Legendary Leslie

Leslie Gabriel brings a storied career and decades of continunity to her new role as the Top Dawg of women’s volleyball

Gabriel (above left) was one of the nation’s best blockers as a Husky from 1995-98. Above right, the Husky Marching Band fetes Gabriel and athletic director Jen Cohen at the news conference introducing Gabriel as the women s volleyball coach.

Leslie Gabriel has been part of 618 victories and five NCAA Final Fours with the Huskies’ women’s volleyball program over 26 years—as a player, assistant coach and associate head coach. Now, as the team’s new head coach, she is poised to lead one of the nation’s most successful programs. Interview by Jon Marmor

What’s it like to be in charge?

If you would have told me 28 years ago that I would have spent 26 of the next 28 years of my life on the sidelines of Husky volleyball, I would not have believed you. It’s been a dream of mine to be the head coach here, and I’m beyond excited to lead the women in this program.

What is special about UW volleyball?

We have one of the most passionate and loyal fan bases that supports us in one of the best places to watch volleyball in the country. And the Pac-12 Conference is one of the premier volleyball conferences in the country.

What is your outlook going into the season?

We will continue to strive to win national and Pac-12 championships. And we will graduate every player with a degree from the University of Washington. I want our players to be the best students, the best volleyball players and the best people. But it takes a daily commitment. Are we giving everything that we have in all that we do? Are we doing the little things we need to do before, during and after practice? Do we play with an attitude to win each point? That’s all I am going to ask these women to do.

I told the team that becoming great is a choice. So, each day, we are learning how to make those great choices.

What is your vision to win another national championship?

It takes a lot of hard work to win a national championship. I’m all about improvement. Can we get 1% better each day? I’m going to study this game, and we are going to have standards.

You’re losing a tremendous senior class. How do you replace those players?

The senior class laid a great a foundation, but I am really excited for the future and the women that we have on our team right now. I am excited to see how these women take on new roles. As a coach, I want to give them the tools to help.

Has it sunk in yet?

I don’t know that it has. I remember the day when [Director of Athletics] Jen Cohen called me and offered me the job. I went “Woohoo, yes!” But then my brain went, “Checklist, checklist, checklist, this is what you have to do.” I feel like I have been on the run, but I am really excited to be here.

Tell us about your personality.

I’m all about hard work and giving everything that you can. That’s something I am going to demand of our players. Can we give it all we have, and can we compete? Let’s go out and win. I’m going to coach with that intensity and demand that from them: that we just go hard.

Check any list of the most dominating pitchers in college softball history, and you will find Danielle Lawrie’s name near the very top. That’s why she is part of the first all-female list of former student-athletes, coaches and administrators being inducted into the Pac-12 Hall of Honor in 2023. Her list of accomplishments could fill an encyclopedia. The first Canadian recruit to play for the UW—not to mention the first player recruited by coach Heather Tarr, ’96—Lawrie started opening eyes at the age of 14 when Tarr spotted her playing in Canada. With her unique pitching style and blazing fastballs, Lawrie, ’10, was a three-time first-team All-American who led the Huskies to their first national championship in 2009. And what a year 2009 was. Lawrie was the Pac-10 Pitcher of the Year, National Player of the Year and Most Outstanding Player in the Women’s College World Series when she led a Husky team that went 51-12, finished second in the Pac-10 and then beat Florida for the championship in the College World Series.

That year, Lawrie recorded 521 strikeouts with only 76 walks in 352.2 innings. She still holds conference records for strikeouts (1,860) and wins (136), played in the National Pro Fastpitch league and was a two-time Olympian (2008, 2020) for Team Canada, earning the victory in the Bronze Medal game in Tokyo.

Lawrie, a 2018 inductee into the Husky Hall of Fame, was only the fifth Husky player ever to have her jersey number retired. She had numerous schools recruiting her out of her hometown of Langley, British Columbia, but fortunately for the Huskies, “I wanted to be close to home. I wanted my family to be able to watch me,” she said recently. “And once I took a visit [to the UW] there was no question: This is where I wanted to be.”

And the girl who started playing softball at age 10 sure made the most of her opportunity at the UW, employing her favorite quote as her driving force: “You 100% get what you put into things.”

Small in Stature, Big in Our Memories

Gig Harbor walk-on Joe Jarzynka dazzled the Husky faithful with his fearless play

By Jon Marmor

At first glance, Joe Jarzynka did not look like a Husky football legend. The 5-foot-7 walk-on from Gig Harbor High School joined the Huskies in 1995 and played like a special-teams wild man as a kickoff and punt returner, refusing to call for fair catches. He volunteered to handle the team’s placekicking duties when two Husky kickers left the squad. And he earned the opportunity to play as a wide receiver, his long blond hair flowing out of the back of his helmet as he raced down the field. He was so popular that he had his own fan club, with the motto “Joe, Joe, he’s our guy, give him the ball and he will fly.” The Daily even came up with a nickname for the Olympic Peninsula dynamo: Mo’ Joe. Husky fans everywhere were devastated to learn that Jarzynka, only 45 years old, died March 5 while fishing on the Sol Duc River on the Olympic Peninsula. As a junior in 1998, Jarzynka—who walked on at UW instead of accepting his only recruiting offer to play at Eastern Washington University—had his best season. He was named to the All-Pac-10 first team as an all-purpose player, recognizing his ability to return kicks and to make them. When two kickers left the Huskies, Jarzynka, a high school soccer star, stepped in to make six of eight field goals, including a 44-yard kick that helped the Huskies beat WSU, 16-9, in the Apple Cup and secure a berth in a bowl game. He was named the team’s most valuable player. Jarzynka’s best performance came that season in Husky Stadium against Cal, when he returned a punt 91 years for a touchdown. He was so excited that after he made it into the end zone, he ran to the fence behind it and vigorously gave it a shake in his attempt to be noticed by ESPN.

Former UW assistant coach Dick Baird said it best: Jarzynka “just refused not to play.” His Husky spirit will live on.

Her Northwest connections played a big part in Marilynne Robinson’s path to becoming one of the most important authors of our time

By Sheila Farr

Early in the novel “Gilead,” the narrator, the Rev. John Ames, confides: “For me writing has always felt like praying ... You feel you are with someone. I feel I am with you now. …”

That’s one of the great gifts of Ames’ creator, Marilynne Robinson, too: the ability to make her readers feel that she is not only with us, but part of us.

Since Robinson earned her Ph.D. at the UW in 1977, she has become one of the world’s premier fiction writers. A Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Library of Congress Award for Fiction are among her many honors. Yet fiction is just one facet of Robinson’s work. She teaches, writes nonfiction books and essays, and is an esteemed contributor to public discourse on ideas and events. In 2016, Time magazine named her one of its 100 Most Influential People.

This year, the UW will present Robinson with the Alumna Summa Laude Dignata Award, the highest honor bestowed upon a graduate for exceptional lifetime achievement. Past recipients include former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell, ’78; architect Steven Holl, ’71; former Washington Gov. Daniel Evans, ’48, ’49; and children’s book author Beverly Cleary, ’39.

Speaking by phone from her home in Saratoga Springs, New York, Robinson says she is eager to revisit her alma mater. “I loved living in Seattle. … A great deal went on for me at UW. I had my first child there and so on.”

That casual “and so on,” includes writing the initial stages of her first novel, “Housekeeping,” while she completed her Ph.D. And now, in the English Department where Robinson was once a student, her books are a staple of the curriculum. “When you are looking at significant American literary artists right now, she has to be way up your list,” says Professor Charles LaPorte. “She is in a very rare company of people who are making a difference—but not just making a difference as artists. She is a philosopher, too: someone who appeals to people who think.”

Robinson’s fame increased exponentially in 2016 when President Obama, on a visit to Iowa, made an extraordinary request: He wanted to record a conversation with Robinson. (Has a sitting president ever interviewed a novelist before?) It turns out Obama had read “Gilead” on the campaign trail and was smitten. He posted it on Facebook as one of his favorite books, along with the Bible and The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. Obama and Robinson first met in 2013 when he presented her with the National Humanities Medal in conjunction with the National Endowment for the Humanities. He told her, “Your writing has fundamentally changed me.”

Their later conversation, recorded and transcribed in two issues of The New York Review of Books, serves as a testament to the profound impact Robinson’s writing has on readers around the globe, as well as to the wide-ranging intellect of our former president.

Besides, it was fun. “That was one of the pleasantest experiences of my life,” Robinson says. “It was pleasant and very exciting at the same time, which is not always a combination you can rely on happening, you know.” Because she had already met the president, Robinson didn’t feel intimidated. “I’d had a certain amount of contact with him before that. I had had dinner at the White House, and I had exchanged letters with him. And I knew he really is a very gracious man, which is obvious in everything he does, and I just knew I could trust him to make me feel it was a totally good experience. And he did.”

Their discussion touched on the strains in American democracy and the difficulties of living up to the doctrines of Christianity. They talked about the musical “Hamilton,” about empathy and optimism, and the role literature can play in a world that runs on tweets and seems to have lost its attention span. Robinson told Obama about how the narrative voice of her character, the Rev. John Ames, “just showed up” one day as she was sitting with pen and paper in a hotel room in Massachusetts—and what a surprise it was to be suddenly writing from a male point of view. At one point, Robinson suggested that the word “competition” should be struck from the American vocabulary and Obama quipped: “Now, you’re talking to a guy who likes to play basketball and has been known to be a little competitive. But go ahead.”

NORTHWEST Connections

Robinson was born Marilynne Summers in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943. She grew up in Coeur d’Alene, where her father worked in the timber industry and her mother stayed home to raise Robinson and her brother, David. The Presbyterian Church and poetry were in the fabric of Robinson’s life. As a child, her brother (now a professor emeritus of art history) predicted that he would become a painter and she would be a poet. In high school, Robinson seemed headed in that direction. She wrote Edgar Allan Poeinspired verse and translated a section of “The Aeneid” from Latin. Eventually, she gave up writing poetry for scholarship.

As an undergraduate at Pembroke (now Brown), Robinson took three years of creative writing classes before coming to UW to pursue her master’s in 1966. She took courses in American literature as well as delving into Chaucer, Victorian literature and Shakespeare to broaden her literary background. She continued her Shakespeare studies when she was accepted into the Ph.D. program in 1973.

Robinson’s dissertation, “A New Look at Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure and Meaning,” involved extensive research in primary documents and long hours combing through microfiche at Suzzallo Library. She focused her analysis on an underappreciated play and showed it to be “more accomplished, subtler, more coherent than has been suspected …” Her dissertation committee also noted that even though Robinson used standard methods of literary criticism, “what is unusual here is not only the play to which she applies them, but the sensitivity with which she has used them to arrive at an excellently written and most perceptive dissertation.” Her adviser, Professor Bill Matchett (1923-2021), a few years before his death still vividly recalled his former student. He needed just one word to describe her: “Brilliant.” While attending UW, Robinson married Fred Robinson and had her first son. (They would have another son and later divorce.) At the same time she was starting a family and immersed in the high-pressure research and writing of her dissertation, Robinson had the capacity to begin another writing project, experimenting with metaphor, drafting the initial stages of what would later grow into a novel.

“I guess she was a little bored,” jokes poet, author and teaching professor Frances McCue, who uses Robinson’s work in her classes. She finds the idea of Robinson writing her dissertation and working on a novel at the same time hilarious, a feat your garden-variety Ph.D. candidate would likely consider superhuman.

Robinson laughs at the notion. “I’m one of those students who took her time in graduate school. But I am always writing fiction and nonfiction at the same time—a habit I formed in Seattle—and I find they stimulate each other, they keep each other in focus, so they don’t really compete.”

After completing her degree, Robinson began shaping her initial notes into a novel, without really looking beyond that. “I had no thought of publishing it. I thought it was unpublishable,” she recalls. Why? “Too poetic.” Nevertheless, she shared her manuscript with a friend, who sent it to his agent, and the next thing Robinson knew she had a book contract. “Housekeeping” was published in 1980.

In language of heart-stopping sensuality, the story braids the lives of three generations of women in one family. It opens with the description of a legendary disaster in a fictional Idaho town.

1987, was adapted into a movie. “Housekeeping” has since been named by the Guardian Unlimited as one of the 100 greatest novels of all time.

A quintessentially Northwest story, “Housekeeping” is set in a town hugged by mountains and bounded by a deep ancient lake, much like the landscape of Sandpoint, where Robinson was born. And that setting—the remote town, the deep, cold lake whose waters permeate the atmosphere—is as fundamental to the story as any of its characters. The place seems to hold the people who live there in thrall, as trapped as those passengers on the train.

The Northwest connection is significant to LaPorte, the UW professor, for several reasons. When teaching incoming English majors, he likes to give them a little department history. “I knock myself out to tell my students when we are doing Theodore Roethke or Elizabeth Bishop that they taught here. Or Richard Hugo or James Wright or Carolyn Kizer: They all came out of this program. They came here to work with us.”

And now there is Robinson, too.

Robinson started her first novel, “Housekeeping,” while she was working on her Ph.D. in the 1970s. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1982. Time magazine honored her as one of its 100 most influential people in 2016 in recognition of her superb writing in both fiction and nonfiction.

Surprisingly, after her initial success with “Housekeeping,” Robinson put away fiction writing for more than two decades and turned her attention to research, scholarly writing and teaching. In 1989 she published her first nonfiction book, “Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution” and in 1991 was offered a teaching post at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the famed MFA program at the University of Iowa. She retired in 2016. It wasn’t until 2004 that Robinson re-emerged as a novelist with the publication of “Gilead.” The aged narrator Ames, who has lived his entire life in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, is writing down his life story for his young son. Kirkus Reviews called “Gilead” “a novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering.” The Pulitzer Prize and the huge rush of acclaim that followed seemed to place Robinson at the pinnacle of an amazing career. But she was just warming up.

As a night train crosses a bridge, it suddenly “nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.” That train sprawled at the bottom of the lake and the passengers entombed in it haunt the town and its inhabitants. Like a Greek tragedy, the disaster ripples through generations.

“Here’s a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself,” Anatole Broyard wrote in The New York Times.

“It’s as if, in writing it, she broke through the ordinary human condition with all its dissatisfactions and achieved a kind of transfiguration. You can feel in the book a gathering voluptuous release of confidence, a delighted surprise at the unexpected capacities of language, a close, careful fondness for people that we thought only saints felt.”

After that awestruck early review, “Housekeeping” received the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and then, in

The story of “Gilead” and Ames grew into a series with the publication of “Home” (2008), “Lila” (2014) and “Jack” (2020). In each of those novels, Robinson retells the events of “Gilead” from the perspective of a different character— and the awards continued to pile up: a second National Book Critics Award and The Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. It’s easy to see what drew President Obama to “Gilead.” Ames is a man who thinks continually about his place in life as a son, grandson, father, husband, friend and, perhaps most urgently, about his service as a minister and role model to his community. As Ames looks back at the accumulation of sermons he wrote over the years, he reminisces, “I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. …” One can easily imagine Obama writing those same sentences about his many speeches and his books. And it seems that Robinson is speaking from her own heart, too, as she writes in the thoughtful voice of the character who sprang unbidden from her subconscious.

Now Robinson has a new nonfiction book, “Reading Genesis,” slated for release in 2024. And she looks forward to revisiting Seattle in June. “At this point in my life, I do tend to think of things as culminating events—and who knows? I think it will feel very good and right to be at the UW again. It was very important to me and beautiful.”