By Michelle Hines, University Relations
(336) 334-5371
Posted 11-14-07
David Roderick.
GREENSBORO – As David Roderick, a Plymouth, Mass., native, began to write in the “disguise” of his pilgrim forefathers, he also researched their history. He discovered that the familiar stories we tell our children are more mythic than fact-based.
“Plymouth has its own mythology that is local and national,” says Roderick, a professor of creative writing. “It just surprised me that I hadn’t been aware of a more three-dimensional history. I was speaking to the myths but trying to debunk them.”
Seven years later, Roderick’s first collection, “Blue Colonial,” melds his musings on the lives of the Plymouth pilgrims with more contemporary, more autobiographical poems. The book has won him the 2007 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship — an honor that comes with a $50,000 purse and requires him to live overseas in Florence and Dublin for the next year.
The scholarship was established by Amy Lowell, an eccentric and groundbreaking poet of the early 20th century. Lowell, heralded by one critic/biographer as a “Cigar-Smoking Sappho,” died in 1925.
Roderick welcomes the chance to work abroad and is already studying Italian. “This is the fantasy every writer has. It’s like winning a lottery for poets or something. I’m very interested in challenging myself to write different types of poems. Certainly being away from my home turf will nudge me in that direction. The last thing any writer wants to do is repeat himself. As Ezra Pound said, ‘Make it new.’ It’s important that I keep surprising myself.”
Denise Baker, associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, calls Roderick “another jewel in the crown” of UNCG’s English department. “He joins an illustrious group of predecessors and colleagues who have contributed to the national preeminence of the university’s creative writing program,” she says.
Although Roderick is already looking ahead to a second collection of poems, tentatively called “North Wind,” he learned a great deal from probing the past for “Blue Colonial.”
“I was never really satisfied with the way Native Americans were portrayed as fast friends with the colonists,” he says.
'Blue Colonial' fuses Roderick's imaginings of life in early Plymouth with more personal musings.
“It was a much more complicated relationship and strained at times.”
The repression the pilgrims lived under in order to stay united and survive in the New World is almost beyond the modern American’s understanding. “They lived with a very strict religious dogma,” Roderick says. “In retrospect, it seems almost cultish. It’s difficult for me to imagine living under those conditions, subordinating the self to the greater community.”
Roderick spent the first 30 years of his life in Massachusetts and has always felt connected to the pilgrims. “I had to give them voices. Then I had to figure out why those voices were important to me.”
The autobiographical poems in the collection were much tougher to write and came later in the creative process, he says. “I realized I was hiding behind the masks of these pilgrims and I wanted to strip that off. And I knew I wanted a wider audience; I wanted more than two people, my parents, to read my book.”
As for Thanksgiving Day, adopted as a federal holiday under Abraham Lincoln, Roderick often wonders if another tradition would have risen up in its place if the South had won the war. “Even William Bradford didn’t mention it much in his histories. We’ve sort of taken this meal between the two cultures and turned it into this myth that’s emblematically American.”
