Meeting The New Boss
Day three of the McMullin Writer's Workshop
After fourteen days of near misses, I finally met the new president of Millsaps College in person. Men tend to judge each other by their handshake. That first test is pretty important. His was firm and direct. That's a good sign.
He's been on the job for not quite two weeks, but for about a month, some of my friends have maintained a phone group to exchange and collect social and legacy media mentions of Frank Neville. The world of Millsaps and Mississippi Methodism is in quite a bit of flux right now. Everybody wants to know the news.
I've lived long enough to be part of the old guard. That wasn't expected. One of my classmates in the McMullin Writer's Workshop is an Ezelle, a name of deep and ancient magic where Millsaps and Mississippi Methodism are concerned. I've been monitoring her responses to things. Even though what hair I have left is white, I still have masters, and I'm fully aware that I have to make a report to them at some point about the progress so far. Consider this the first report.
One of the first things I told Frank was that he's my sixth new president at Millsaps. I have a specific reason for mentioning this as much as I do. Change is not a reason to be afraid. Change is normal. Change is expected. Millsaps and Methodism are in flux right now, but when you get my age, you realize it's always been so. An amount of fluidity and uncertainty can be a very good thing.
The last few times I saw Frances Lucas, she's tried to find a way to almost apologize that her tenure at Millsaps didn't turn out the way she was expecting. I've been trying to find a way to tell her not to do that. Maybe this is it.
You won't ever see me talk bad about a former president of Millsaps. I have a good idea of what that job needs, but I couldn't do it. Trying and not reaching your goal is not the same as not trying at all. Sitting at the top of the key with the ball in hand can be a pretty intimidating position, but you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take, and Francis took her shot. So did Rob, and Eddie, and George, and Ben. Technically, I was alive when the guard changed between Finger and Graves, but people I encountered before learning to speak shouldn't count.
When Ruben Millsaps and William Murrah started Millsaps in 1890, nearly every student was the first person in their family to attend college. All five of the Campbell kids from Hesterville, Mississippi, were family pioneers. We still graduate kids who are the first in their families to attend college, but it's uncommon. You'd be surprised how many kids we graduate who aren't only third—or fourth-generation college graduates—they're third—or fourth-generation Millsaps graduates. Whatever we were in 1890, we've evolved a good bit, and everyone who ever sat in the captain's chair added some of their DNA to the end result.
Every few days, I talk to people who are wringing their hands and clutching their pearls about the future of Millsaps. When you're my size, people tend to look for you when they are afraid.
There are a few things they don't know. One is that Millsaps is in a better position financially to hand the baton from Rob to Frank than it was to pass it between Fast Eddie and King George.
George's first day at Millsaps famously included a tour of the physical plant with the maintenance supervisor, where he insisted on laying eyes on every broken thing on campus. George was famous for being a man of few words, and some of them could be purple.
The way the story was always related to me, he spent the day identifying the many liabilities in our physical plant and saying, "That's crap," over and over. By the time he left, all that crap was fixed, and George had added a whole new generation of crap to break.
One of the things I find so energizing about being around the academy, particularly at Millsaps, is that ideas mean more than brute force. One of the most important things we have going right now happened because George Bey had a crazy idea and enough energy to see it through. When George Harmon came to Millsaps, people laughed at his idea to have a Harvard Style business school in the middle of Jackson, fucking, Mississippi, at a small liberal arts college. Ten years later, everybody in Mississippi was trying to copy us and catch up. Maybe we need to recruit more guys named George.
I signed up for the McMullin Writer's Workshop with two purposes. One was to build my tribe as I reinvented myself. When I was young, I watched the people in the circles around Willie Morris, Eudora Welty, and Barry Hannah like a poor kid at the window of a candy store. Fearing disapproval from my father, I never had a writer's tribe in Mississippi. I had a pretty good one in California, but I never moved there, and nearly all of them are dead now.
Yesterday, we talked about habits and environments we use for writing. Ray Bradbury was famous for writing at the bottom of the library on a typewriter rented by the hour. By the time I knew him, he did all of his writing in his office. I never would have been able to work in Ray Bradbury's office. It was a monster-kid paradise. Besides all the books and typewriters, he had all these classic monster and sci-fi toys and a few actual movie props littered amongst the pages. The short-lived Ray Bradbury theater always included a few shots from his office. That wasn't a set made and dressed for television; that's where he worked.
My entire collection of Aurora Monster models and one of the original production maquettes made for King Kong is sitting behind me. There were maybe ten of these models carved in 1931 and 32. You can tell how close they are to the production by how much the face looks like a gorilla, not a caveman. Mine is pretty close to the final version.
My other reason for attending the workshop, and the reason I'll probably be back next year, is to get a hands-on measurement of how Millsaps engages with high school students—what I tend to call "potential Millsaps students"—and the larger community of writers and letters in Mississippi.
The center of writing in Mississippi tends to move around. When I was very young, it was unquestionably at Jackson State where people came from all over to sit at Margaret Walker Alexander's feet. Then, it moved to Oxford with Barry Hannah and Square Books. I probably should have been there in those years. I don't think my father would have considered it a betrayal since he has an Ole Miss degree himself, but for a child who struggled to learn to read, my father always entreated me to "be reasonable" about these things. I had pretty severe limitations, and the Office Supply Business was laid out like a buffet before me. This writer business is best just forgotten.
We all have dreams. For a broken child, dreams are usually only ever just dreams. Daddy wasn't being cruel; he was trying to protect me. Never try to protect somebody my size. I was built to take abuse.
My Ole Miss friends will probably shun me, but I honestly believe that the center for writing in Mississippi today is at the W. They have the most innovative programs and the best students. It's not that Ole Miss ever did anything wrong, but even giants die. Thanks to John Grisham, the Ole Miss writer's program has more money than God himself, but Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 with a pocket full of nickels and a box of typing paper. Where writing is concerned, money isn't the answer. There may be another Barry Hannah one day, but not yet.
Millsaps will never be the center of writing in Mississippi. We don't offer an MFA, which takes us out of the running. We'll never have a seat at the head of the table, but I can't remember a time when we didn't have an important seat somewhere at the table.
Casey Parks, a Millsaps Graduate, has a readership that exceeds the combined total of every journalist working in Mississippi. What she writes about may irritate you, but you can't argue with those numbers. Michael Guidry, who graduated close to when Casey did, is the new editor at Mississippi Today. They recently won their first Pulitzer and are working on their second. Legacy media will never be what it was again, but whatever it is now, Mississippi Today is on top of the stack.
The McMullin Writer's Workshop has been an unquestionable success. Last night, Liz and I had a brief conversation about numbers. She was graciously very honest with me.
About a third of the workshop participants came back again. This being my second time in the workshop, I recognized a lot of young faces. In the short time the program has existed, thirty-four McMullin Writer's Workshop participants have become Millsaps Students. Considering the program's size and how much it costs us, that's a remarkably good number.
It occurs to me that we can expand on this idea. There are many summer programs for middle and high school students, so we'll have to find our niche, but we're pretty good at that. I can see a summer studio art program for the same audience and maybe one for budding managers and marketers. People are going to laugh, but I think "Else School Junior" has potential. My sister used to burn it up in Junior Achievement. Sometimes, High School kids love business.
Like everything else we do, these ideas will require some faculty-level person who is willing to give their time and energy to make it happen and a little seed money. The seed money is actually easier to find than somebody willing to build the program. The Wolfes used to organize their now famous art colonies from Millsaps. I don't see why we can't do something like that again and add high school students.
My first impression of Frank Neville is that he's spent his first fourteen days aggressively encountering the community on their turf but on his terms. One of my friends suggested that he might be something of a hot dog. I said I didn't think that was a bad thing. It's vitally important for the president to take this job on their terms and make that pretty clear right from the start. I think that's happening.
Millsaps won't succeed because we have an aggressive new president with great ideas. Millsaps will succeed because we have a great team. That's the other secret nobody knows: George Harmon wasn't a one-man show. He had a great team when he arrived, and he made it even greater while he had the ringmaster's hat. Frank has a pretty great team. Some are getting long of tooth, and some are very young, but there's enormous energy there; from that, he can build.
I'll be pretty old when the next new president comes along. I'm sure I'll be bugging somebody younger for news about the new guy, probably Erin or Sam. That's how this game is played.
