Wallace will read new works at his retirement reception on Nov. 19 at the Pyle Center.
When Ron Wallace accepted a teaching position in the University of Wisconsin’s English department in 1972, he got some practical advice from Frank Miller, a family friend and professor at Washington University School of Law.
“Frank told me, ‘Go there and make yourself indispensable,’” Wallace remembers. “And that’s what I tried to do.”
Few terms work as well as “indispensable” when describing the impact Wallace — co-director of UW’s program in creative writing, Halls-Bascom Professor of English and Felix Pollak Professor of Poetry — has made on the university. He founded the UW undergraduate program in creative writing in 1978, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (post-MFA fellowships) and University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series, both in 1985. He also co-founded the MFA program in creative writing in 2002.
Along the way, Wallace, 70, wrote almost two dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction and criticism. Meanwhile the honors poured in — including three distinguished teaching awards and the Associated Writers and Writing Programs’ George Garrett Award for outstanding community service in literature.
On Dec. 31, Wallace will retire from the university he helped transform over the course of 43 years.
He plans to write “the great poems of my old age” while he and his wife, Peg, split time between their Madison home and a farmhouse in Bear Valley. But he won’t be leaving the UW behind (nor will the UW be filling his position). Wallace expects to retain an office in the English department, where he will volunteer consulting services and read student applications.
A reception for Wallace will take place Thursday, Nov. 19, at 7 p.m. at the Pyle Center, 702 Langdon St. He will read from his two new collections of accessible poetry, For Dear Life and You Can’t Be Serious. Both feature what he calls “haiku sonnets,” a new form he created, which he says places “the contemporary sonnet in conversation with the classical haiku.”
Jesse Lee Kercheval says it was a profound experience working with Ron Wallace. “I could write a page for every day I have worked with [him],” says Kercheval, one of his English department colleagues. “And since he was director of creative writing when I was hired at Wisconsin in 1987, I think that would be a 72,000-page book.”
Wallace arrived in Madison in 1972 on a one-year visiting appointment to teach creative writing. The year before he’d wrapped up his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan.
In 1973, Wallace was given a more permanent position at UW-Madison. By 1982, he was a full professor, teaching poetry and fiction workshops, plus courses in 19th- and 20th-century literature.
“Before all that, I sold underwear,” Wallace says with a dry sense of humor that makes you wonder whether he’s fibbing. (When asked for clarification, he confirms he did, indeed, work in a St. Louis department store.)
He also wrote poems on the side — a talent he discovered as a 13-year-old when a teacher handed out mimeographed pages of Emily Dickinson poems. “I read them and thought, ‘There’s power and mystery here. I need to do what’s she’s doing,’” Wallace says. “There’s no money in poetry, so you don’t need to write to an audience or write something you think will sell. You just write what you feel. And sometimes, when no other language works — like after 9/11 or at a funeral — people turn to poetry.”
Today, thanks in large part to Wallace’s efforts over four decades, Wisconsin is the only university in the country to offer creative writing at the undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels.
But Wallace is quick to give credit to colleagues and students who helped build the program over the years. Renowned alums include Anthony Doerr, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for 2014’s All the Light We Cannot See; David Clewell, an English professor at Webster University and former poet laureate of Missouri; and Lauren Groff, author of the novel Fates and Furies, a 2015 National Book Award finalist.
“I love the times he’s knocked on my door, student manuscript in hand, big grin on his face, to tell me that a mutual student of ours has written a stunning poem or a moving short story,” says Judith Claire Mitchell, director of the UW’s MFA program in creative writing. “How can students not love and work their hardest for a teacher like that?”
It is in that spirit that the English department plans to establish an annual $1,000 prize in Wallace’s name to be awarded to one undergraduate writer of a senior poetry thesis.
“I hope I’m remembered,” Wallace says, again with a hint of that dry humor.
Don’t worry, Ron. You will be.
Rounded With a Sleep
after Issa
My two-year-old granddaughter won’t go to bed. Life,
she thinks, is too good to sleep away, so, suddenly, she is
loquacious. Things that had held no interest all day—a
wooden block, a plastic doll, a piece of lint, a dewdrop,
are now worthy of her full attention. Oh, yes,
she is much too busy to attend to her mother, and I
am but a small annoyance, an impediment. I am
of little consequence. Bedtime? She’s not convinced.
And so we sit back and let her regale us. Life
is something she knows a lot about. She is
talking on and on to herself, she is a stream, a
flow, an ocean of talk, and we are but a dewdrop.
It’s late. We know this is going to have to end, and
we’re going to have to convince her. And yet, and yet.
Note: This is an example of one of Wallace’s haiku sonnets, in which the last words of each line, read vertically top to bottom, form a haiku by the Japanese poet Issa. Reprinted with permission from For Dear Life (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).
