Todd Hearon
ENGLISH
Banjo-playing poet who sees the Harkness classroom as “a collective, mutually responsive, imaginatively engaged mind”
B.A., Baylor University; M.A., Boston College; Ph.D., Boston University. Appointed 2003.
On Harkness: “Some folks say ‘Harkness’ is just the teacher getting and staying out of the way, and to a degree, for me, that's true. But not on the ideal day. On the ideal day, the ideal Harkness teaching (ideally, indefinitely sustained) is one in which the border delineating ‘teacher’ and ‘student’ dissolves, or is blurred, the two sides becoming interchangeable, so that we – a collective, mutually responsive, imaginatively engaged mind which is the class – are learning and discovering together.”
Why he loves teaching: “It's because of the invigorating, infectious enthusiasm and motivation – and general caliber of brilliance -- in the students. Far from complacent, they are willing to stretch, to take imaginative and intellectual risks, to change their lives. And with that willingness, anything is possible.”
Favorite quotations:
William Wordsworth: "What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how."
Samuel Beckett: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Emily Dickinson: "I dwell – in Possibility."
“And what Ezra Pound said once, something to the effect of ‘Genius is Curiosity.’ I see that borne out here every day.”
Other hats: “I'm a writer first and foremost, though I do much more teaching than writing (and caring for our toddler twins -- another ‘hat’). I write poems, plays, fiction -- however it comes. My first book of poems is coming out in spring 2010; I'm currently looking for an agent for a novel. I did theater in Boston for about nine years prior to coming to Exeter – wrote and directed plays, sometimes acted. I play music – guitar, mandolin, banjo, bass.” Hearon lives in Dunbar Hall with his wife and children, where they have a great time with the students and dorm team.
Why Exeter: “It's home.” Hearon first came to Exeter with his wife, poet Maggie Dietz, the 2002 George Bennett Fellow (writer-in-residence). “We got to know people in the English Department, visited some classes, came to love the place and began to see it as a potential home,” he explains. “Exeter seemed so similar to the small, New England liberal arts college I'd hoped to land at.”
Hear Hearon read his poem, "What Is Man That Thou Art Mindful of Him," (courtesy of Slate, posted May 9, 2006)
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