{"id":4218,"date":"2015-12-04T14:40:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-04T19:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2015\/12\/04\/a-most-prolific-retirement\/"},"modified":"2022-11-07T15:05:20","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T20:05:20","slug":"a-most-prolific-retirement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/a-most-prolific-retirement\/","title":{"rendered":"A most prolific retirement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"allen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nearly four decades worth of aspiring fiction writers at Furman got their first meaningful feedback from Gil Allen, Ph.D. Nearly as often, it probably wasn\u2019t what they wanted to hear.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I would usually\u00a0tell students is regardless of the quality of the manuscripts that you are producing now, if you decide that you want to make writing a real part of your life you will look back at your work five or 10 or 15 years from now and not regard it as your best stuff,\u201d Allen said. \u201cSo although you want to make your poems and stories as good as you can make them now, realize that they\u2019re ultimately more important as part of a learning process. Try to enjoy that process as much as you can, and just keep writing and keep reading as long as it gives you pleasure to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allen spoke from the Travelers Rest home he has shared with his wife, Barbara, from nearly the moment Allen arrived at Furman in 1977 as a fresh-faced Cornell graduate. For 38 years this wasn\u2019t a place he was often found on a Friday afternoon smack dab in the middle of fall semester, but since retiring in May he\u2019s had the luxury of having lunch in his sunroom at his leisure. No papers to grade, no classes to lead\u2014only a cat to lift off prize chair real estate.<\/p>\n

Undeterred by the number autumn has done to the leaves once on the trees in the backyard, a row of zinnias mounts a spirited resistance against the encroaching winter as the conversation veers toward what makes a writer. Measured, thoughtful, and intimidatingly intelligent, it just seems like Allen would know\u2014and many an English major has assumed as much.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a question a lot of students have asked me over the years \u2026 \u2018Dr. Allen, do I have enough talent to be a poet or a fiction writer or whatever?\u2019 And that\u2019s a very difficult question to answer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because being the Bennette E. Geer Professor of Literature doesn\u2019t mean he has preternatural abilities.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve asked myself \u2026 a good many times over the years: What is the difference between a student who goes on to make writing a significant part of his or her life and one who doesn\u2019t? And there\u2019s only a modest positive correlation between the amount of ability or promise a student shows as an undergraduate and that later result,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI\u2019ve found that the best predictor is how much the student wants to write. There are some students in your classes, regardless of their level of proficiency at that moment, who can\u2019t not write, and they continue through life with that mindset. And those are the ones who go on to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intentionally or not, Allen described himself. He became a dedicated writer in high school in Long Island, N.Y., and never stopped putting words on paper as he earned Bachelor of Arts, Masters of Fine Arts, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from Cornell.<\/p>\n

A fiction writer as an undergraduate, he found his stories \u201cgetting shorter and shorter and more language intensive,\u201d making a switch to poetry unavoidable, and from 1973 until the late 1980s Allen did nothing else. In 1982 his first collection of poems, In Everything<\/em>, was published, followed by Second Chances<\/em> in 1991.<\/p>\n

His third, Commandments at Eleven<\/em>, was chosen as one of the year\u2019s five most outstanding books by Columbia\u2019s The<\/em> State <\/em>newspaper in 1994, cementing Allen\u2019s status as a literary icon as well as providing him with unassailable street cred with his students. Driving to Distraction<\/em> (2003) was featured on Garrison Keillor\u2019s The Writer\u2019s Almanac<\/em>, and Catma <\/em>became his sixth book when it was released in 2014.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things about his poetry that I always found interesting was he wrote very thoughtful poems but also often injected a good bit of humor. You were sometimes surprised, and you would laugh and sometimes laugh at yourself,\u201d Furman English department chair David Bost<\/a>, who has been a member of the faculty since 1981, said. \u201cIt\u2019s very strange for us. It\u2019s the first time in my life here at Furman that I haven\u2019t had him as a colleague. We miss him a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intertwined with his books were numerous poems, short stories, and essays that appeared in a variety of publications, creating a body of work that has landed Allen enough awards to fill a shelf or 10. Two of his most noteworthy career accomplishments came recently when his short story \u201cTrash\u201d received a Special Mention for a Pushcart Prize in 2013, the year before he was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s one of the people who in some ways put Furman on the map,\u201d Bost said.<\/p>\n

Allen has done his part to give back to a writing community that has long embraced him, founding Ninety-Six Press<\/a> in 1991 with Furman colleague Bill Rogers and editing it until his retirement. Ninety-Six Press has published more than 20 books of poetry written by South Carolina writers, and Allen spent most of his first summer off moving mountains of material from his office in Furman Hall to the Duke Library in preparation for \u201cCelebrating South Carolina Poetry<\/a>: An Exhibition to Mark the Acquisition of the Ninety-Six Press Archive,\u201d which opened on Sept. 15 and will run until Jan. 15, 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen we took a trip to Yellowstone. We\u2019d never been before,\u201d Allen said. \u201cThat was a lot of fun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their social calendar has already started filling up, Barbara said, but it would be a mistake to think Allen is content to sail off into the sunset. His seventh book, The Final Days of Great American Shopping<\/em>, is due out in April of 2016, and it marks a beginning as his first book of short stories.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re writing poetry and publishing books of poetry you\u2019re really dealing with a niche audience. There aren\u2019t that many folks besides poets themselves that are interested in those things,\u201d he said. \u201cBut with prose fiction, you do have a fairly substantial general readership out there, and it\u2019s nice to think you have a possibility of making connections with that group of people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another group he may soon reach is long-fiction readers, and fans of his poetry need not fear neglect. A novel manuscript is nearing completion, and he has enough previously published poems and short stories for two more books of each.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s five books there, plus I\u2019m trying to write some new stuff too. I\u2019ve managed to write a few poems and one substantial short story since I\u2019ve retired,\u201d Allen said. \u201cI don\u2019t have any trouble finding things to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Allen seldom starts a sentence that isn\u2019t preceded by a pause, but when asked if he ever marveled at his own success as a writer he took an extra moment.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Being published) is not a divine pronouncement. When I\u2019m writing, I do not initially think of trying to please an audience,\u201d he said. \u201cI think a lot of young people have the notion that if you ask someone \u2018are you a writer\u2019 and the person says yes, the next question is, well, what have you published? And if the answer is nothing, then a lot of folks will think, well, you\u2019re not really a writer. But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true. I certainly don\u2019t measure my success as a teacher by the number of published writers who have enrolled in my classes.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more on Allen or to read some of his work, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly four decades worth of aspiring fiction writers at Furman got their first meaningful feedback from Gil Allen, Ph.D. Nearly as often, it probably wasn\u2019t what they wanted to hear. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":15625,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-english"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4218\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}