34 minute read
Stepping-Off Places
JOHN IRVING ’61
OPENS UP ABOUT
HIS NEW NOVEL, HIS TRIBUTE TO
AN EXONIAN WAR
HERO, AND HIS LAST TATTOO
By Ralph Sneeden ’98, ’03 (Hon.); P’07, P’09, P’13
EPIC IS
NOT AN
EXAGGERATION
FOR THE
AUTHOR’S
HEROIC
MANAGEMENT
OF LANGUAGE
AND SCOPE.”
In my recent correspondence with John Irving ’61 (via email and a phone call that lasted almost two hours), it was difficult separating the author from Adam Brewster, the narrator of his latest novel, The Last Chairlift. Taming this conflation, trying to keep these voices in their own corners, was harder than I thought it would be.
I was feeling like a hypocrite, too. Though I retired from Exeter’s English Department in June, I had been bludgeoning my students for decades with Vladimir Nabokov’s mantra for good readers: “We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world … having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know.”
Whatever you assume about skiing and ski culture, let it go when you read Chairlift. Secure your boots to your bindings and enjoy negotiating the intertwining trails of Adam’s quests. Whether he’s searching for his father’s identity, nudging into place the puzzle pieces of his skier mother’s evolving love life or his own, or brooding over the ghosts of Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, it would be a shame to project our own experience onto the narrative’s screen or try to decode the artist’s life there.
We must surrender to the story. Which is hard to do if a chunk of it is hunkered on a setting the reader knows well. Like Exeter, for instance. If you’re a devoted Irving fan and have spent time with The Cider House Rules, A Widow for One Year, The Hotel New Hampshire, The World According to Garp, the more recent Avenue of Mysteries, or any of his 14 previous novels, you might appreciate a few echoes in The Last Chairlift (e.g., wrestling!). But Irving, who turned 80 last March, is an author who can conjure a distinct world upon what we believe are the foundations of the familiar — even if we can identify the thematic and topical watermarks of his previous fictions, especially while reading the book in the very town he’s describing.
“Fiction writers like what we call truthful exaggeration. When we write about something that really happened — or almost happened, could have happened — we just enhance what happened. Essentially, the story remains real, but we make it better than it truly was, or we make it more awful — depending on our inclination.” This is the voice of writer/narrator Adam Brewster, so you get my point about authorial ambiguity, which only intensifies in the stitched together conversation that follows.
Reading this novel, just shy of 900 pages, in two and a half weeks was a full-time job, especially when anticipating dialogue with its author. I loved every word, every minute of it. Not only the gravitational pull of my empathy for Irving’s characters and being subsumed by a tangled plot and historical commentary, but its patterns and refrains, its almost Homeric epithets. Epic is not an exaggeration for the author’s heroic management of language and scope. Like Adam says, “Unrevised, real life is just a mess.”
Ralph Sneeden: Early in our correspondence, I betrayed my dread of not being able to finish your book before our first phone conversation.
John Irving: What a blow it must be to your retirement — to be reading a novel longer than [Charles Dickens’] Bleak House. My Chairlift is still shorter than David Copperfield (barely). That said, it’s a relief to know that Chairlift really will be my last long novel. I know the approximate length of the boxcars in the train station, the novels not yet coupled to an engine. I’ve been trying to write the longest trains first — either the longest or the most difficult, for reasons other than their length. It looks like shorter trains from now on. I’ve always imagined dying at my desk, midsentence. I can accept dying in my sleep, only because it would be less of a nuisance for my wife. I’m not saying I’m going to become a novella man overnight, but that’s the direction I’m going in.
You’ve written about Exeter before, sometimes in disguise, indirectly. But this novel calls Exeter by name. Did this most recent fictional foray back to the culture of the school in the mid-20th century generate any unanticipated revelations, memories?
Nothing unanticipated. The farther I get from being the faculty brat I was lucky to be, the more free I feel to take liberties with what happened to me. The surroundings feel autobiographical, and some of the core relationships to the school are autobiographical — like the faculty-brat connection, like the townie connection. I like to use my autobiography as a stepping-off place … to make something sound grounded in the real, in the actual. Then, when the exaggerations commence, you’ll think it’s all real. What develops from these familiar circumstances never happened to me. … Sometimes I change the name of Exeter, but there’s a familiar small town and a boarding school with an insider-outsider student population. The word “normal” and its counterparts — weird, bohemian — come up later in the novel in the context of what sort of life Adam wants to live in comparison with his experience with his immediate family.
The basic circumstance of Adam’s situation is one we’ve seen before, too — a boy with a mysterious (or elusive) mother and an unknown (or absent) biological father. This is another stepping-off place; from this familiar premise, unfamiliar things develop. Adam is the lone straight guy in a queer family; even his extended family (including Nora, his cousin) is queer. Two lesbian couples and a trans-woman stepfather are the people looking after him; they’re his support group. Adam is afraid for them. “The Honeymoon on the Cliff” could have worked as a title for the novel. Yet Adam is the one who needs looking after; he’s more badly behaved than all of them, sexually. Of course, Nora is a troublemaker, a magnet to danger, and Em (her partner) is right to see the hatred coming — to be afraid for Nora. … Adam is both the out-of-it one and the odd man out. Adam is a slow learner, the last to learn.
LGBTQIA+ themes are laced into the DNA of your work from The World According to Garp to In One Person, but now it seems the reading world might be better equipped to appreciate what you’ve been doing all along. In an email, you were passionate in your recommendation of James Hannaham’s new novel, which you reviewed for The New York Times, as a must read, because of its titular main character, Carlotta. You wrote, “It’s a time in the U.S. when state legislatures are passing anti-trans legislation — a good time to heroize a trans character!” I think Chairlift is a bold foray into that territory.
Elliot Barlow [a character in the novel] isn’t called “the only hero” for no reason; she’s a brave soul. My singling out the lonely bravery of the snowshoer owes a debt to
THIS 1961 PEAN YEARBOOK ENTRY MISSTATES IRVING’S MIDDLE NAME. FOR THE RECORD, IT IS WINSLOW.
DEREK O’DONNELL
my trans daughter, Eva. My third son, Everett, began the transitioning process to female less than six months before I began The Last Chairlift [in 2016]. Eva read my first draft when I’d only written half the novel. She has always been a writer — a playwright, a screenwriter and an actor. We show each other our first drafts. She’s been doing an M.F.A. in film and screenwriting at York University in Toronto, where she’s also had a teaching assistantship. The name she’s chosen for herself as a writer, actor, director is Eva Everett Irving, which I like, because it’s totally accurate, but I call her Eva — she’s just Eva to me. I’m very proud of her.
You seem to be working out some of the great tensions of our time through what your characters say to each other, and how your narrator processes their ideas, their opinions. Chairlift seems poignantly current even in its evocation of the 1960s, from Adam Brewster’s childhood right up to the election of Donald Trump. The novel also enables the decades of the last 70 years to have their own conversation about the events, politicians, etc., that got us to where we are now. Though your plot broaches gun violence, religion, war, the brightest spotlight is trained on gender, Roe v. Wade, AIDS, sexual orientation and, especially, Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s moral absenteeism was most apparent in the AIDS crisis. Of the Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe, only one of them isn’t Catholic, and he was raised Catholic; his mother was an anti-abortion activist who worked in the Reagan administration. Those justices seem more in step with the Vatican than with the First Amendment — the part that says, “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
In the time of the Puritans, abortion was allowed beyond the first trimester — up to four or five months. Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to have a child belonged to the woman who was pregnant. For more than two centuries — beginning in the 1620s in Plymouth, Massachusetts — abortion was permitted. (It was prohibited for scarcely a century.) It’s ironic that we’re a nation founded by Separatist Puritans fleeing religious persecution in England. Now we’re doing the religious persecuting! An undeveloped fetus has more rights than an adult woman?
Pope Pius XII used the right-to-life term in an “Address to Midwives on the Nature of Their Profession”— a 1951 papal encyclical. Here are the pope’s exact words: “Every human being, even the child in the womb, has the right to life directly from God and not from his parents, not from any society or human authority.” The poor midwives! This amounts to mandatory childbirth. Freedom of religion is a two-way street. Yes, we’re free to practice the religion of our choice, but we’re also protected from having someone else’s religion
I WANT MY FELLOW MEMBERS OF THE CLASS OF “
IRVING’S NOVEL, HIS FIRST IN SEVEN YEARS, IS A SPRAWLING TALE OF A FAMILY THAT WORKS THROUGH SOME OF THE GREAT TENSIONS OF OUR TIME.
practiced on us. Not now — not in these United States. What Dickens wrote about the law applies to those Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. “It is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.”
In the midst of what is supposed to be my publicity and promotion for The Last Chairlift, all these years later they’re screening Cider House at the Toronto International Film Festival again. I’m introducing the screening, telling the novel-to-film storyline — talking about the overturning of Roe, and how abortion rights were safer in 1985 (when the novel was published) than they are now. I didn’t think Roe v. Wade was safe when I wrote the novel, or when the film was made. There’s a moment in Cider House when one of the nurses says something to Dr. Larch about the law. “The law — what has the law done for any of us here?” Larch cries. (More déjà vu.)
Let’s talk a little more about the commerce between your own life and one of the novel’s most compelling characters, Zim, based on Richard “Dick” Pershing, the grandson of John “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I. Dick graduated from Exeter in 1961 and his name is on the Korea/Vietnam memorial bench at the Academy. In a novel that features a lot of ghosts, Dick’s “spirit” provides a compass bearing for your exploration of the war in Vietnam and how it affects Adam and his family. With the character of Zim, the elegiac sonar pings you’re sending out to Dick Pershing are really gorgeous, subtle.
Thank you for noticing the elegiac sonar pings I am sending out to Dick Pershing — not the only friend I lost in that misbegotten war, but the one who always had a hero’s exemplary bearing. I’m a member of the class of 1960 and the class of 1961 — simply because I started with the class of ’60 but I graduated with the class of ’61. I have close friends in both classes. Dick Pershing was someone I admired at Exeter: a very entertaining guy, a three-sport athlete, he was someone I always looked up to. The school was a struggle for me. Dick did everything with seemingly effortless grace. I wished I could be more like him.
My character, Matthew Zimmermann, is not Dick Pershing. Nothing comes easily to Zim. He is undersized for the lightest weight class in wrestling, but he bravely competes (and often gets mauled). Then Zim starts to grow. Yet Little Ray (the narrator’s mother) will always see him as the little boy she loved and sought to protect.
In June 1965, Dick Pershing and I were ushers at a mutual friend’s wedding in Exeter — at the Exeter Inn. Our ’61 PEA classmate Don Hendrie was marrying an Exeter girl — Susan Niebling (like me, a faculty child).
I’d signed up for ROTC my freshman year at Pitt; I kept up the ROTC at UNH. I’d been accepted to the M.F.A. creative writing program at Iowa, but I always imagined I would be in service in the U.S. Army after my M.F.A. However, I got a girl pregnant on my junior year abroad, in Vienna. I married her; we had the baby. My son Colin was born in 1965. I was thereby dismissed from military service — 3-A, married with child. It was JFK’s ruling that at-home fathers should be ineligible for combat. I knew nothing about this; a ROTC officer told me. Unintentionally, I was out of the U.S. Army. (At the time, I was naïve enough to be disappointed.) I felt sorry for myself — to be married with a child before I graduated from college. I thought I’d missed an opportunity, as a writer, to “see” a war.
I both envied and admired Dick that he was headed to Fort Benning, Georgia, to complete his training. Here I was at a party following Don Hendrie’s wedding, talking to Dick, wishing I could be more like him — as I remember wishing at Exeter. Dick was killed in action in Vietnam in 1968. In The Last Chairlift, I wanted to pay respect to Pershing’s heroism and to his illustrious military family. I wanted my character Zim’s heroism to mirror Dick’s. I never met the Pershing family, but I made their fictional counterparts as wonderful as I could imagine. I want my fellow members of the class of ’60 and ’61 to see my homage to Dick Pershing in Matthew Zimmermann, who — as a little boy at Exeter — grew big enough to achieve Dick’s heroic stature. I’m not the only one who misses him.
Chairlift can be described as “self-conscious” in a few ways; it’s a hall of mirrors in which the narrator is also a screenwriter who deploys his noirish screenplays in the hunt for family origins. But he’s principally a novelist who sees the world in terms of books, especially Moby-Dick, administered by his grandmother when he is a child. His stepfather, too — a searching, endearingly protean hero — is an English teacher at Exeter who often brings a wry literary sensibility to scenes. Melville, especially, gives Adam a way to appreciate destiny. I wonder if Chairlift might be a sort of love letter to great novels, to writers who’ve had an impact on you.
I agree. Great Expectations was the novel that made me want to be a writer, only if it was possible for me to be a writer like Charles Dickens — to move a reader, as I was moved by reading him. (To make you laugh, and to make you cry.) The intention of a Dickens novel is to move you emotionally, not persuade you intellectually. I believe in, I aim for, the emotional payoff. … Having it both ways is a subversive intention of my writing. To be funny and serious at the same time.
Moby-Dick, which I read a couple of years later — when I was 17, almost 18 — showed me how to foreshadow an ending. I tried to pay my respect to the foreshadowing of that ending in the grandmother’s devotion to Queequeg and his life-buoy coffin. As for Melville’s bad reviews for Moby-Dick, those sloppy readers helped me put book reviewers in proper perspective. The Moby-Dick reviewers either skimmed the novel or skipped around in it. Yes, the novel can be tediously expository on the minutiae of whaling, but the intentionality of the foreshadowing couldn’t be more clear.
You mentioned in our last email exchange that Melville had inspired one of your last tattoos.
I was in my late teens or early 20s when I went to a maritime tattoo shop. I wanted the last line of Moby-Dick on my left forearm. In my imagination, I envisioned a sperm whale configured around that last line — “only found another orphan.” If I’d asked for a girlfriend’s name in a bleeding heart on my chest, the tattoo artist wouldn’t have hesitated, but he was worried about the last line of a novel. “I’ll give you the sperm whale, kid, but you should think twice about that quote from a book. You don’t know what you’ll think of that book when you get older.” (Hence no Moby-Dick tattoo — not then.)
The line from Moby-Dick and the sperm whale would end up being one of the last tattoos I got — not the first. I have a maple leaf on my left shoulder, and the names of my wife and daughter on my left upper arm. I have the names of my two sons, Colin and Brendan, on my right upper arm. There’s the starting circle of a wrestling mat on the inside of my right forearm. I got all these before I got the sperm whale and “only found another orphan” on my left forearm. I found a maritime tattoo artist from St. John’s in Toronto. She told me my arm was too small for a sperm whale, but she did a good job.
My last tattoo, on the outside of my right forearm, are the last lines of The Cider House Rules: Princes of Maine, Kings of New England. E
Ralph Sneeden taught English at Exeter from 1995-2022, held the B. Rodney Marriott Chair in the Humanities, and is a co-founder of the Exeter Humanities Institute. His essays and poems have appeared in many magazines, including AGNI, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, The New Republic, and The Surfer’s Journal. His most recent book of poems, Surface Fugue (2021), won the Poetry Society of New Hampshire’s Best Book of the Year award, and The Legible Element, his collection of water-related essays, is forthcoming from EastOver Press.
CONNECTIONS
News and notes from the alumni community
Ever Open to Change
By Samuel M. Maruca ’73; P’04, P’07, P’10
As a member of the inimitable class of 1973, I am eagerly anticipating a return to campus in 2023 for our 50th reunion. Getting together with classmates every five years has been a high point in recent decades. I treasure those relationships — forged in the fire of a time that included the Vietnam draft and the Kent State shootings, frequent demonstrations (even in New Hampshire) and rather frosty interactions between many of the students and some of the faculty.
I was one of the many “casualties” of those years. Suffice to say, I am an alumnus of my class but not a graduate. From time to time, I am asked, with evident incredulity: “How is it that, even though you were required to leave Exeter, you have given regularly; served as a class agent and class president; sent all three of your sons to the Academy; and now contribute your time and energy as a GAA director and trustee? Why are you so attached to the institution?”
I have a number of answers to that question, two of which you would hear from thousands of other Exonians explaining their allegiance to the school. It’s where I got 90% of my education — the ability to think critically and to write and present effectively, along with the humility to realize that lots of folks are smarter, more athletic and better looking. It’s where I made deep and lasting friendships with a group of extraordinarily talented and fundamentally decent people — the kind you would want in your foxhole. Those friendships have endured for almost 50 years.
I also have a fundamental appreciation for the institution itself. Exeter is far from perfect, and everyone who has passed through the doors of the Academy Building — student, faculty or administrator — is imperfect. But the school is always striving to be better, to pursue ever more successfully its mission of gathering “youth from every quarter” and instilling in them “goodness and knowledge.” It has fallen, and will fall, short of these lofty goals, but I don’t think Exeter will ever simply rest on its laurels.
In the mid-1970s, the turbulent times referenced above, Exeter’s leadership recognized that it had a problem, as dozens of students left or were forced out; students and faculty were virtually at war. This led to changes in leadership and, among other advances, the cultivation of a “kinder and gentler” approach to student discipline. Judging from my experience as an Exeter parent, the school is an entirely different, and better, place in that very important dimension.
Today, perhaps the most pressing issue on campus is racism. Many students of color at Exeter simply do not feel safe, much less respected as equal human beings. Principal Rawson has recognized the urgency and imperative of mitigating, and eventually eliminating, racism at Exeter. He has said that overcoming racism is a predicate to any claim of excellence. Indeed, the campus has more affinity spaces, the Trustees have made the DEI Task Force an official committee, and the school has expanded the Core Values Project curriculum, among other important initiatives.
Exeter has demonstrated a willingness to change. More important, Exeter’s leadership understands that ultimately, the stakeholders will judge the school on its actions, not on its rhetoric. I have faith that, over the next few years, Exeter will continue to make concrete gains in its effort to become a more diverse, and genuinely antiracist, institution. But we all must continue to press constructively for real change, and to support Exeter’s efforts as we are able. With that support, Exeter can and will do better.
I look forward to working with the alumni and Academy leadership to foster continued excellence at Exeter. E
P R O F I L E
CANDACE BACCHUS HOLLINGSWORTH ’99 Voice for the People
By Jennifer Simmons
Asking Candace Bacchus Hollingsworth ’99 if she’s a “career politician” sets her teeth on edge. Yes, she ran in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor of Maryland. Yes, she served seven years as mayor of Hyattsville, Maryland, and co-founded the activist group Our Black Party. And yet, she firmly rejects the label’s implications. “A career politician sounds self-serving,” Hollingsworth says. “I’ve never felt personal glory in public service. … Of course, I do get gratification in being of service.”
During her two years at Exeter, a non sibi philosophy took root and carried into her college career, first at Emory University and then Georgetown University. Although Hollingsworth didn’t come to service accidentally, she didn’t plan to, either.
Her journey began in her freshman year of public high school in Memphis, Tennessee, when a guidance counselor handed her an Exeter Summer brochure and told her to apply. At the time, Hollingsworth understood little about the Academy. (“I had no idea it was a boarding school,” she says. “Boarding school was for bad kids!”) And her parents, while proud, were unequivocal: She had to get a scholarship to attend. Though she secured a scholarship to attend the summer session, the cost of an Exeter education — including the books and the basics of living far from home — were always in the background. Attendance required sacrifice, sometimes in unexpected forms. “I often credit Exeter with my parents’ reuniting,” she says. “They knew the only way they could afford all the extra expenses was to move back in together” after they divorced. It was a sacrifice with a silver lining for both her education and her family. With that kind of commitment as an example, Hollingsworth took her opportunity at Exeter very seriously.
She applied for the regular session and was accepted, returning to campus as a new upper with a strong sense of belonging, but also navigating difficult cultural expectations. “There’s wading through others’ assumptions, and then your own assumptions of what others think of you,” she says of her experiences. “There were challenges.”
She recalls tensions during college admission time when some fellow students suggested that her acceptances were a product of her skin color and not her work ethic. In those moments, a different Exeter emerged. “I talk a lot about the larger school community at Exeter,” she says, “but there is another community. … The community of Black people who cared for me. Black faculty members who helped me navigate not having enough.” Hollingsworth speaks fondly of those who helped Black students in the absence of their families, whether by offering money to buy books, sewing prom dresses or giving critical feedback on schoolwork. Community is “the woman who gave me keys to a space so I could do Black girls’ hair on the weekends,” she says. “The Black community at Exeter was my foundation.”
Another unexpected challenge? Learning to use her voice. Hollingsworth says, “My first year, almost all my evaluations included: ‘She has really good ideas; she just needs to let others hear them.’” Well, I don’t have a problem with that anymore,” she adds.
Although she and her running mate did not win Maryland’s support in the primary, Hollingsworth will continue to raise her voice for marginalized citizens. “It’s hard to be both an activist and a politician because you almost inevitably have to compromise on something,” she says. “I spent my early years doing politics in a way that made me palatable but undermined my voice. I decided, in the future, I would never do that again.”
When asked what’s next for her, Hollingsworth says she’s “not eager to run for office again.” Instead, she says, “I’m looking forward to helping people like me recognize their power and harness it to create change starting at home.” E
P R O F I L E
BETH SCHMIDT ’82
Force for Good
By Andy Faught
Abandoning a two-decade career as an award-winning journalist to become a Las Vegas police officer at 45 isn’t your typical career arc. But it’s all part of the story for Beth Schmidt.
The seemingly disparate professions actually have more in common than most think. “As a cop, you’re trying to figure out the unbiased story, what really happened,” Schmidt says. “You show up at a scene and you have a victim and you have a suspect, and their stories are incredibly different. We may not have the value of a video or witnesses. It’s very much the same skill set of journalism and how to talk to people.” But there’s an added perk: “I get to drive cars fast.”
Schmidt, who has had an affinity for the military since she was young, considered enrolling at West Point but was swayed against the idea by her family, whose members include “Ph.D.s, writers and liberal arts folks,” she says. Instead, she went to Williams College, then on to journalism stints at Sports Illustrated, ABC Sports and the BBC.
Schmidt eventually decided to write books, and in 2010 she published a well-reviewed young adult novel, Soccerland, about a soccer-loving teen. She says that she considered turning the story into a series but that writing books was too “lonely.” And she was looking for a new challenge.
Schmidt moved west and applied for an editing job with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. But her recruiter saw something more in her, suggesting she consider wearing the badge. Schmidt figured she was too old, but there are no age restrictions to become a police officer in Las Vegas. “They value people with prior experience, and all of a sudden those things that attracted me to West Point started to come back,” Schmidt says. “I realized people would look at me like I was crazy and that it was a huge jump, but it wasn’t. I literally took the skill set that I built over 20 years of learning to talk to people.”
Schmidt has climbed the ranks during her 13 years with the force; she’s now a sergeant in the department’s financial crimes section. It’s a plainclothes job in which officers investigate “forgery labs,” where fraudulent credit cards, money and checks are manufactured. In law enforcement, financial crimes are burgeoning, reflecting new trends in criminal activity. “A lot of the really dangerous criminals are moving away from selling drugs, human trafficking and running prostitutes,” Schmidt says.
In a department where just 10 % of sworn officers are women, Schmidt sees herself as a role model. She was recognized earlier in her career for helping to reduce crime in the Downtown Area Command, where she led community-oriented policing efforts. Schmidt also worked as a patrol officer, taught officers about the use of force and was a detective in internal affairs. In January, she will be promoted to director and will lobby and oversee the department’s intergovernmental services section.
Schmidt’s family has been supportive of her life in law enforcement from the beginning. When her mother was 80, she even went for a ride-along.
Police work has deepened Schmidt’s compassion for the less fortunate, an outlook that was shaped by her humanities grounding at Exeter and Williams. “I didn’t grow up with money, but I grew up with every opportunity in the world,” she says. “What I came away with from that is: I’m not special, and neither are you. Nobody wants to live in a dangerous neighborhood; nobody wants to feel unsafe.
“When we grow up with privilege, it’s incumbent upon us to change the world we live in.” E
G I V I N G B A C K
PHILIP ALBERTI ’93
Health Justice Champion
By Debbie Kane
For Philip Alberti ’93, a prep-year assembly at Exeter helped spark a passion for social justice work. The speaker, Wellesley College activist and researcher Peggy McIntosh, addressed students about unpacking what she called the “invisible knapsack” of white privilege.
The knapsack analogy wasn’t lost on Alberti. “I knew what she was saying was true,” he recalls. “Growing up, my friend group was pretty racially diverse, and I knew a lot of kids who were treated a certain way that I wasn’t.” He was also beginning to address his feelings as a gay teen who hadn’t come out to friends or family. He looked around Assembly Hall and thought, These are the people who have the power to change things. “It was a seminal moment,” he says. “I realized I could be someone who could help unpack those backpacks.” Now, as founding director of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Center for Health Justice, Alberti is tackling equity and justice in health. “Health equity is not just about medical care,” he says. “Medical care only contributes around 20% of what makes a person or a community healthy. The other 80% encompasses whether they have humane housing, access to nutritious food, reliable transportation, quality education and economic opportunity.” AAMC members include U.S. and Canadian medical schools, teaching hospitals and health systems, as well as Veterans Affairs medical centers and academic societies. Traditionally the outsize voices in conversations around health care policy, these organizations have the academic and financial resources to contribute to multisector solutions. “Academic medicine is one of many partners in this process,” Alberti says. “There’s a lot they can achieve by collaborating with others.” Growing up in Revere, Massachusetts, a working-class community near Boston, Alberti was a self-described nerd who attended private schools through scholarships and perseverance. Exeter was a pivotal experience. He appreciated the Academy’s academic rigor and broadened his worldview during a year abroad studying in Spain; he also appeared in numerous plays and joined Dramat.
Socially, however, Alberti struggled to find his place. “Exeter was a tough place if you’re from a marginalized or minoritized community,” he says. “I was deeply guarded and really aware of homophobia and what that meant.”
Eager to live a more authentic life, he moved to New York City after graduation to attend Columbia University, exploring the city’s comedy improv and theater scene while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in psychology. After college, he trained as a Shakespearean actor in London, then returned to New York as a working actor.
“My go-to was comedy, but I was getting cast in roles I wasn’t excited about,” Alberti says. “I remember one day thinking, Ugh, I have to go to work. That was my wake-up call to explore my social justice passion, which hadn’t gone away.”
He returned to Columbia, ultimately receiving a doctorate in sociomedical sciences,
an interdisciplinary degree that, in his case, combined the study of public health, social psychology and social justice. Applying public health principles in local communities led him to a position at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, leading research and evaluation to promote health equity between New York City neighborhoods. Alberti joined AAMC in 2012 as senior director of the organization’s newly created health equity research and policy team. That team’s efforts led to the founding of the AAMC Center for Health Justice in 2021.
Although systemic health inequities periodically receive news coverage, the coronavirus pandemic and the monkeypox outbreak brought them to the forefront. “It’s easy to forget a one-off story or data point about health inequity,” Alberti says, “but it’s hard to forget three years of sustained reporting on inequities around COVID, from who gets exposed to who gets sick, who gets vaccinated and who dies. We’re seeing that now with monkeypox within the LGBTQ community. While more Black and brown members are getting monkeypox, more white LGBTQ people have access to vaccines.”
AAMC is addressing these inequities by engaging representatives from marginalized communities and using their knowledge to drive its health equity research and reporting. Alberti and his team are currently focusing on three areas: helping organizations demonstrate they are worthy of their commmunities’ trust, addressing health inequities for birthing people, and developing the data infrastructure all sectors need to address health inequities. They use the feedback as a basis for developing solutions that can be embedded in organizational, local, state and federal policies. “The true experts are community members who’ve navigated these health injustices forever,” Alberti says. “The challenge is how we walk the talk in community engagement by centering our work in community wisdom.”
His team recruited a Multisector Partner Group comprised of national and community leaders from across the country in areas such as healthy food and clean air, the arts and affordable housing. Their ideas and recommendations make up a new Center for Health Justice initiative called All in for Health Equity, intended to make a larger impact on health justice by “baking in” multisector prospectives. Another initiative, AAMC’s Collaborative for Health Equity: Act, Research, Generate Evidence (CHARGE), brings together health professionals and community partners to design and implement research addressing health care inequities, and supports advocacy efforts.
Alberti emphasizes that anyone can champion health equity. “Everyone has a role to play through community engagement,” he says. “It’s working at your local polling station, coaching your local sports team, and doing all of the things that are a foundation for connectivity and creating opportunity in your community. When we all have access to the basic things we need to thrive, we all benefit. We are all responsible for health equity and for unpacking whatever invisible backpacks we carry.”
Alberti is still tapping into the sense of social justice he discovered at Exeter. “My goal is to have the biggest impact I can on this work,” he says. “It’s personal to me and all of the communities we work with. It’s our lives.” E
Invisible
By Ira Batra Garde ’76
Aging, I fear I will be seen as irrelevant not be seen at all, be alone, become invisible. If it happens, I could just notice that others don’t notice me, remain calm about it.
Spots, unwelcome guests. I notice my aversion. Could I welcome them? Skin, tight no longer, jowls and neck loosely defined. Eyelids: soft, delicate tissue. Redundant or beautiful? Do these dermatologic signs of decay hide the mood within?
You have to know me, be interested in me to know I feel happy, energetic, vital and also afraid about the loss of my vitality.
Getting older, I notice my walking, gaining interest in its sensations, the universe beginning to become contained within me. Bone, joint, muscle: pleasant ache, minuscule twinge. Surprisingly unsteady step: less sure, foot rises higher, falls flatter.
I notice myself enlivening my steps, making myself spry, testing the moments while I think I might still fake it. Wanting to deny the inevitable: a good game, harmless fun when I notice. Or bittersweet?
Others see that I am old: they don’t deny it. They assist me by making me invisible, seeing me but not noticing, desiring nothing, asking too little helping me enter the realm of the imperceptible. E
Editor’s Note: Ira Batra Garde, a psychiatrist, is currently writing a novel about an Indian military surgeon during the tumultuous reckoning that encompasses both World Wars. This poem originally appeared in the anthology Walking With the Shadows, Leaving Them Behind: Selected Poems by the Pegasus Physician Writers at Stanford, which features creative works written by physicians and medical students.
LAUREN CROW
LAMONT GALLERY FREDERICK R. MAYER ’45 ART CENTER
2022 & 2023 EXHIBITIONS
MANAGING MISCELLANEA July 5-September 24, 2022
This exhibition is a continuation of the ongoing work being done to research, care for and share some of the unseen works from the Lamont Gallery’s collection.
“ITALIAN CITY (MATERA),” BY GLEN KRAUSE,1960, OIL ON BOARD; LAMONT GALLERY COLLECTION
TRADITION INTERRUPTED October 18-December 10, 2022
This exhibition explores how artists weave contemporary ideas with traditional art and craft to create thoughtprovoking hybrid images and objects.
“HAL,” BY FAIG AHMED, 2016, HANDMADE WOOLEN CARPET; COURTESY OF THE RODEF FAMILY COLLECTION, SAN DIEGO, CA
TRADITION INTERRUPTED WAS ORGANIZED BY BEDFORD GALLERY AT THE LESHER CENTER FOR THE ARTS, WALNUT CREEK, CA.
STILL NO MORE January 24-April 15, 2023
In a synthesis of tradition and contemporary culture, this exhibit features five multidisciplinary artists who reimagine the classical still life genre in ways that are as compelling as they are unexpected.
“PORTRAIT OF AN IRREGULAR PEARL,” BY NICOLE DUENNEBIER, 2020, ACRYLIC ON PANEL
ADVANCED STUDENT ART EXHIBIT May 9-June 4, 2023
This annual exhibit features the creative works of current Exeter students enrolled in advanced studio courses.
“II,” BY AVERY LAVINE ’22, OIL ON CANVAS (STUDENT WORK FROM COLLECTIVE GROUND 22, THE 2022 ADVANCED STUDENT ART SHOW)
LAMONT GALLERY
PHILLIPS EXETER ACADEMY
11 TAN LANE
603-777-3461 • gallery@exeter.edu
The Lamont Gallery is open to the public by appointment. Please go to the “Visit the Lamont Gallery” page of our website to learn more and make a reservation. www.exeter.edu/lamontgallery
20 Main Street Exeter, NH 03833-2460
Parents of Alumni: If this magazine is addressed to an Exonian who no longer maintains a permanent address at your home, please email us (records@exeter.edu) with their new address. Thank you.
Jackie Addo ’25 and Kendra Wang ’25 are one of several cross-dorm pairings in Exeter’s newest dormitory, New Hall.
