MEMORIES
- JESSICA TREAT 
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Some Thoughts on Evergreen on its 25th Birthday
This summer, on vacation in Canada, I met a recent graduate. When I asked him how he had liked Evergreen, his reply was immediate - "Oh I loved it." He had gone to France after studying French; to Russia after studying Russian. And he had done it on his own, on independent studies. "At Evergreen you can do what you want," he told me. I don't know that I would sum up my experience at Evergreen in that phrase (I remember wanting desperately to get into Thad Curtz's Short Fictions program, for example, along with too many other students, and being told I couldn't - the decision having been made by lottery, that is, by drawing names out of a Kleenex box), but I understood my fellow alum's enthusiasm for a college where when you know what you want to study you are not told to wait, to study something else first, but instead are encouraged to go as deeply as your interest takes you...
When I first got to Evergreen in 1977 I thought I wanted to be an anthropologist. While I was advised to take a more general program of study, no one stopped me from enrolling in the very small and specialized program, "Cultures of the Pacific Northwest," taught by Lynn Patterson. I remember our seminars, the potlatch the class attended, the sites we visited, the time a fellow classmate and I dressed up as Tlingit Indian chiefs and walked across campus... But most of all I remember my own research. I still have the fifty-or-so page paper I did in that class, a study of the role of women and their life cycles, in the Kwakiutl, Tlingit and Chinook cultures. I spent hours at a time in the museum library in Olympia. I couldn't wait to get to that small dark room, to pore over books, journals, articles, tapes, photographs and artifacts. My research was exciting and addictive; it consumed me. Writing the paper, putting together all the information I had gathered in a coherent, readable fashion, was even more challenging. I met the deadline; I handed it in. But I worried that I hadn't covered everything (Lynn never said to me, 'You can't do that -- it's much too broad a topic!'), that I'd left out something important. So I was surprised when Lynn asked me to present my paper (in a shortened version) at an upcoming anthropology conference. "I could never do that!" I told her. "But why not?" I couldn't because I had begun to listen to my earlier pre-Evergreen yearnings: to be creative, to write my own stories... I no longer wanted to be an anthropologist.
And yet I could have become an anthropologist. Evergreen would have prepared me well for that - by allowing me to dig deeply where I needed to.
After those first two quarters at Evergreen, I enrolled in programs like "Modern Art and Modern Life," "Shakespeare," and "Images" (and of course that TESC staple, "IPE: Introduction to Political Economy"). And yet... I was still pursuing learning in my own fashion, out of my own interests, and being encouraged to do so. In "Modern Art and Modern Life" (I was finally in a Thad Curtz program), Thad apologized for not including Marcel Proust and Djuna Barnes in the syllabus, and encouraged us to read them on our own. I decided to take on Proust: I would read him in French. This seems to me almost absurd now (my French couldn't have been that good!) but Thad did not seem to think so. And so I read A la Recherche du Temps Perdu on my own, often sitting under the same tree at the edge of the soccer field on campus. And this is what I remember about Swann's Way: leaning against a tree, holding the book in my hands, letting the mellifluous French prose flow through me. And that seems rather Proustian, after all.
Of course there are so many other things I think of too: where else could a creative writing student get to study with a painter? I studied with Marilyn Frasca, and I still remember some of her comments; they help me now: how painters always go after the same subject matter, that she had been painting the same bay for so many years... I see now that my own subjects are also the same, writing as I do out of my own obsessions - only the form, the shape of the tale, differs. And I remember my individual sessions with Mark Levensky -- I'd hand in 20 pages of writing and we'd spend an hour on just one: "Look at this -- what is this? Why are you using this word here?" And I would stare at it and have no idea... The page had been diagrammed -- words circled, lines drawn; a map in blue felt pen superimposed on my writing. I learned writing from the inside out with Mark, and I still remember his lessons.
I teach college now and am always trying to get my students interested in their research. I want them to get excited, to delve deeply, to go where their curiosity takes them. I try not to say what I imagine other college teachers might have said to me when I was a student, "You can't do that! It's much too broad a topic! Your French isn't good enough! You'll be wasting your time with it!" It was never a waste of time. (Well... except maybe IPE... in my case only, of course).
