And Finally 31 (423)

FOUR DECADES OF INSPIRATION

Richard Jackson retires after 46 years

By Shawn Ryan

The students did it.

They kept Richard Jackson at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for 46 years.

Oh, they didn’t lock him in a cage or tie him to a chair or anything. They used their minds. To impress him.

“I think they’re more inquisitive in a lot of ways. You’d tell ‘em something and they’d say, ‘Oh yeah,’ and want more,” says Jackson, a professor of English and creative writing.

After more than four decades at UTC, Jackson is retiring. He wants to travel more with his wife, Terri, before it’s too difficult due to pain from hip and knee injuries during his days in football, hockey and track and field.

In past years, trips have included 45 states, most of the countries in Europe, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Israel, Hong Kong and India, among others, to give lectures and readings of his work. He has published about 35 books, 15 of them poetry collections. No. 16, “The Heart as Framed,” is due for publication this year.

He also has had significant influence on his students. Forty-six of them are published authors, ranging from fiction, nonfiction, poetry, even TV screenplays. Some are teachers; some are freelance writers.

Doing quick math using the number of students multiplied by the number of classes multiplied by the number of years, he’s taught around 9,000 students.

During his career, he’s won fellowships from the National Education Association, National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim Foundation. He was chosen for the inaugural Barnett Prize for Local Distinguished Author by the Southern Lit Alliance, given to recognize the outstanding achievement of authors in the Chattanooga area and to raise awareness of their talent.

In the mid-1980s he created the Meacham Writers’ Workshop (not named after Chattanooga native and Pulitzer Prizewinning author Jon Meacham), a three-day, biannual event that has brought in hundreds of national and international writers.

Visiting writers have included Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Phil Levine, Charles Simic and James Tate, Pulitzer finalist poet Mary Ruefle and novelist and screenplay writer Laura Kasischke.

Jackson is a voracious reader and has several thousand books—yes, thousand— crowded on bookshelves in two rooms of his home. One of his retirement plans is to find the time to read them.

While enjoyment is naturally part of what motivates him to read, he’s also interested in other writers’ thought processes.

“I want to see how somebody else thinks,” he says.

“It’s the same thing as listening to a piece of music. You hear the beginning, then the person has to do all these variations and keeps going, going, and it ends. Then you realize, ‘Oh wow, that’s how he got to that.’”

Jackson is a music fan, especially jazz. Music is one of the reasons he switched to English after starting as an engineering major at Columbia University in New York in the 1960s.

“I was hanging out too much in Greenwich Village. I used to go into the bars and coffee houses. Listen to the music, hang around, listen to people sing,” he recalls. “I took up the guitar, but I have no voice, so that left me with the words.”

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