The gentle cadences of a softly singing male voice, accompanied by a guitar’s simple strum, wove through the crowded room. From his perch on a chair, the singer teased a lilting melody from the instrument on his lap, sending a living thread of sound among the youthful, raptly attentive faces of thirty listening students crowded on couches and scattered about on the floor. Though none present realized it at the time, the scene of music and fellowship shared by visiting poet Wilmer Hastings Mills with the students at the 62 Park St. “Donnybrook” off-campus house that night in 2010 would come to epitomize both the purpose and history of the English department’s Visiting Writers Program.
Professor of English Daniel Sundahl established the program in the late 1980s as a way to allow students to interact directly with contemporary poets and authors. Since that time, writers including Paul Mariani, B.H. Fairchild, and Dennis Covington have come to campus for two-day visits every year to share their craft in workshops, classes, lectures, or public readings.
In the 1990s, Sundahl passed responsibility for the program to Assistant Professor of English John Somerville, who still heads it today. For both men, Mills’ visit to the Donnybrook represented the unique quality of the personal interaction between writer and students that was the original purpose of Hillsdale’s Visiting Writers Program.
“What happened that night when he went to the Donnybrook, to me is the ideal,” Somerville said. “I want [writers’ visits] to be as much as possible an opportunity for the students to spend time with these writers at these informal, more intimate gatherings. By all accounts it was a miraculous evening.”
Sundahl’s value of such interactions led him to begin the program in the first place. In the 1980s, when a pool of money became available for use in the college’s fine arts programs, Sundahl made sure to join the committee formed to decide how to allocate the funds.
“If music gets visiting musicians, we should have visiting writers,” he said.
He received a small amount of money and the program was born. At first, Sundahl could only afford to bring one writer to campus for a two-day visit each year. Czeslaw Milosz, a Lithuanian poet and Nobel Prize Winner, was the program’s first guest. After the success of that earliest visit, Sundahl then began building up the program. During the next few years, he hosted well-known poet Paul Mariani of Boston College and organized a Center for Constructive Alternatives on American Literature that brought several other visiting writers to Hillsdale. Both decisions helped establish the program’s credibility on campus.
Sundahl’s increasing duties during the 1990s, including the task of establishing the Dow Journalism Program, forced him to turn the program over to Somerville.
“It is his program, and he has done such a marvelous, marvelous job,” Sundahl said of Somerville. “He has almost brought it to the point of perfection.”
Somerville leaped at the opportunity to lead the program. He said he has enjoyed almost every minute of his 20 years doing the job. Despite the hard work, he would never give up the responsibility.
“One reason I haven’t turned this over to someone else is I want to make sure to keep bringing people I like,” he said with a laugh. “Writers I’ve read that I really like and that I want to share with our students and faculty.”
He has seen the program grow in different ways over the years.
“We have more money now than we did when I first started,” Somerville said. “For a number of years I could only afford one [writer] a year, and then recently it’s been possible to bring one each semester.”
According to Somerville, inviting writers to visit an off-campus house for a night of fellowship with students, without any faculty present, has now become a tradition and a highlight of every visiting writers’ stay. It exemplifies what the program has come to mean to Hillsdale over the years.
“It brings people who want to spend time with the students, not just come in and out,” Sundahl said.
About a year after Mills played guitar and sang at the Donnybrook, the poet died of cancer, but his memory lives on in the continued intimate interactions between writer and student that the Visiting Writers Program engenders. According to Somerville, Mills’ death greatly impacted the Hillsdale students who had known him. Their genuine feeling at his passing further manifests the meaningful influence the program enables visiting writers to have on the college’s students.
“I think there’s a lot of value in just going to a lecture and hearing someone give a pre-meditated talk or lecture on their work, and if you know the author it’s really cool to have them shake your hand and sign your book, but it really accesses different angles of them as people instead of just writers when they come to an off-campus house and someone hands them the guitar and they start playing a song,” junior Forester McClatchey said. McClatchey has kept in correspondence with a number of the visiting writers.
Looking to the program’s future, Somerville is confident that the program will continue to live up to its history of bringing students and writers together. As long as students desire to learn, listen, and connect with writers such as Mills, the program’s impact will only strengthen.
