FOR MER FACULT Y
Spotlight on Phil Gambone Phil Gambone, who taught English, Latin, and social studies at Park for 27 years, is excited to share his most recent book, As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in WWII, with the Park community. In January, Director of Communications Kate LaPine sat down with Phil over Zoom to learn more about the book, his writing process, and what’s next on the horizon.
Congratulations on your latest book! How long have you been writing? I wrote a lot of poetry in college. In fact, I had the great good fortune to study with fabulous poets Robert Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald, who did a translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad. When I came back to Cambridge to do graduate work, I was also doing some writing, journalism, and short stories. So, writing is something that I’ve been doing since the late 60s. My “catalog” now includes many genres: novels and short stories, personal essays, non-fiction, scholarly essays, as well as book reviews and interviews. In As Far As I can Tell, you refer to your journals, too. I still keep a journal! I write every day, it’s the first thing I do in the morning. I just make a cup of tea and I sit down and I write and kind of reflect on the day before. So sometimes that’s 15 minutes and sometimes that’s an hour. It’s kind of an exercise in meditation, or a way of focusing and centering, being present to what happened. I also meditate, but journaling is another kind of meditation. Yeah, I’ve been doing it since 1968. I think at last count, I have something like 125 volumes…
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THE PARK SCHOOL
I’m curious about how the themes of this book tie into your long career as a teacher. You spent 27 years at Park, followed by 14 at Boston University Academy, working with adolescents—kids who are developing their own identity and grappling with who they are. That’s a great question. You know, I was drawn to teaching for a lot of reasons. So we’ll start with the least exalted reason—I needed a job after college! When senior year came along, I had been moderately interested in teaching and a friend of mine had attended this school in Kansas City, so I interviewed with the headmistress and off I went. Ultimately, I loved working with young people. I loved their enthusiasm. I loved their sense of discovery. I loved being able to open up young minds and get them excited about something. I loved literature and I wanted them to love literature. I loved writing and I wanted them to love writing. So I think for all of those reasons I went into teaching. At Park, I guess I became known as somebody who was particularly responsive to kids who needed a helping hand in some way. For me, teaching was all about letting every child know that they could have success and that I was taking them seriously. Taking their
