Being Wise Twenty-Three July 11, 2021
When I sleep, my mind goes back
to my beginnings. 1981, when Cindy
Paris worked for the Durham County
Library and suggested a Humanities
grant, and so a Roadmap to Great
Literature came to exist because
I invented it, using Ezra Pound’s
ABC of Reading. Because I was
a local publisher, I gathered more
students than we had places for,
and the grant was emended to give
them room. I was tough. They were
to read all of The Iliad and The Odyssey,
all of Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer, Sappho,
Catullus. Then write from those
examples, and they did. Our meeting
place was the Stanford Warren library,
earlier the Black branch. Broken
windows were repaired. Later they
put us at the big main library. I was
glad, but noticed fewer Black writers.
So I set up a class at the Warren
library, and the Black writers returned.
The Humnities Council kept funding
our classes, and I had a salary. Cindy
cheered me on as did others. even
Mary Semans when I had been rejected
by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She used her influence to tell them they
were wrong. My students were reading
the books. So then I got a two-year grant
and even an opportunity to write a
book about my Roadmap classes.
I had no Ph.D., but I was considered a
Humanist because of my years at
U.C.-Berkeley studying the classics.
I brought in professors from UNC and
Duke to teach French, Spanish, modern
Greek literature. The book, Watering the
Roots in a Democracy, was published
by my Carolina Wren Press and sent
free to libraries. Cindy was glad for my
success. I gave a copy to the Mayor of
Kostroma when he visited Durham to sign
the Sister Cities Agreement between
Durham and Kostroma, Russia. And he gave
the book to the leader of the Kostroma Writers
Organization, Mikhael Bazankov, and he
proposed we do exchanges of our writers,
and we did.
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