Oral History Program Judy Elsley Interviewed by Michael Thompson 20 August 2021 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Judy Elsley Interviewed by Michael Thompson 20 August 2021 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description The Weber State University Oral History Project began conducting interviews with key Weber State University faculty, administrators, staff and students, in Fall 2007. The program focuses primarily on obtaining a historical record of the school along with important developments since the school gained university status in 1990. The interviews explore the process of achieving university status, as well as major issues including accreditation, diversity, faculty governance, changes in leadership, curricular developments, etc. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Elsley, Judy, an oral history by Michael Thompson, 20 August 2021, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Judy Elsley (born 1952). Dr. Elsley was a professor in the English Department at Weber State University in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. During her time at Weber, she also worked as an administrator over the First Year Experience, Writing Across the Curriculum, Bachelors of Integrated Studies, and Honors programs. The interview was conducted on August 20, 2021 by Michael Thompson in order to gather Dr. Elsley’s experiences and stories of her time as an employee of Weber State University as well as her work as an artist. MT: Today is August 20, 2021. We are in the Stewart Library on the campus of Weber State University, and we are conducting an oral history interview with Judy Elsley on her time here as a faculty member at Weber State, as well as her career as an artist. My name is Michael Thompson. I'll be conducting the interview and my film technician is Alexis Stokes. So, to begin with, when and where were you born? JE: I'm English. Can you hear from the accent? Yeah. I was born in 1952. I'm 69 now and I was born in Oxford, England. My father was doing a higher degree at Oxford and my mother was a nurse and they were based in Oxford. MT: Are they originally from England? JE: My mother is a German Jewish refugee who came over on the “Kindertransport” or children's transport. The English made an agreement with the Nazis to let Jewish children come to England to be fostered by English families. The Jewish children were put on a boat to England, ranging in age from six months to 16 years old. They arrived at Liverpool Street Station, a railway station in London, 1 where English families met them. Many of those children, including my mother, never saw their parents again. My grandparents died in Auschwitz. So that's my mother's history. My father was English, and a conscientious objector in World War Two, so he was sent to work to work as a porter in a hospital. My mother was training as a nurse in the same hospital, and that's how they met, during the war. MT: Can you tell me a little bit more about your early life and what it was like growing up in England? JE: Well, England, as everybody knows, is the center of the world. Well, that's what we thought. We were very much pro-colonial, believing English was the very best that the world could offer. I've changed my mind considerably since then, but there's a Flanders and Swan song, that parodies that attitude: "the English, the English, the English are best. I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest." I felt sorry for any child who didn't have an English background because they clearly were deprived. So that gives you some sort of sense of how we saw ourselves. I came from a middle middle class family. In England, class is and was, perhaps less now, deeply rooted in the culture. Rather like racism in this country. There were different strata of middle class, unspoken but clearly understood. We weren't lower middle class, we were middle middle class, which means my parents were professionals. My father was an English teacher with degrees. Then there's the upper middle class, which is landed gentry, for example. I don't know if that gives you some sort of idea- a rigidly structured society. Of course, I didn't realize that at the time. For example, table manners: I was taught early on: 2 don't put your elbows on the table, never help yourself to seconds until you’re asked, keep your mouth shut when you eat, this is how you use a knife and fork. Our whole lives were controlled by a set of behaviors that indicated what class we belonged to. MT: You mentioned your father was an English teacher and he was going to Oxford. Were you encouraged to pursue an education because your father was a teacher? JE: Yeah, I mean, it was given that I would too. The house was filled with books, bookshelves in every room. I read voraciously as a child, and it's no mistake that I turned into an English teacher. I was a slow learner. There's a word for it: Opsimath. It means somebody who comes to things late in life, and that was me. I was 17 when I had my first period. You don't want to know that. But it's interesting, you know, and I look at my grandchild now who had her first period at the age of 10 or 11. Things are really different these days. And I was tiny. I'm still fairly small, but I didn't grow to be five foot tall until I was in college. So physically, emotionally, and mentally, I was a late developer. It meant that scholastically, I was slow. My parents took that as a sign that I was stupid- or stupid is too strong a word, not very bright. It wasn't until I got into college at the age of 18 and grew up, that I came into my own. Then it wasn't till I went back to school in this country to get a master's and a Ph.D. in my late 20s, early 30s that I was really ready for academic work. All of that is background to say I was really mediocre at a lot of academic subjects. But the one thing I was good at, because 3 it was so much part of the air I breathed was reading and writing because of my home background. So English was my strongest subject. MT: You mentioned that you went to college in England? JE: Yes, I got my first degree at a teacher training college in Cheltenham that offered a bachelor's degree in education from Bristol University. It was a four-year course. In England at that time, if you went to college, you left home. Thank goodness. I mean, I was ready to leave home by then. I went back to visit, but I never went back to live. So, you lived on campus, everybody did. My life was on campus and away from home. At that time, it's not true now, my education was paid for by the state; we even got a small stipend. So, everything was paid for. Yeah, amazing. May I say, as it should be, I think the two things that mark a civilized society and this is coming from an English perspective, is accessible health care and accessible education. MT: Which makes sense. JE: A lot of people would disagree with that. MT: What inspired or caused you to move here to the US? JE: When I finished that first degree, my uncle, who was my father's twin brother, invited me to visit him in Chicago. I spent six weeks in this country. He was single, a business executive in a telecommunications company, and made lots of money. It turned out- I mean, it didn't turn out- he was gay, but at that time, noone in the family spoke about it. When I came home from that trip and said, "you know Jack's gay," my father replied, "No, no, he's not gay." His twin brother! 4 So anyway, I visited Jack and the world just opened up with this trip. I traveled from East Coast to West Coast: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Jack and I did a trip to the Grand Canyon, and I visited family friends in St. Louis. Jack paid for my internal flights. I think there are a couple of things that really impressed me. One was that the sun shone on a regular basis in this country. That's almost unheard of. English weather is like the weather we've had for the last two days, rain and then more rain and then a slight drizzle and then more rain. I loved being in sunshine. I loved being warm and dry. But the other thing was that I could see this was a much more expansive place of opportunity, unlike that rather rigid, restricted childhood I described to you. It helped that my uncle was very generous to me, taking me to good restaurants, staying in nice hotels. Everything seemed possible. Because he traveled so much for business, he had a membership of several airline clubs. You know, you see people swanning in through private doors at the airport, and you think, oh, I wish I could do that, you know? So, we would go to these clubs to wait for the flight. Sitting there, before getting on the plane home at the end of the trip, I said, "I want to try living in this country." After six weeks, I could tell. This was a way forward for me, but it wasn't that easy. MT: So what was it like? Immigrating? JE: I came back to England and I taught high school for a while, but the big interruption in my life and perhaps the most significant event of my life, the thing that has shaped me the most is that I developed Hodgkin's disease, which is a cancer of the lymph system. It was so unexpected that by the time it was 5 diagnosed, it had spread. I was like stage three and really sick. It took a year of my life to be diagnosed, treated, and recover treatment, which was radiation and then recovery. The whole thing from beginning to end took a year. I went back to living with my parents because I was too ill to take care of myself. I would say that while it was the worst experience of my life, it was also the best thing that ever happened to me. It was a wakeup call and many of us need something like that to stop just drifting along. At the age of 23, I realized life was short and unpredictable. Things could change in a minute; and if there were things I wanted to do in my life, I'd better get on and do them. The one thing I did know was that I wanted to try living in this country. When I recovered, I took a job teaching in an elementary school, and traveled in the U.S. during my summer vacations. On one of those trips. I met the man who eventually became my first husband, Tony. It was a rocky relationship, on and off in the U.S. and when he visited me in England. But I wanted to come to the U.S., so I sold everything I had in England, bought a one way ticket to the US and I had about three thousand pounds, which is about five thousand dollars. My uncle arranged for me to get a one-year visitor's visa. I couldn't work, but I could stay. So, I had a year to figure things out and three thousand dollars. But it was all sort of part of the, “Okay, I'm just going to press forward. Worst comes to worst, I can go back to England.” My uncle, who was there in the background, was always very supportive. You know, if I really needed help, I could call him. So that's what I did. One thing led to another, I married the man eventually, and then I went back to school. At that time, Tony was working for the 6 Forest Service in North Kaibab Forest, which is in Northern Arizona, Southern Utah, near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. We were living in a trailer, and we did a lot of hiking and river trips. That was great for a while, but then I decided I wanted to go back to school. Tony’s mantra was, "Every step away from the Grand Canyon is a mistake." So, I chose graduate schools according to how close they were to the Grand Canyon. Talk about nuts, yeah. I went to UNLV in Las Vegas and did a master’s degree there. I loved it. Just fell in love with being in academics. I was ready for it. I did well, I studied hard, I was focused, and I thought, oh, I really like this. When it came to the end of the two years, I took a year off to think about what I wanted to do next. What I wanted to do was a Ph.D.; I couldn't think of anything else I'd rather do. So again, I looked around for universities close to the Grand Canyon and I ended up at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which is not that close to the Grand Canyon. But, hey, you know, kind of close. Yeah, and while the Grand Canyon lasted, the marriage did not survive that kind of stress. And while I was there doing my Ph.D., we divorced. MT: So, what was your master’s degree in? JE: It was in English and English literature. MT: And your Ph.D.? JE: In English. MT: As you were pursuing your master’s and Ph.D., what were some positives and negatives of the experience as far as the education side? What mentors did you have or what roadblocks did you face? 7 JE: I would say that the experience of being in school was wonderful. I loved being in school. I had supportive faculty, and I loved every class. I was just like a cat with cream. I just lapped up. The negative side of the master's degree was living in Las Vegas. I mean, even then, this was in 1982 to '85, I hated it. I come from an environment where we were camping and hiking and doing river trips, living in a trailer. Here I was in this very urban setting, riding around on a little motorbike in Las Vegas. I didn’t have any money. It was just ridiculous. So that was the worst part about my master’s, having to live in Las Vegas. I loved the academics, though. I just took to it like a duck to water. With the Ph.D., it was the same thing. I mean, some people struggle with a Ph.D., many people do. They get as far as the dissertation and, you know, ABD [all but dissertation] and, you know, struggle with it all- not me. I mean, I loved it. I was ready for it. It was what I was made for. I loved living in Tucson. I had a community of friends there. I love Tucson itself. It was a place where I was a lot more comfortable- and it was warm. I mean, well, Vegas is warm too- notice that I've always chosen warm places or dry places to live. I had five very happy years there. MT: Your dissertation explored the semiotics of quilting. Would you like to talk more about that? JE: My area of expertise in literature is British modernism, which is 1900 to 1950 English literature. It's people like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, WB Yeats, Virginia Woolf- I mean, the biggies. Yeah, they are wonderful. I had chosen this very minor writer who had very little written about him, R. C. Hutchinson, for my 8 dissertation. It would have been a good area because there was very little written about him; and I loved the one book I read by him. Then I started reading his other books and my heart sank- I hated them. They were awful. And I thought, I just can't spend the next two years writing about this rather mediocre writer who produced this one wonderful book. I was walking back from the library to the English department across the quad at the University of Arizona. I thought to myself, what would I really like to do? I had been a quilter by that time for a number of years, and really liked quilting. I thought, I'd like to make a connection between feminist and literary theory and quilting. By the time I got to the English department, I knew that's what I wanted to do. So, I went to my committee and said, “I’ve changed my mind, this is what I'm interested in. I know it's sort of a little odd. What do you think?” They were very supportive and enthusiastic. It was wonderful- I mean, I loved doing that project and a lot of work has come out of it since. MT: What started your interest in quilting? JE: When we were living in the Kaibab Forest, we brought our trailer down to Fredonia in the winter because the forest would be snow bound. I bet you've never heard of Fredonia. It's right on the Arizona Utah border, and if you blink while you're driving through on your way to the Grand Canyon, you miss it. We were living there for the winter and what on earth was I going to do with myself for three or four months? So, I bought a Dover book about making patchwork and I borrowed a sewing machine. I went to Kanab, the big city- ooh the "big city," because they had a fabric store there. I bought as much fabric as I could afford, 9 and I started making patchwork blocks with my borrowed sewing machine in the trailer we were living in. You know, I tried sewing before, sewing clothes, and it never worked because you have to make things fit and turn corners. Quilting, you sew in straight lines. I could do that. So, it was one block after another until I'd used up all the fabric and then it was, what now? I had to buy another Dover book about how to put a quilt together. Then, I borrowed a quilting frame, and a friend helped me to tie the quilt because that was the easiest way to put the quilt together. I came back to the trailer, this little trailer we had, with this huge quilt that my friend and I had tied. I stood outside the trailer holding the quilt, and Tony was inside the trailer at the door, but I couldn't get into the trailer holding the quilt. I'd never bothered to measure the quilt to see if it actually fit the tiny beds we had. I had to feed this quilt through to him in the trailer. So that was my first experience of quilting. But I was hooked and after that I did measure. MT: Going back to the University of Arizona and your dissertation, what year was it when you finished? JE: Well, I finished in 1990. I started in 85 and I finished in 1990 so five years. When I came into the program, the graduate director said to me, “You know, you can come here, but you have to understand there are no jobs out there.” I mean, that was before I even started. I thought, well, it's like everything else in my life, I just sort of push forward and think, I'll deal with that when it happens. So, I went ahead, did the five years and in the fifth year I realized, okay, I'd better start looking for a job. I applied to places that were in the West. I am very 10 geographically bound to Arizona and Utah. Those are heart and bone places for me. Not so much for the culture, but for the geography. It's sort of odd as an English woman coming from lush, green, wet country to say that, yeah that's all very nice, but the desert, the desert is amazing. With my current husband, Alan, we still do a lot of traveling in the desert. I applied for jobs in the southwest, basically in Arizona and Utah. There was a job at Weber State College. I applied for it, was interviewed, and got the job. There were eighty-five applicants for the job. Yeah, I know there have been times when there have been a lot more for an English department job. MT: What was Weber like when you first came up here? Because that would have been right as it was transitioning from a college to a university. JE: I think it was the next year probably, it transitioned to becoming a university. My first question when I came here was, I'm not LDS, I'm not about to become LDS, I've got nothing against Mormons. I'm fine. I mean, I understood early on that in order to live in Utah, you know, there were people who adapted to the culture and there were people who didn't. I was quite willing to adapt to the culture, but I was not willing to become a Mormon. We could have a long conversation about that. Feminism comes into it. But anyway, one of my first questions when I came for the interview was, “How will I do personally, socially as a non-Mormon in a clearly Mormon environment?” What I found was that I could seek out a community of friends, mostly through the university, who were also not Mormon. My experience with Mormons is that while they are very nice to me, there's a glass window. As a non-Mormon, I'm not invited to their houses or to weddings or 11 to Christmas parties. I mean, at that time anyway it was, I wouldn't say closed, but an insular culture. My perception is that LDS people are kept so busy with the expectations of the church and their social lives organized primarily by the church, that there's not much room or space for anything outside of that. So as an outsider, there was nowhere for me to come in. Does that make sense? MT: That does make sense. JE: OK, I didn't mind that. That was fine as long as I could find friends outside the church, which I did. Am I answering your question? MT: Yes. When you arrived at Weber, you were teaching English. What building were you working in? JE: Oh, well, there weren't enough offices where the English department was, which was in the social science building. So, they gave me an office in the business building, which was fine with me and it gave me a little bit of independence. Yeah, I would say that my whole career at Weber has been built around stepping outside of my department, and that was the first step. Then I took a series of administrative positions that took me beyond my department. The first one was Writing Across the Curriculum and the second one was First Year Experience. Kathleen Lukken started FYE, and Jennifer Grandi and I were the first coordinators. Then I went on to Bachelor of Integrated Studies and then the Honors Program. These seem like very different programs, but the similarities are stronger than the differences: all these programs are university wide, and they're also interdisciplinary. First Year Experience where I was helping at-risk students 12 coming into the university, and Honors where I was supporting students who excel in college, are very similar. I was working to make a home and community for a student within the academic setting. BIS is the same: these are students who have a range of interests that take them beyond a single academic department. And the overall goal, for me, was to help students reach for their goals and succeed in college. My strength as an administrator was to take a program that was not doing well and put it back on its feet, give it a firm foundation. Build it up and hand it onto the next person. And I definitely did that with the Bachelor of Integrated Studies program. And while people may disagree with me, I think I did that with Honors. MT: What year did you start with the Writing Across the Curriculum program? JE: Well, let's see, I came here in 1990 and so it was probably '91 or '92, so very early on. And I would say that the most challenging part, to circle back to your question of teaching, of working at Weber was living with my department. Your department is like your own dysfunctional family; you're stuck with them for life, these people are not going anywhere and you're not going anywhere either. And you're all in this together. You're often not agreeing with each other. I hope that's not true for your families, but it is true for some families. I was very involved in the beginnings of the women's studies program, while in the English Department, I was working with a lot of older white men. So, I was not really going to fit in too well there. Nobody was ever rude. I was treated just fine, but with caution. And so, finding a place outside of my department, with these 13 leadership positions, helped me. I loved the leadership positions, too, because they let me exercise and hone a set of skills that are part of my chemistry. MT: Out of those different programs you helped with, which one was your favorite to be a part of? JE: I loved them all. And I particularly loved the ones like First Year Experience, BIS, and Honors because they directly served students and they gave homes to students who might not otherwise find them. I'm going to go back to my childhood again. When I was being raised in the 1950s, there was a test called the 11 Plus, and a child took it at the age of 11. That test decided whether you went on to grammar school, which was academic, or you went on to the secondary, nonacademic trade school, age 11. MT: Oh, my gosh. JE: I know. I took it and scraped into the grammar school. As I said, I was not smart, you know, I mean, I wasn't doing all that well, but managed to get in, very rigid system. I think it's changed since then but it was a rigid system that was always finding ways to cut you out. At 15, we took ordinary levels, O levels, which were public exams across the country, and everybody took the same exams. If you did well, you went on for the next two years of high school. If you didn't do well, that was it. You left school. There were always cutting off points. No second chances, if you dropped out, if you stopped going to school after the O levels at 15, you couldn't come back; that was it. Same with college. Anybody who dropped out of college anywhere along the line. You were done. That was it. I had a friend who came into college thinking that she wanted to do what was then called Bible 14 Knowledge, which was religion. And she changed her mind to Drama. She was told, you can't, you've signed up for Bible knowledge. That's what you're doing. One of the things that I love about Weber State and about the American system and especially about, you know, the open enrollment universities like Weber is that there is always a second chance and a third chance and a fourth chance. And I can't count the number of students I've had who have needed a second chance and a third chance. And then finally, they're up on their feet and they're doing what they want to do. And for me, that was the most rewarding thing to do at Weber and all those programs and everything I taught was always with that as the base. The very opposite of my one upbringing. MT: How has the English department changed over time during your career? JE: More women probably teaching there, a little more diversity, but not much. I've now been retired since 2016, so I'm out of date now with how the English department has changed. But I would say not much during those 26 years that I was teaching. We were all pretty white; heavily male. And pretty traditional We taught the canon; we taught American literature and British literature. I mean, that's fine, because this is my area of expertise but what about African-American literature, or Asian literature? And things like literary theory, which is what I had studied as a graduate student, and which to me is foundational to the study of literature, was viewed with considerable skepticism. We had huge disagreements, over the years, about whether or not we should be teaching literary theory. And to me, it was like a given. How can you teach literature if you don't have a foundation of theory? But 15 if you talk to somebody else in the English department, they would completely disagree. MT: That leads me to the next question, what resistance or battles did you face throughout your time at Weber? JE: Literary theory MT: Are there any others maybe in regards to some of these programs as you were trying to get them back on their feet? JE: Yes, some resistance. I mean, with the First Year Experience people would say, “Well, if they're not ready for college, they shouldn't come.” And with the Bachelor’s of Integrated Studies, it was, “Well, this isn’t a real degree because you’re just doing three minors.” Honors was, “Hmmm, special treatment for those spoiled kids.” So, yes, there were always people who had prejudices against those programs, and I would encounter them when I'd go into their departments. But I could deal with the criticism from other departments more easily than from my own. It’s easier to ignore the dysfunction in other people’s families. Much harder in your own. And I was offering them something they wanted. And if I didn’t get it the first time, I got back a second time and then kept working at it, like a persistent little dog gnawing at their heels. That was me. “OK, all right, give it to her.” MT: How about on the university wide administrative level? JE: I was in Faculty Senate, and I was on the committee that makes the decisions about what goes to the Faculty Senate. I didn't like the Faculty Senate much. Why didn't I like it? I just wasn't interested in it, maybe because my interest has 16 always been with the students. That's why I'm here. That's why we're here, is to help those students reach their dreams, reach their potential. And Faculty Senate was a lot about not that, a lot of other things, but not that…probably really essential things, but not things that were of great interest to me. MT: That makes sense. What was a typical semester for you like? How many classes did you teach? JE: Well, for the first three administrative jobs, I got one class release time to do the administrative work. And then in the last, when I did Honors and maybe with BIS, can't remember, I got half time. So I ended up doing half time teaching and half time administration. That suited me well. There was always something challenging and interesting to do. MT: And what classes did you teach? JE: I taught a range of writing and literature classes, everybody in the department did. It was one of the things I liked about the department is that we all taught Freshman Composition. We all taught Introduction to Fiction. You know, there was equity there. I liked that. My specialty, as I said, was Modern British Lit. I taught that at the graduate level too when we got a graduate program. And my other specialty in writing was nonfiction: Writing essays, personal essays. So autobiographical writing. And I loved teaching that. I taught that at the three thousand level and at the graduate level. MT: I did notice you had some classes where you did actual fabric dying. JE: I did, yeah. MT: What was that like? 17 JE: I combined it with writing; writing and dyeing fabric. My other passion was always with quilts and with that I learned to dye fabrics. I would take the students through the process of dying fabric. You have to prepare the fabric to be dyed, then dye it, and then over dye it. It’s a parallel process to writing. You start off with a clean piece of paper, just like you do with a white piece of fabric, and you prepare it by brainstorming and thinking about your ideas and then you dye it, so that’s your first draft. Then you have to edit it. The process of taking a piece of fabric from beginning to end parallels the process of a successful piece of writing so I could put the two together. MT: Was it a special class? JE: I offered it through the English department, and I offered it through the Honors Program. MT: How many years? JE: It depends when they would allow me to do it. I probably did it four, five, or six times. I can't remember. MT: What are some of your favorite memories of your time here at Weber State? JE: Students, always students. Seeing students be successful. I had a young woman who wanted to get into a creative writing program. She was a good writer, and so I helped her with her applications, and I warned her, “They're notoriously difficult to get into. So don't be disappointed if they turn you down, it's not you. It's just that they're really tough to get into.” She was turned down and so she thought, well, that's it, I'm giving up. I made contact with her and said, "Come back in. Let's rethink this." She came back into my office, and I said, "Why don't you apply 18 for an English... Just a straight English degree-- English literature? That would be much easier to get into. And then you can morph into creative writing, if that's what you're interested in doing." So, she did. She applied. She got in, she did a master’s degree. She went on to a Ph.D. She's now tenure track at Boise State University and loving it. And she's got this whole sort of gender Queer thing going on. Really interesting. And I think that's why I came into this, to help someone like her with lots of potential but who had more or less given up. My job was to get her back on track. I started The Rising Star scholarship as a way to support non-trad women make their way through college. To me, the student recipients are rising stars. Many women get married, have families, and then want to come back to school. Their children have left home, there’s a divorce. Who knows. But now, they’re ready just like I was ready. This scholarship that gives money to those women, pays for their tuition and fees and tuition fees so they can pursue their dreams. There’s a single theme through my teaching, my administration, and my giving: to support people who may not have a lot of confidence in themselves now, stand on their feet, get going, do what they really want to do MT: That's wonderful. That's what I hope to do in adjunct with the library. JE: With the library? MT: Yeah, the Library Science course and that's one thing I strive for is to do the same, help them learn those basic skills so that they're successful throughout the rest of their academic and future careers. 19 JE: You know, it's on the micro and the macro level. Macro is the programs and donations we’ve been talking about, but the micro level is just as important: the day to day contact we have with the students. And we can all think of faculty, teachers we've had who were discouraging. I mean, the material was fine, the content was fine. They just didn't really encourage us. And then we can think about those teachers who said, you can do this. Yeah, you stumbled. It doesn't matter. Okay, dust off, get up. We can do this. I've got confidence in you. And what a difference those people make to us in our lives. And that’s on the micro level every day. MT: I want to talk a little bit about what you've written about and get back to that connection with your Ph.D., and the quilting and the literature. JE: I've published mostly in two different areas. One is the social meaning of quilting. For example, looking at the AIDS quilt and asking, why is a quilt such a powerful way to write about, to talk about, and to express our grief over AIDS? I published an essay responding to that question. Or looking at the significance of quilts in a book like The Color Purple. It's theoretical, cultural. And then the other thing I do is write personal. One of the things that I learned from the Hodgkin's is to face the world with as much honesty and integrity as we can. I don't wear makeup because I think I don't want to hide my face. This is the face I have. This is the face the world is going to see. My essay writing is about digging into whatever is going on in my life and writing about that, again, with as much honesty as I can. I would tell the students in essay writing classes; the reader can tell if you're not telling the truth. You may not know what 20 is missing, but you can sense this isn't the whole story. If you're not going to tell the whole story, don't tell the story. If you're not ready to tell a story, that's okay. But if you're going to tell a story, tell the whole story. MT: We do have a book about breast cancer quilts. JE: You do? Yeah. MT: I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. JE: You actually have a number of books here. The autobiographical class, after every class, I would invite somebody from the library to come and we would give them a manuscript of our best essays. Each student would choose the best essay and I would write an introduction, put it all together as a book, and then Joan Hubbard would hand it over to be professionally bound and cataloged. I wanted students to know that their stories mattered. MT: I believe that they are here in the archives. So actually, I looked at a few. I interviewed Holly Hirst a couple months ago, and she mentioned those books. JE: Yeah. I would put them together and each student would also get a copy of the book. A lot of work but worth it. I would bargain with Kinko's. “Come on. It's the students. They don't have any money. You can lower the price on this.” And I'd get it down to three or four dollars a copy. And if there was somebody who couldn't afford it, I'd just say that's alright, have the copy. I'll pay for it. I got off track there a little bit, what was your question? Oh yeah. The Breast Cancer Book, self-published through Amazon. I had breast cancer in 2013. It also took a year of my life. The university was very good to me. I was diagnosed at the very beginning of what should have been a sabbatical, 21 and then I needed to take another semester off after that because I was still not well enough to come back. I coped with that experience by making quilts. I’m a lifelong journal writer, so I just started documenting what was happening to me on fabric because I was not well enough to write on paper. And bit by bit, these turned into a whole collection of quilts that I now give presentations on. Mostly other quilters or cancer survivors. MT: That's very fascinating. JE: Yeah. I wrote on them; a lot of them have words on them. MT: That's really neat. So after you retired, you mentioned that you're now a full-time artist doing quilting and pottery. JE: I am. MT: How did you get into pottery? JE: So I'm going to back up a bit and change the topic a little and tell you about my second husband. MT: Oh, yes. I'm sorry. JE: All right. His name is Alan Livingston and when I came to Weber, I was single and divorced and thirty seven, thirty eight, something like that. And my boss when I was working in Writing Across the Curriculum was Kathleen Lukken. Have you interviewed Kathleen yet? MT: I believe we have. JE: Yeah, good. Which is wonderful. I learned everything I know about administration from her. Absolutely wonderful. She said, “Well, look, there's this new guy who's come to work in IT, and I think you might like him.” And I asked, “Well, what's he 22 like?” “He's normal.” That was the best recommendation. I thought, Okay, I'll take normal. He's very shy. We went out for the obligatory first lunch and I had this thing I do when I meet somebody. I'll ask some long, complicated question. So, I would say to you, “Michael, tell me how you came to be a librarian?” And of course, you want to talk about that. I mean, that's very interesting to you. And you'd put your fork down and you tell me all about it. And twenty minutes later, I would have finished my lunch, and you hadn’t touched your food. I do it almost automatically, you know, and I'm listening. I'm very interested because it tells me something about the person, but it also allows me to eat my lunch. I knew that he was an ex-Mormon, so I asked him, “Why did you leave the Mormon Church?” It’s a good question, don’t you think? Yeah. He still had his fork midair 20 minutes later when I finished my meal. He never did finish his meal. He's gotten wise to me since then, but at first, he was very shy and we began emailing across campus. I would come to my office in the morning and find an email from him. At that time, his department was based here in the library, and I was in the social science building. I would dash off a response before I went to teach. I fell in love with him because he could write. He was a writer. What I didn't realize at the time was that he would stay after work to compose the emails he was sending to me. Yeah. So that he got them, you know, just right. And it took us weeks, months for the face-to-face intimacy to catch up with the written intimacy. And I've been married to him for 27 years. AS: Congrats! 23 JE: Thanks. Coming up in September. And he is the love of my life. He's my best friend. We adore each other. He was a real find. MT: Sounds like it. JE: Yeah, completely different from me. MT: You mentioned you have three daughters through him. JE: Through him, I'm a bonus Mom to three now grown daughters. And I am a grandmother by immaculate conception because I didn't actually have the children. I have four grandchildren. I wasn't interested in having kids, wasn't anything on my radar. I know that sounds really weird, I just wasn't. It never occurred to me that I would have grandkids. So, I'm surprised and delighted to find that at 69, I had three bonus daughters. Their mom has sort of faded out of the picture a bit. She did a great job raising them, but there are issues there. I have sort of gradually grown into being the Bonus Mom, I never say I'm Mom because I'm not. But I'm the Bonus Mom. But I'm the real grandma. Grandma Judy, to these four grandkids. MT: Aw, that’s wonderful! JE: Yeah. What a surprise. Anyway, you asked me about what I've been doing with art. I've always been interested in pottery. I started making pottery when I was on sabbatical in 2003 and rather like the quilts, I just found it fascinating, especially working at the wheel. It's very difficult working at the wheel to get a pot to center and stand up. Have you ever done any? No, it's not easy. MT: I did as a kid. 24 JE: Yes. But it's addictive and rather like the fabric, there's always something to learn. I'm a lifelong learner. I mean, that's another reason to be in this business, right? Because you're learning right along with those students, and I did learn a lot. Pottery and textiles, they're very tactile. It's very much hands on. It's the feel of something, whether it's a textile or the clay, and it's this constant process of learning. I'm most interested in the process. I'm much less interested in the finished product. I give away my pottery. I sell some of it at Gallery 25 on 25th Street. What I really like is the challenge of it and the making of it and the hands on. And I'll go to the clay studio here at Weber, that's where I work, at nine o'clock in the morning and then I'll look up and it's 11:30. It's like what happened? I’m completely absorbed. MT: Has the pandemic affected your artistry at all? JE: It affected everything and everybody. Because of my history with Hodgkin's, and all the radiation, I live with damaged lungs and a damaged heart, I was really vulnerable to Covid. So I was very much sequestered at home and I did a lot of fabric dying, a lot of quilt making. Yeah. I mean, I was just working at home. I have a home studio where I do my fabric work. And then I would come into the clay studio at weekends, so I didn't have to come in during class time because of being with other students. MT: Yeah. JE: So, yes, whose life has not been affected by it? But for me there are a couple of things at play with Covid. One is that I have had two experiences of having to retreat, once with Hodgkin's, once for the breast cancer, each for a period of a 25 year. You know, illness like that throws you into a different world. It's a very small world; you're no longer part of the normal world where you could just go out and do things. I was familiar with that. It wasn't like that was a shock to me because I'd done it twice before. There's a wonderful book of essays called Wintering by Katherine May that I read during Covid. Her main idea is that we all go through periods of time when we winter, where we need to withdraw and lick our wounds and reconfigure things, and then we can come back out into life. She makes the case that wintering is a necessary and good part of life. I'm not saying Covid's a good thing or necessary, but I'm saying her approach gives us a perspective on it. And the other thing I think about Covid is that I'm in a really privileged situation. I own my house; I have enough money to be able to buy groceries. Other people, the people who work in the grocery stores are on the front line. I'm not on the front line, so I'm not at all complaining about Covid because I was lucky. I was all right compared to many, many people that had a much, much tougher time than me. MT: I think we've been blessed even working here at Weber. JE: Really? MT: Yeah, because they made it so we could work from home for the last year, basically. JE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. MT: It's been wonderful. 26 JE: Yeah. And you think about that, if you were working at a hospital or in a grocery or at Costco, it'd be a very different situation. It gives us a whole new respect for the people upon whom our lives depend. MT: Yeah, which is wonderful. It makes you get out of your head. JE: Yeah. MT: And focus on others and their needs. One topic that I realized I haven't asked you about, you mentioned feminism, and I just wanted to see how that played into your career. JE: Well, women's studies was just beginning when I came to Weber and I helped to build that program. In A Room of One's Own Virginia Woolf asks, why is it that we don't have as many women writers and artists as we have men artists? She argues that it isn't because the women didn't have the ability or didn't have the skill. What they lacked was the opportunity. She says, if a woman wants to become a writer or an artist, there are two things she needs. She needs a room of her own. In other words, her own space. That might be a house or a room or somewhere that's her own, and an independent income. She was writing this in the 1930s, but it's still true. Those have been my guiding principles through life. I've always supported myself financially, and I've always made sure I had a room of my own. Over the years, I’ve owned three houses in order to create a room of my own. So that's a practical application of feminism. Some of my friends describe me as a Little Person, an LP. An LP is someone- you don't mess with. An LP may be small, but she is sort of fierce. You just don't tread on her toes. I'm an LP. You've probably 27 figured that out already. For example, before I came here today, I told you I’d be wearing a mask and I’d like you to wear one, too. And you, of course, agreed. It's fine, of course, and it's not an unreasonable thing to ask. But I’m comfortable knowing what I want or need and then articulating that. I think that’s another practical application of feminism. MT: Which is wonderful. My wife is a lot like that. JE: Is she? MT: And it's been amazing to have her shape my view of feminism. Especially how to raise our daughter. JE: How many daughters do you have? MT: Just one. JE: One? MT: One boy and one girl. JE: But when you have a daughter, you wake up to feminism because you want your daughter to be able to move through the world with the same ease as your son. And how are you going to make that possible? MT: Yeah, it's eye opening for sure. JE: Yeah, yeah. [To Alexis] Do you respond to this? AS: Yes. MT: Well, it's been wonderful meeting with you and hearing your story. One last question I would love to ask is what advice would you give to students entering either academics or the English field? 28 JE: Just follow your dream. Yeah, I mean, that's what I've done all my life, basically, just take one step in front of the next and with faith and hope that the next step will become possible. And surprisingly, it does. But if we don't take that first step, we don't start at all, so, yeah. Just step forward. MT: That's wonderful advice. Thank you again. JE: My pleasure. [To Alexis] Thank you very much. You've been a very attentive audience. 29