The morning is a struggle for electrical engineering student Nick Elliott, who is operating on no sleep after pulling an all-nighter to study and finish homework that is now due. He rushes to head toward his two classes in differential equations and circuits, but on the way, he makes a stop at the Alfred Emery Building. There, in the “purple room” of the ASUU Student Child Care Center, he pauses for a moment with his 7-month-old daughter. “I try to set her down and get her used to sitting by herself so she doesn’t freak out when I leave,” he says. In about three hours, after his classes wrap up, Elliott picks her up from the center and tends her for the day while his wife, Alla, who is also a student at the University of Utah, attends her classes and works as an accounting clerk. He says there’s an art to balancing his schooling with responsibilities as a dad and work at Costco, where he spends three nights a week and a full shift on Saturday.

Elliott counts himself lucky to find child care on campus. “There aren’t many places that provide day care services for infants that are affordable,” he says. “When you total up how much it’s going to cost to have day care, it almost makes it insurmountable to finish school. It’s like, ‘Oh, how am I going to do this?’ ”

The University of Utah is trying to make the answer to that question a little easier for student parents and nontraditional students with families. Providing affordable, on-campus child care for students is a high priority as a means to help prevent them from dropping out, alleviate possible debt, and enable them to graduate sooner.

“Our goals are to help, support, and enable our students to focus on their learning, and one of the ways we do that is assuring them that they have great, safe, high-quality spaces for their kids,” says Ruth Watkins, the U’s senior vice president for academic affairs. The University also is providing quality and convenient child care for faculty members as a way to attract and keep them.

About a quarter of the U’s 31,515 students are parents, and an estimated 4,000 children of both students and faculty require some sort of child care, from full-time day care to part-time, hourly services. The University has eight child care programs with a total capacity for 480 children, meaning that only about 10 percent of the child care needs are being met on campus. Yet the U is doing much more than most colleges and universities across the country. In January, the University of Utah was ranked No. 2 in the nation by BestColleges.com as a top school for nontraditional students, and the University is expanding child care and other family-friendly services even as institutions nationwide are cutting back because of funding constraints.

From left, Hanna Kordy, Haylee Puga, and Kate Rasmussen study a plant’s growth, in the University of Utah’s Child and Family Development Center.

The ASUU Student Child Care Center groups children by ages in five rooms painted different colors. The center opened a purple room this past January, to provide part-time hourly care for infants at the U, a first on the campus. Within the past year, the University also added lactation rooms across campus, and starting in May, all new buildings and renovations totaling more than $10 million must include designs for a lactation space. In all, the University now has 21 private rooms for nursing mothers, and three more will be located in the new S.J. Quinney College of Law building when it opens this fall.

****

Afamily reading room where parents can study while their children play also opened last fall at the J. Willard Marriott Library, along with three adjacent lactation rooms. And renovation of the Child and Family Development Center, located next to the ASUU care center, is planned for next year.

Debra Daniels, right, director of the U Women’s Resource Center, with student Victoria Farrimond and her daughter Tori Anne.

Lindsey Reichlin, research and program coordinator for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C., says the U’s efforts to provide comprehensive child care options are “fantastic.” “For students with children, child care can be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, factors in a student’s ability to complete college and be successful,” she notes. “It’s the most obvious solution that schools can seek to provide in order to help student parents graduate.”

Even so, fewer colleges nationwide are providing such services. The research institute, which follows women’s policy issues in the United States, released two studies last November that found child care services on campuses across the country are declining, even as the number of student parents is increasing. According to one of the studies, 26 percent of U.S. college students, or 4.8 million undergraduates, have children, and 71 percent of those students are women.

From 1995 to 2011, the number of student parents increased by more than 1.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of four-year institutions providing child care decreased from 54 percent to 51 percent from 2002 to 2013, and federal funding for child care through CCAMPIS (Child Care Access Means Parents in School) grants dropped from $25 million in 2001 to $14.8 million in 2013. (The University of Utah received one of the coveted grants, totaling $1.3 million, last year.) Students with children also have much higher debt after graduation, the study found.

Reichlin says the numbers are concerning. “When you’re having to balance so many competing responsibilities, child care plays an even greater role,” she says. “Child care is the crux in a lot of ways.”

****

The U has made child care a priority, in part, because the unique demographics of both the University and the state of Utah dictate that focus, Watkins says. “I do think that our undergraduate student population is very different than most flagship universities, and I think that puts some special responsibility on us to think about this creatively and assertively.”

A higher proportion of Utahns—28 percent, compared to 22 percent of people nationwide—has taken some college coursework without finishing. “That does tell us that we do have a fair number of working-age adults who have started college but haven’t been able to complete their degrees,” Watkins says.

At the same time, more than half of students at the U are taking six years or longer to graduate, and for the past decade, nearly a third of students enrolled at the U have been over age 25. “That then leads us to question, ‘What’s different about our population and our students?’ ” Watkins says.

Two important factors are that half of undergraduates at the U marry before they complete their degrees, and about a quarter of students have one or more children before graduating. Many students also delay their education to serve religious missions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and because those students are older when they return to school, they are often also starting families.

Shauna Lower directs the University of Utah’s Center for Child Care and Family Resources.

“As an institution, possibly the single most important thing we’re working on is increasing the retention and graduation rate of our students,” says Watkins. “So that leads us to look at the most important things to be doing to promote student success, and clearly one of them is to help our students with access to quality child development and child learning opportunities.”

Mary Parker, associate vice president of student affairs at the U, agrees that the picture is different in Utah than in other states, especially when it comes to women in higher education and the number who graduate. “We know we have to do a better job of helping young women understand the importance of an education and how that helps their families.”

According to the U’s Office of Budget and Institutional Analysis, 45 percent of undergraduate students enrolled at the U this year are women, compared to 55 percent who are men. Nationally, more women than men are enrolled in public universities, at a ratio of 56.4 percent to 43.6 percent.

When students begin families, their finances also can become stressed. The U surveys students who are enrolled one semester but not the next, and the number one reason they indicate for not coming back is “financial constraints.”

“Student parents take longer to graduate, and many times it’s because they go to school, work a semester, go to school, work a semester,” says Parker. Once they do leave, she notes, there’s a strong risk they won’t come back. To help students defray some of their costs, the University is utilizing the CCAMPIS funds it received from the U.S. Department of Education to subsidize child care for low income students during the next four years, through the duration of the grant. About 150 families at the U now receive such subsidies each year.

The University has an array of campus child care options. The U’s Center for Child Care and Family Resources manages the ASUU Student Child Care Center, which offers a variety of services such as drop-in evening care, free finals week care, and a “Parent Night Out” one Saturday per month for students. The center, which is open from 7:15 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and until 6 p.m. on Fridays, serves 160 children ages six weeks to five years. Student parents sign up each semester for the hours they need to cover for study or classes, and a sliding scale based on income is used to calculate cost.

****

Shauna Lower, director of the Center for Child Care and Family Resources, says the efforts are making a difference. “There are parents with infants, in particular, who have said, ‘I am so thankful. I wouldn’t be in school right now.’ Some have dissolved into tears when they’ve heard there is a space.”

Other child care programs at the U include the BioKids center, started by faculty in the biology department in 2000. It provides full-time care to children ages six weeks to five years, and generally has about a nine-month waiting list. The Child and Family Development Center, which opened back in 1930, is the oldest program on campus. It primarily serves as a child care development lab for University students studying early childhood and human development, and enrolls children ages 18 months to five years in a three-hour morning or afternoon session.

There’s also the Early Childhood Education Center, a full-time center that mainly serves employees’ children ages two to eight years, and the Fine Arts Preschool for children ages three to six. The full-day University Kids, a private national program run by Children’s Creative Learning Center, enrolls children ages six weeks to eight years, and University Head Start provides morning and afternoon classes for three- and four-year-olds. And then there’s Club U and Youth Academy, summer programs run by U Continuing Education.

“If you’re looking at Pac-12 schools, most of them do not have child care at this level,” Lower says. “Even in the state, having eight programs that serve children in different capacities is pretty unique.” Lower knows firsthand the challenges of juggling school and child care. “I’ve experienced all of this. I’ve taken children to class before, which is an awful experience.” She says she wants to make it easier for students at the U: “I don’t think wanting to be a parent should stop you from going to school.”

Erin Beeghly, a University of Utah assistant professor of philosophy, with her daughter Esme Rivkin in the Marriott Library’s Family Reading Room.

Debra Daniels MSW’84, director of the Women’s Resource Center at the U, notes that by far, women shoulder the responsibility for finding and providing child care. To help, her office provides emergency grants to students each year. The grants, funded by a number of foundations, range from $10 for a needed stroller, formula, or diapers, to thousands of dollars for a child care voucher or help with tuition.

The goal is to keep student parents, especially mothers, in school. “We know that if they step out, the chance is slim to none that they will come back,” she says.

U student Cassie Smith has three young children who are enrolled at the ASUU child care center for a few hours here and there while she goes to class and studies. “I wouldn’t be able to go to school if I didn’t have this,” she says. Her husband just graduated from the U with a master’s degree, and while she has had to take some semesters off due to parenthood, she plans to graduate this summer in elementary education after enrolling six years ago.

Elliott, whose daughter is in the infant room at the ASUU center, says student parents face many challenges that other students don’t. “It’s intimidating, too, because sometimes you may not get the academic performance that you would like maybe because of all the other things that are going on.” But there’s no question that having a child as a student also has its pluses, he says. “It’s surprising how much motivation there comes from that. No matter how stressed you are, you always find little times of thinking, ‘Oh, I get to go see my baby.’ And that cheers you up. It’s weird how that works.”

Web Exclusive Photo Gallery

[nggallery id=110]

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.”

****

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.”

****

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.

*****

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.”

*****

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.”

*****

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.

Web Extras

Continue reading →