Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work (Harmony Memoir Series) - Softcover

Hague, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1947504053 ISBN 13: 9781947504059

Publisher: Bottom Dog Press, 2018

Synopsis

Dick Hagues Earnest Occupations digs into the rich, complex soil of place, time, and rootedness. Like Frost, Hague seeks to make his avocation and vocation one and the same, so the work of teaching, writing, and gardening weave into the fabric of an integrated life full with the poetry of the grackle-dazzled air. Hague cultivates students; he hoes rows of words; he learns the language of a garden. And he shares it all with us. Read, dear reader, and be supped and renewed.

--Jim Minick, author of Fire Is Your Water

About this title

About the Author:

Richard Hague is a native Appalachian, born in Steubenville, Ohio, just across the river from Weirton, West Virginia. From his boyhood on, he visited and later summered occasionally in Monroe County, Ohio, on Greenbrier Ridge, Perry Township. He taught for forty-five years at an inner-city high school in Cincinnati, while also working now and then at Edgecliff College, Xavier University, Northeastern University, The Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, Radford Universitys Summer Highlander Institute in Appalachian Literature and Writing, and Thomas More College, where he began as Writer-in-Residence 2015. He has conducted workshops, lectures and readings in the East, Midwest, and Appalachia.

Winner of four Ohio Arts Council fellowships in poetry and creative nonfiction, he is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Appalachian Studies Association, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, The Mercantile Library, The Literary Club of Cincinnati, and the Irish Heritage Center of Cincinnati.

His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life (Bottom Dog Press) was a National Book Award nominee. For Ripening (Ohio State University Press) he was named co-Poet of the Year in Ohio in l985. Alive In Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press) was named 2003 Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association, and During The Recent Extinctions: New & Selected Poems 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press) won the Weatherford Award in Poetry. His latest collections are Beasts, River, Drunk Men, Garden, Burst, & Light: Sequences and Long Poems (Dos Madres Press, 2016) and Studied Days: Poems Early & Late in Appalachia (Dos Madres Press, 2017). He has also edited two anthologies for Dos Madres, Quarried: Three Decades of Pine Mt. Sand & Gravel (2015) and Realms of the Mothers:The First Decade of Dos Madres Press (2016) He continues to live in Cincinnati, and to operate Erie Gardens, a small urban organic farm.

He is married to Pamela Korte, Assistant Professor Emerita of Ceramics at Mt. St. Joseph University. They have two sons, Patrick and Brendan, both of Cincinnati.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Dirt Rich
Under normal conditions, a house stays put; it is a relatively permanent thing when measured against the sweetsour brevity of human generations. I remember as a child seeing a photograph of a great frame house, barn-square, jacked up onto timbers atop huge trucks of wheels, being navigated through a neighborhood somewhere. Trees had been trimmed back, telephone lines temporarily removed. There was something startlingly wrong about it all to me, as if St. Peter's Church, that huge pile of sandstone in the shape of a basilica which I attended every Sunday, were suddenly to rise from the ground and fly across the river.

I think my misgivings were appropriate. Part of the connotative meaning of "house" is that it is a place that stays where it is. It may not stay the same, what with termites and storm-downed branches and heaves of frost and warps of summer heat, but it stays in the same place. It is this aspect of permanence in the notion of "house" that makes "mobile home" the oxymoron it always will be. There ought to be nothing temporary about the purposes and uses of a house, though I will admit here a deep and abiding sense of householding in a couple of trailers I have shared with blacksnakes and field mice, off and on, for substantial periods during my life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bottom Dog Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1947504053
• ISBN 13: 9781947504059
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 200