A Classical Education

When I've talked with people about my background and education, I've often been told that they admire my intelligence and the wonderful education I received in high school, college, and grad school. What many of them don't realize is that the education I received is not the thing I take the most pride in, or feel the best about. It is my God-given spark of creativity that I am most grateful for. I see myself primarily as an artist, not as an academic.

Unfortunately, my creative gifts of poetry, music, creative writing, storytelling, and songwriting didn't get much nurturing while I was growing up. For my dad, the most important life value was acquiring a sound education. It is what helped him go from being an anonymous German-English translator in Berlin to becoming an esteemed college professor at Xavier University. I know that he meant well and wanted me to have the opportunities he never had to get a college education and go to grad school. He thought that a teaching career like his would be my finest achievement.

But from the very first, my heart was elsewhere. I was never suited for the life of academe, even though I tried so hard to conform to its strictures. My destiny was to be an artist. There were some early indications of this direction. I remember my dad telling me once that he heard me sing a German song I had learned after returning from a convalescent home as a three-year-old toddler. After I emigrated to the U.S. from Germany as a nine-year-old, I continued writing illustrated letters to my aunt and cousin. Another spark for my creative impulses occurred when I wrote my very first story for my 8th grade teacher Miss Helen Gerwig, a story I still have. And when I was a junior at Xavier, I began keeping a journal which I've continued for almost sixty years. At the end of my senior year in high school, I added my first poem -- Ode to a Pigeon -- to a student anthology. During my sophomore year at Xavier University, I published my first poem -- Gas Jet Epitaph -- in The Athenaeum, the college literary quarterly of which I became associate editor in my junior year. And during my senior year, I won the Xavier poetry prize for a sonnet that was published in The Xavier Athenaeum entitled Metamorphosis .

For the most part, however, my creative gifts didn't find a nurturing environment to flourish in. The emphasis in high school where I attended the honor's program during my sophomore, junior, and senior years, was strictly on academics. I studied ancient Greek and translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. From junior high throughout high school and college, I took nine years of Latin, translating Caesar's Gallic Wars, Virgil's Aeneid, and Cicero's Orations. At Xavier University, where I continued in their honor's program for my first two years, I continued studying ancient Greek and Latin. I read Sophocles' Medea, Thucidides' Pelopponesian Wars, and took a class in Latin compostion. In high school and college, I also took chemistry, biology, zoology, and calculus. All those required classes left me little time to pursue my interest in English literature. But even there, the emphasis was not on creative writing (with the exception of my Freshman Composition class), but on literary criticism. We spent all our time dissecting the works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry we were reading, and writing research papers to back up our opinions. It seemed as if the more footnotes we could include in our papers, the better our resulting grade.

All through junior high, high school, college, and grad school, I never took a single course in music. The only music I was exposed to was an extra-curricular activity since I played the flute in the marching band in junior high and college. I also took classical piano lessons for three years from the ages of 14 to 17. Even that ended when my dad decided to get rid of our piano because he felt I didn't practice hard enough.

It wasn't until long after I had finished grad school before I took my first classes in creative writing at The Loft and the Whittier Writers' Workshop. While in grad school at Ohio State, I also took my first off-campus guitar class and followed that up with classes in banjo, guitar, and harmonica. Eventually, I did begin feeling more comfortable pursuing creative writing and music. But if I had to do it all over again, I would like to have received more mentoring in the arts during my formative years.