments.” He invited them all over to his house once a month, because he wanted to create a community. “It felt like an oasis among the silos” of the U’s disparate departments, says David Chapman, a distinguished professor emeritus of geology and geophysics who taught in the Liberal Education Program.

In 1980, the program was named by the U.S. Department of Education as one of the 10 undergraduate programs nationwide that were worthy models for reforming liberal arts study. But the University and its levels of bureaucracy were growing, and some of the U deans wanted to channel funding and control of liberal education classes back to their own departments. After Newell left his deanship in 1990 to return to full-time teaching, the Liberal Education Program morphed into the U’s Office of Undergraduate Studies. Today, students can choose from more than 900 “gen ed” courses. Whether something has been lost depends on whom you ask.

Newell’s passion for “liberal education” began in his childhood home in rural Englewood, Ohio, where his father was a physician and his parents would talk around the dinner table with reverence about their former college professors. Still, Newell admits, as a child and teen he was more adventurous than studious. (“The Newells have very slow-maturing genes,” he says by way of explanation.) He preferred to daydream, or make a raft and float it down the river behind his house; at school, his grades were mediocre.

In junior high, he became enchanted by the idea of Deep Springs College in the remote Sierra Nevadas of California, after a neighbor who was a student there came home with stories of the school’s improbable mix of scholars and cowboys. Newell, who had spent summers at his grandfather’s Colorado ranch, was already predisposed to the romance of the West. So, with his aptitude for science and a letter of recommendation from the local superintendent of schools, he applied and was accepted at Deep Springs.

Unless you’ve made it a point to investigate progressive American colleges, you might not have heard of Deep Springs. As Newell writes, it’s “the smallest, most remote, most selective, and certainly the most unusual liberal arts college in the world.” More than half the graduates have gone on to get doctorates.

Today the two-year college has, at most, 30 students. In the whole school. When Newell entered in 1956, there were 13. Located northwest of Death Valley, the college is housed on a working cattle ranch and alfalfa farm. Students milk the cows, bale the hay, and clean the toilets, as well as engage in intellectually strenuous course work. They also help choose the faculty, design the curriculum, and run the admissions process.

Physical isolation—the closest town (population 259) is 28 miles away over a high mountain pass, and even today the students have chosen not to have wi-fi access in their dorms—was crucial to the vision of the school’s founder, Lucien L. Nunn, who wanted to create a place that would foster both self-reliance and community spirit, and would produce “capable and sagacious leaders.”

L.L. Nunn was a quirky, theatrical, driven, complicated man. In Colorado, in 1891, he built the world’s first alternating current hydroelectric power plant for industrial use, taking energy from a stream downhill to his gold mine higher up the mountain, a feat that revolutionized industrial production worldwide. At Niagara Falls in New York, he built what at the time was the largest power plant in the world. In Utah, he built the Olmsted Power Plant in Provo Canyon, and in order to train enough able workers, he established an educational institute on the site. He also once owned a Ford dealership in Provo and developed the Federal Heights neighborhood in Salt Lake City. In 1917, he founded his own liberal arts college, Deep Springs, in California.

Newell has written a book about Nunn and the school—The Electric Edge of Academe: The Saga of Lucien L. Nunn and Deep Springs College—published this spring by the University of Utah Press. The book includes Newell’s firsthand account of his years as a student, young professor, and, from 1995 to 2004, the college’s president.

Like Deep Springs itself, Newell is both academic and practical-minded, obtaining a doctorate in educational leadership from Ohio State University but also working as a forest fire crewman and a mule packer during and after college. He encourages his students to branch out, too: “I plead with my students not to just take an internship somewhere, as good as those things are, but to use their college summers to go out and throw themselves into a different life and meet people they would otherwise not rub shoulders with.” It’s advice that often falls on deaf ears. “I can’t get their attention on this, partly because their parents are saying ‘résumé, résumé, résumé.’ ”

And you need to learn to write well, he tells his students. He requires them to keep journals about what they read and to connect those readings to their own life experiences. “Be yourself, be funny, be inspired, be irritated, be real!”

Newell has kept a journal since his first autumn as a student at Deep Springs, beginning with a passage that reads, “When I’m a parent and my kids go off to college, I want to ask them what they are reading in their classes, buy those books, and dive into them so we can talk about what is exciting to them.” His youthful exuberance diminished only slightly by the time his actual four children went off to college—he didn’t end up buying all those textbooks, but there were always spirited conversations, says his son Eric, who like his three sisters, ended up becoming an educator, too.

Jack met his wife, Linda King Newell, when both of them worked on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon one summer while she was an art education major at Utah State University and he was getting a master’s degree at Duke University. Linda is probably best known as the co-author, with Valeen Tippetts Avery, of the prize-winning but controversial 1984 biography of LDS Church founder Joseph Smith’s first wife, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith.

Newell himself has written more than 120 published articles and six books, served as editor of The Review of Higher Education, and with his wife was co-editor in the 1980s of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, an independent quarterly published by generally more liberal members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The articles about church history that the Newells published sometimes got them in hot water with LDS Church authorities, but he stands by them.

“Our tests for publishing became 1) Is the evidence unimpeachable? 2) Is the interpretation responsible? And 3) Is the issue important to a rounded understanding of the Mormon experience,” Newell wrote in a 2006 Dialogue essay that followed his spiritual journey as a Mormon convert who, as he says, eventually “moved beyond the religion over issues such as the squelching of dissent.”

Transparency and trust are keys to good leadership, he says. He notes that the best lesson he ever received about how to be a good leader came when he was 21 and working as foreman of a forest fire crew at Crater Lake in Oregon. It had been a rainy spring, and the fire danger was low, so the chief ranger assigned him to supervise the building of a boathouse—and then announced that he would not be back to check on their work until the end of the summer. Being trusted like that, Newell says, meant “we were not going to let him down.”

Katherine Chaddock PhD’94, chair of the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of South Carolina, says she felt the same way about Newell when she was taking his graduate courses at the U nearly 30 years ago. “You could tell he wanted to learn from you,” she says. And that led her to this realization: “You just didn’t want to bring someone like Jack a half-assed essay.”

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Sometimes Newell asks his students to imagine the kind of newspaper story that might be written about them in the future, perhaps on the occasion of their retirement after a long career. The assignment is to write a story that captures not only what they were like but also what they stood for. Moral courage, moral authority, moral issues— these are themes that come up again and again in Newell’s classes.

So what would the news story about him say? Maybe it would note that he hardly ever wears a necktie, that he loves hiking and photography and canoeing, that some of his happiest moments are spent paddling his old red canoe on a quiet lake at dawn. But first and foremost, he says, he would like to be remembered as a teacher, someone who “has always been passionate about pushing people to think.”

Jack Newell enjoys hiking, photography, and canoeing and in his youth worked as a forest fire crewman.

For the nine years since his return to Utah from his presidency at Deep Springs, he has taught both at the U and in the Venture Course in the Humanities, a Utah Humanities Council program that provides college courses in philosophy, history, art history, and literature to low-income students. These days, he teaches two courses at the U: a graduate-level seminar on leadership in the School of Education, and a year-long undergraduate honors class whose subtitle is “Rediscovering Liberal Education.”

After a half century of teaching, this is what he still wants: to sit down with students, to throw out a question, to not shy away from what happens next. “Good teachers must ask students to examine their deepest beliefs and values,” he says. “None of us can ultimately live a full and good life, a committed life, without questioning what we believe and reaffirming as full-blown adults the commitments we wish to live by.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t read much poetry. We mean to, in the same way we mean to eat 10 servings of fruit and vegetables every day, which makes poetry kind of the collard greens of the literary world. And that makes Paisley Rekdal disappointed but also kind of relieved.

Rekdal teaches poetry at the University of Utah, where she is also director of the graduate Creative Writing Program. In poetry circles, she is well known and respected, the winner of prestigious prizes and fellowships (two Pushcarts, an Amy Lowell, and a Guggenheim, for starters). But prizes don’t necessarily translate into book sales or readers.

“I can tell you this,” Rekdal says, “every time I’ve done a reading and they say, ‘She’s published six books and she has a seventh on the way,’ someone will come up and say, ‘I’ve never heard of you. Really, I’ve never ever heard of you.’ ” Then she laughs and adds, “People are very happy to reinforce your obscurity.”

But there is also an upside to being on the sidelines of American consciousness, and of writing verse that a reader has to actually put some effort into.

Here’s how Rekdal summed it up in a blog entry titled “Why I Hate National Poetry Month”: “One of the things I love so much about poetry is how it walks that line between public speech and private utterance, and for me, I’ve always felt that there were certain things I couldn’t say if I knew they were being read widely.”

Yes, she admits, she has revealed all kinds of things about herself on her blog, in published essays, and in memoirs, “much to the horror of my family.” But the advantage of poetry is that “some of the darker things I might say, people won’t necessarily understand.”

“I’m not going to lie,” she says. “I think it’s a real bonus.” So here, perhaps, is Paisley Rekdal. Open. But also wary. A little afraid you might try to fit her into a box of your own design.

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Rekdal didn’t set out to be a poet. She thought she’d be a medieval scholar, and she received a master’s degree from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies. She liked the idea of braiding together disciplines such as history, art, theology, and music to study an obscure time. But after a while, she realized that what she really wanted to do was put everything she learned into a poem. “I was always connecting something in the medieval world to my life. And that doesn’t work very well in an academic paper.”

Five years later, she received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Michigan—because what might not work for a scholarly journal turned out to be perfect for the writing she has since become known for: a blend of research and memoir, facts and personal discovery, distance and emotional truth.

Paisley Rekdal, shown here in her office at the U, directs the University of Utah’s Creative Writing Program, which is currently ranked fourth in the nation by Poets & Writers magazine.

Rekdal grew up in Seattle, “a girl so boringly middle class her parents hadn’t even divorced,” as she says in one of her poems. Her mother is Chinese, and her father’s family is Norwegian. As a child, “I was often confused as to who was Chinese and who was white,” she reports, although she was pretty sure TV anchorman Tom Brokaw was Chinese.

“Everyone was potentially Chinese, just as everyone was potentially white,” she explains in her braided memoir/ “fictive biography” Intimate: An American Family Photo Album. “Perhaps it was because the meaning of my own race changed according to my parents’ wishes, depending on which characteristics they wanted to emphasize. As if I was a photo beneath which the caption was being, continually, rewritten.”

Much of her writing is an attempt to sort out what identity and authenticity mean, using her own discomfort to shed light on larger questions of race, self, and change. Intimate, published in 2011, examines and reimagines the photographic quest of Edward Curtis to document Native Americans during the early decades of the 20th century. Rekdal believes that the photographer, in trying to “help” his subjects, insisted on a kind of cultural purity that no longer rang true.

Most people, she observes, inhabit that middle ground between how we understand ourselves and how others understand us. In her own life, she says, being biracial has been a way for her to literalize that divide. “Most of my life, people have tried to give me an identity. So unless I come up with a sense of my own identity and push back, I’ll be like Mae West, a bit of a cipher.”

Ah, Mae West. When Rekdal was a child she was obsessed with West, even dressing up as the bawdy performer for her elementary school talent show (a reference only the teachers got). Rekdal’s fifth volume of poetry, which will be published in 2016, includes “West: A Crown,” in which she explores her own fascination with the strong-willed, outrageous actress/playwright/sex symbol. Wonder Woman was also one of Rekdal’s favorites.

“I think both were early feminist icons, although as a child I didn’t have the language for that,” she says. “But West is a very complicated feminist symbol,” she points out—independent yet playing the same vixen role over and over, never breaking character, “never allowing that character to evolve emotionally or intellectually.”

“I’m interested in what happens when you inhabit a role and then get trapped in it,” Rekdal says. That interest also hits close to home. “Mae West presents a real terror for me as a working writer. Because I don’t want to be hitting one note and never get out of it.”

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So Rekdal likes to mix it up. Be a poet. But also a memoirist (her The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee was published 15 years ago, when she was just 28 years old). And a writer of nonfiction (she’s currently researching a book she prefers for now to keep under wraps). She also is a community archivist. In 2013, she launched a website called Mapping Salt Lake City, a community project based on Rebecca Solnit’s 2010 book Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Solnit’s book reinvents the traditional atlas, using the work of writers, artists, and photographers to explore a city through the eyes of its inhabitants.

A city isn’t Mae West, stuck in time, defined forever by one shtick. A city and its stories evolve, even if outsiders try to stuff that city into one small stereotype. Mapping Salt Lake City, a joint project between the University of Utah, Westminster College, and current and former residents, is a compilation about Salt Lake’s then and now, from known and unknown writers. A little sample of its quirky offerings: a poem about bargain shopping at a Deseret Industries store, by Utah poet Joel Long MFA’93; the tender thoughts of a returning Mormon missionary as he arrives at the airport baggage claim; a breathtaking memory of the old Chapman Branch Library by writer Ron Carlson BA’70 MA’72.

Often, says poet Jeffrey McDaniel, who teaches Rekdal’s books in his creative writing classes at Sarah Lawrence College, poets are known as free spirits, “but we stay in our genre, or even within one region in our genre, in a not-free-spirit way. Paisley crosses borders. That’s just an extension of who she is.” And, says McDaniel, “she’s one of the smartest people I know.”

Rekdal has lived in Salt Lake City for 11 years now, lured to the University of Utah’s faculty from the University of Wyoming. Living here, she says, has made her think more about the relationship between person and place, “and what it means to be part of a community that on the surface you don’t have anything in common with.”

The U’s doctoral Creative Writing Program she runs is ranked fourth in the nation by Poets & Writers magazine, based on job placements and prizes won, departmental reputation, and funding. Rekdal also teaches poetry (reading it, writing it), as well as creative nonfiction, at the graduate and undergraduate level.

Can creative writing be taught? “I believe it can, much in the way the basics of archery are,” Rekdal wrote in 2012 in the Los Angeles Review of Books. “I can instruct you on the purpose and characteristics of metaphor. I can train you to recognize (and excise) a cliché. I can educate you in traditional poetic form. … What I can’t do is teach you how to recognize in your own life what has the power and depth to translate into a poem versus what will become merely a charming anecdote to tell at a party.”

U professor Paisley Rekdal is now working on her fifth volume of poetry, scheduled for publication in 2016.

Rekdal’s own poems show “an incredible attentiveness to the world around her,” says Jennifer Chang, an assistant professor of creative writing and English at George Washington University. Chang first read Animal Eye, Rekdal’s 2012 poetry collection, when she was serving as a judge on a prize committee. “In a year with lots of strong books, her poems stood out,” says Chang. “Animal Eye at once invites you into the experience of creating language and pushes you to think about difficult subjects. It’s one of my favorite books in the past 10 years.”

Two of the poems in Animal Eye are long, 13 pages each, and showcase Rekdal’s ability, again, to braid together disparate elements. “Easter in Lisbon” is about a love affair that soured, the Rodney King beating, and the afternoon in 1991 when she unwittingly caused the escape of baby lemurs from their cage at the dismal Lisbon Zoo. “Wax” weaves together the French Revolution, her mother’s cancer, and Madame Tussaud.

Animal Eye ended up winning one prize (the UNT Rainer Maria Rilke Poetry Award) and being a finalist for two more (the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize and the Balcones Prize). If you’re a poet, you spend a lot of time sending out your collections in the hopes of winning a contest or getting a fellowship. Rekdal figures she is successful less than 5 percent of the time. But, having served as a judge herself, most recently for the National Book Award, she knows how random contests can be.

“The upside, and it’s a really big upside,” Rekdal says, “is you no longer personalize rejection.” Or, as she said in an interview posted on Poets & Writers, “I’ve learned how to brush off the rejection and continue to write within hours of a serious disappointment. Disappointment is, in fact, a great thing for a writer (if by ‘great’ we also mean getting kicked in the groin), since it forces you either to learn how to enjoy the writing process itself or give it up.”

For those of us who don’t pay attention to poetry prizes, though, (or the fact that her poems were included in the Best American Poetry collections in 2012 and 2013), certainly there can be no bigger honor than to be chosen by National Public Radio to be their “NewsPoet” of the month, invited to write a poem about the day’s news. Rekdal’s turn came in July 2012.

That meant sitting with the producers of All Things Considered as they planned the evening’s news show, then being put in a windowless room to come up with a poem. In two hours. That would be read to millions of listeners. It was a slow news day (one of her big fears), but she managed to craft a poem about a new medical app for the heart, rooftop missiles at the Olympics, and a building that was slowly sliding into a sinkhole. Writing the poem, she says, “was one of the scarier things I’ve ever done. It was a nail-biter, I won’t lie.”

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Rekdal is fond of making fun of herself. Here’s something she said about her name, in an interview with former Utah writer Matthew Batt PhD’06 on thenervousbreakdown.com: “I suspect my first poems took a bit longer to publish because who in his right mind would a) want to read about unicorns or b) feel comfortable advocating for anyone whose name evoked Hendrix-inspired air guitar sessions while stoned on cough syrup.”

And here’s a little impromptu standup she recounts now when asked about the phenomenon of The Poetry Reading. “There’s nothing more humbling,” she begins. “People fall asleep in front of you, people get up and leave the room while you’re speaking. People will text. People will tell you afterward how much they hate poetry but they like yours. They hate everything about what you do, but you’re the least offensive example of it. I’ve had people tell me how much older I look up close than far away. So, yeah, there’s nothing better than giving a poetry reading.” She’s pretty sure even her husband doesn’t read her poems. (Sean Myles is a computer programmer for Allstate who lives in the other side of the duplex they own. “I strongly recommend doing it this way,” she says of their living arrangements. “It’s the only way to stay married.”)

American entertainments train people to read and think narratively, expecting a beginning, middle, and end, she says. But a poem thinks in a different kind of way, in a lyric way that may move erratically through space and time, “and it sounds foreign to us,” she says.

She’s pretty sure poetry will survive anyway, if for no other reason than people need something to read at weddings and funerals, when poetry can help us navigate moments of intense emotion. As for herself, writing poetry “allows a kind of wildness that prose doesn’t,” she says. “To be honest, it feels like, if the soul could think, it would think in poetry.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City-based journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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If you run a regional theater in America, you can sometimes find yourself in trouble. Not trouble with a capital T that rhymes with P and stands for pool, because that would be The Music Man, which is always a safe bet. No, we’re talking about trouble that can make you lose season subscribers.

Which brings us to the stage of Pioneer Theatre Company at the University of Utah, where one afternoon this past fall artistic director Karen Azenberg sat fielding questions from a talkback audience that had just seen The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which Azenberg also directed. The funny, softhearted musical includes a song in which a middle-school speller bemoans his “unfortunate erection” as he waits his turn at the microphone. At PTC, though, a milder version of the song, this one called “My Unfortunate Distraction,” was used for all but two shows of the two-week run. “Why?” wondered an audience member in row D.

Azenberg smiled and jumped right in with a little lesson on the politics of theater. The musical’s lyricist, she explained, provided two versions of the script. So at PTC, where many season-ticket holders expect a tame theater experience, she mostly opted for the “distraction” version. Still, she pointed out, there were many audience members who felt just as strongly that Pioneer should have used the “less mild” version. Just the week before, in fact, a subscriber had called to say he was giving back all his future tickets in protest.

Now in her third season as artistic director of PTC, Azenberg knows that if you run a big theater in a place like Salt Lake City, sometimes you’re caught in the middle, trying to please everyone.

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Azenberg is a New Yorker to her core but is no stranger to American regional theater, having worked as a freelance choreographer and director for three decades in 28 states. When she heard that Pioneer Theatre Company’s artistic director Charles Morey would be retiring after a 25-year career, she put her name in the running, along with nearly 100 other applicants.

Azenberg was chosen in 2011 and officially took the reins the next summer. She was the unanimous choice, says Chris Lino, PTC’s managing director, who sat on the selection committee. Azenberg was well known to the PTC staff because she had been guest director and choreographer of Rent, Next to Normal, and Miss Saigon, and choreographer of the sell-out Les Miz in 2007.

Karen Azenberg works with performers in a Pioneer Theatre Company rehearsal for The Rocky Horror Show.

“We knew how smart she was,” says Lino. “Plus she knew every director in the country, including the up-and-coming directors, and that was very attractive to us.” At the time, Azenberg was president of the board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the national union for her crafts. She currently serves on the advisory board and is also a board member of the New York Musical Theatre Festival, a launching pad for new musicals.

“A lot of the applicants, on paper you’d think this is your dream candidate,” Lino says. (Some, in fact, had worked as artistic directors at well-known theaters, and Azenberg had never run a theater of any size.) “But none of them matched what Karen brought to the table.”

David Ivers, artistic director of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, who directed One Man, Two Guvnors at PTC this year, describes Azenberg this way: “The thing that sets her apart is she has theater in her DNA. She has in her bones an innate understanding of how the theater world works”—including years of tagging along with her father.

Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg began his career as company manager for touring and Broadway shows, and later was producer of most of Neil Simon’s plays, as well as producer or general manager for blockbusters including Rent, George M!, and Sunday in the Park with George. Ten of the plays he has either produced or managed have won Tony Awards, and in 2012 Azenberg himself won a “Lifetime Achievement in Theatre” Tony.

Long before there were take-your-daughter-to-work days, Manny took little Karen to the theater (and also sometimes to watch him play softball with Robert Redford in the Broadway Show League). “You sit there,” her dad would instruct her, and so from a chair backstage she would watch the show behind the show.

Pioneer Memorial Theatre is affiliated with the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts.

“How I work here,” she says about her life now at PTC, “is how I perceive he worked; it’s my model.” That means dropping in every day to chat with scenic carpenters and the costume shop, and wanting to know all the details about lighting and sound boards and props. But Manny Azenberg told his daughter over and over: “Don’t go into theater.”

“As a kid,” she says, “this is how I translated ‘Don’t go into theater’: Don’t be an actor. So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be a dancer!’” Of course she meant dancing in musical theater, and the showdown came when it was time to go to college.

“There were lots of tears, and me saying ‘I can’t just dance three times a week! I have to dance all day every day!’ ” She ended up majoring in dance at New York University, and she wonders now if her father’s opposition was a kind of test, to see if she had the drive to make it in a business that can be brutal.

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You might think that the daughter of a Broadway producer would have an easy entrée to Broadway. “Oh, no,” she says. “He hates nepotism… Dad’s theory is, anything you achieve, you achieve on your own.”

So he gave her a job answering phones in his office, which helped pay the bills as she auditioned for dance roles. In her early 20s, she got her first choreography job, in a summer stock theater in Connecticut. Then her work was noticed at a community theater in Manhattan, and from that came a chance to choreograph a revue at the Smithsonian, and that led to a gig choreographing Sweeney Todd at Michigan Opera Theatre, and the next year, at age 24, choreographing West Side Story.

But there were also plenty of dry periods. And this is where being Manny Azenberg’s daughter did get her a foot in the door. When one of his shows moved to Broadway and in a pinch they needed an assistant stage manager, they hired her because they knew she was adept at coordinating sound, lighting, and scene-change cues for performances. And from there came other offers, including Brighton Beach Memoirs and Master Harold and the Boys.

“Pay her minimum,” Manny insisted.

Her next big break came in 1989 when she was choreographing Guys and Dolls at Indiana Repertory Theatre. “You think like a director,” the artistic director told her, and the next year he offered her a job directing. “Like many things, I thought, ‘Oh, I can do that,’ and so I did,” Azenberg remembers. “I was winging it.” Later, that same self-confidence led her to apply for the artistic director job at Pioneer Theatre Company.

The Utah job felt like a once-in-a-lifetime chance. But it also meant that her husband, Augie Mericola, would have to give up his job as head of props for the Broadway company of Wicked. And it meant uprooting their son and daughter, then 12 and 15. On the other hand, their home was an hour commute into Manhattan for Augie, and her job as a freelance choreographer and director meant being gone for long stretches of time. On the other other hand, her daughter hated the idea of moving so much that she offered to live in their car in the garage of their house. In the end, though, Utah won out.

“There are a lot of theaters in the U.S., but not of this size, with this kind of facility, with this kind of financial stability,” Azenberg explains.

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Like her favorite musicals, Azenberg is high-voltage and straightforward. “You always know where you stand with her, which is a rarity in the theater,” says the Shakespeare Festival’s Ivers. Adds PTC resident scenic designer George Maxwell: “She’s very precise, and she doesn’t give up until she gets what she wants.”

A person driven like that can sometimes get stressed out, of course. “I have a barometer of how stressed she is by her hair,” says PTC managing director Lino. “It has its own emotional life.”

PTC runs a “very lean ship,” says Lino. “Our peers—large middle-America theaters with at least a $4 million budget—all have larger budgets but don’t produce work as big as ours. A greater percentage of our operating budget goes into what you see on stage.” (The 932-seat theater is affiliated with the University of Utah’s College of Fine Arts but gets no direct funding from the U.) “Karen knows how to stick to a budget,” Lino adds, “because she instinctively prioritizes. Not every artistic director can also think like a producer.”

Azenberg travels back to New York seven or eight times a year, to do auditions for PTC shows (most hires are New York actors, although she also auditions in Salt Lake and hires a fair number of locals), and to see what’s new on Broadway and off—a requirement since she’s a Tony Awards voter. That also puts her in the loop for what new plays and musicals might be a good fit for PTC.

Karen Azenberg recently started a new play-development reading series at Pioneer Theatre Company, called Play-by-Play.

In sheer volume of potential audience members, Pioneer’s biggest rival is Broadway Across America and the “Broadway-style” 2,500-seat mega-theater now under construction three miles away in downtown Salt Lake City. Here’s how Azenberg and Lino explain the difference between the two venues: The caliber of the actors is equal, but PTC’s stage design, costuming, and other crews are Utahns who pay Utah taxes; the tickets are less than half the price; and, says Azenberg, “our productions are staged for this theater and this cast, so everything is fresh for this production.” Of course, convincing Utahns to pick PTC over the tour is a hard sell, especially when the tour is Wicked or The Book of Mormon.

Would Pioneer Theatre Company ever stage the irreverent, award-winning Book of Mormon? The theater chose not to stage Tony Kushner’s Angels in America two decades ago. “There was no way we could do that in this theater, named after the pioneers, and not have a large part of our audience think we were attacking them,” Lino recalls. Azenberg says she figures that by the time the rights to The Book of Mormon become available for regional theaters, she’ll “be sitting in an old-age home somewhere.”

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Theater audiences in general are a graying lot. But the average age of season-ticket holders at PTC has dropped from 65 to 55 in the past 10 years, and from 55 to 45 for single-ticket sales—perhaps because, over the years, the shows have incrementally included newer works, not just the old chestnuts.

Azenberg strives for a balance in each theater season: mysteries and musicals, comedies and drama, familiar and surprising. “I like doing fun and good and eclectic theater,” she says. But she knows “not everyone is going to like everything.” Sometimes there are nasty letters and phone calls.

During her second season, some audience members called and wrote to say they had blanched at the interracial casting of Elf: The Musical. And there was a flap over a three-second gay kiss in the murder mystery Deathtrap. (Twenty years ago, PTC became one of the first big regional theaters to institute a “content advisory,” but to have warned the audience about this kiss would have been a plot spoiler, Azenberg says.) “I’m not producing these plays and musicals to offend people,” she adds. “I’m trying to cover as wide a range of content as possible.”

To reach newer audiences, Azenberg has also instituted “concert” performances (including the recent scaled-down version of the camp musical The Rocky Horror Show) and a new-play-development reading series, Play-by-Play—no sets, no costumes, just actors reading from scripts she has culled from the hundreds sent to her from playwrights across the United States.

She hopes Play-by-Play will draw a new Utah audience. But she also knows that new play development can boost Pioneer’s standing among actors, directors, and writers nationwide, as PTC launches world premieres that might have a chance of making their way to New York because of Azenberg’s connections. “When I arrived, Pioneer Theatre Company had a wonderful but quiet reputation—which is starting to change,” she says. “Now we are still wonderful, but a little more raucous.”

—Elaine Jarvik is a Salt Lake City freelance journalist and playwright and a frequent contributor to Continuum.

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