- At April 17, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
2
My heart and prayers go out to the friends and family of the dead at Virginia Tech. I am saddened but not shocked. Campuses are one of the least safe places you can be. And evil, unexplained evil, is all around. I am suprised by all the goodness that still surrounds us, even in darkness. I am surprised by hope. It takes more courage to love than to kill. More strength to have compassion than hate. Being a hero in this world means, sometimes, ignoring the evidence, and reaching out to others, saying yes, saying, you are worth risking.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Peter
“It takes more courage to love than to kill. More strength to have compassion than hate.”
Beautiful.
PP
Cipolline
Neither am I surprised. As the story unfolds, we learn he was in creative writing classes with Lucinda Roy and he was advised to get treatment. Having taught just a few independent workshops (not university affiliated), my own experience has been that in every class, there is usually one student who seems to need more therapy than the creative process alone can provide. I mean that in all seriousness. Creativity attracts troubled people for good and healthy reasons, but it doesn’t take care of those darker issues. I’m glad to hear the student was at least advised to seek help, but I fear for teachers and their inability to do more than that.
Today I found out my colleague Katherine Soniat was not on the list. She’s a professor in English at VTech. Now I can sleep a little better, but no doubt she’s got a terrible load of pain, anxiety and sorrow on her shoulders, and I’m praying for her.
Tamara
http://www.tamarasellman.blogspot.com