68
FACETIME
Education has always been part of my
life, coming from a family of teachers.
After earning my master’s in creative writ-
ing from the University of Iowa, there were
no royalties coming in, so I decided to see
what teaching was like. I applied to various
places – not St. Paul’s, I don’t know why
– but to Phillips Exeter. They made me
a George Bennett intern, and I enjoyed it
very much. The rule was you had to leave
after a year until you got more experience
and then reapply, but then I went on to
SPS and never
did
reapply. I was just a
kid, in my early 20s.
Creative writing was the most exciting
course I taught.
At a party with students
who have gone on to writing careers, no
one said there was some magic touch I had;
they just said I was “affirming.” I just made
‘em write. Once I picked up
The New Yorker,
and there were three former students
who had articles in a single issue – Lizzie
Widdicombe [’01], Nick Paumgarten [’87],
and Dana Goodyear [’94]. You teach some-
body and get ‘em so excited about creative
writing, and you think, my gosh, what have
I done? How can they make any money?
But if you can put a story together cre-
atively, you can put a report together, or
a law treatise, or anything in any career.
Another favorite course for me was
Humor and Satire
,
which I’m still
teaching at something called the Beacon
Hill Seminars, where the faculty includes
retired professors and prep school
teachers. Next on the list is Boston
Literature, and I’ve also taught the Lost
Generation.
I’m still writing short stories.
Most of
them have academic settings, but not all.
My newest one is meant to be funny, but
I’ve had more trouble with it than any
other. It’s about somebody who everyone
thinks is crazy because he’s always out
walking his cat on a leash. I’ve got some
long short stories and wondered if I could
turn one into a novel.
One thing I cannot do is proofread
.
I’ve
just written a review for the
Horae
of the
wonderful new novel by Rick Moody [’79].
I read it aloud and sent it in to the maga-
zine, but afterwards asked Joanne to read
it. She spotted some proofreading errors
and said, ‘You haven’t sent that in, have
you? There were four mistakes. Here you
were, head of an English Department, and
you were going to send in something like
that?’ I don’t know whether it’s a psycho-
logical deficit, but I’ve got to have somebody
look over things.
In grading papers, I might sometimes
not have gotten all the mistakes,
but
quite frankly you don’t need to. A teacher
can over-grade a paper. You can drive ’em
nuts, you can discourage them. There are
other things to worry about – if they can
think clearly and develop their thoughts,
that’s the most important thing.
For the last year and a half, I’ve been
working on a book that collects some
of the sermons of [Ninth Rector] Kelly
Clark.
He spoke about St. Paul and Jesus,
and the power of love that comes to us from
Jesus. He really preached what he believed.
We’ll be in San Miguel through March.
We’ve been going for 10 years. I write, read,
go to the gym, walk around, drink coffee.
I’m going to work more on my Spanish;
I’m not fluent at all. There’s a great group
of people and a creative atmosphere –
openings, concerts, a big writers’ confer-
ence. At a dinner party last year, eight
Paulies were there.
Having the honor of this chair named
for me means, years from now, my name
will still be known in some way at a
school I served for 45 years and loved
and enjoyed working in.
I didn’t know
anything about it at all, and then Reeve
Waud [’81] called and invited me to a dinner
in New York, and there we were in a beau-
tiful setting, with alumni I knew and liked,
and I was on top of the world. Then Reeve
called me up front and handed a plaque
to me and asked me to pose for pictures,
and he did it in such a way that I didn’t
see what the plaque was, and I just held
it up. It could have said ‘kick me’ for all
I knew; I had no idea. People cheered
and I turned the plaque around and saw
Reeve’s name and the names of Bob
Lindsay [’73], Chris Willis [’77], Perot
Bissell [’77], Jamie Rose [’77], and Jason
Andris [’92]. It was a great surprise, and
I was very pleased.
I always felt like St. Paul’s was home.
The whole School just seems to be alive
– the Chapel with its bells ringing, the
dormitories where I lived, the place where
I ate, where I prayed, my friends on the
faculty, the students.
In early February, having learned of the
establishment of the George Carlisle
Chair in Humanities, Mr. Carlisle spoke
with the
Horae
about life after his re-
tirement from the SPS faculty in 2008.
After the interview, he and his wife,
Joanne, left for their yearly sojourn in
Mexico’s San Miguel de Allende.
with Faculty Emeritus George Carlisle
“George has touched
the lives of thousands
of students. It’s a
tremendous honor
to celebrate him and the
lifelong contribution
he has made to SPS.”
– Reeve Waud ’81, P’09,’12
Reeve Waud ’81, George Carlisle,
and Melissa Waud
