Alumni

Poet Joan Allan Aleshire ’50 Gives Virtual Alumni Talk

On May 20, Joan Allan Aleshire '50 shared knowledge and excerpts from her book of poetry Happily, which examines a childhood of privilege and difference in a remarkable Baltimore family during the 1940s and '50s.
Speaking of her time at Calvert, which is referenced often in her book, Joan felt that it was a very grounding experience. "I remember loving going to school. It was a place of excitement for me." One of the poems she read was First Day. "In this poem, I'm outside, watching. That's the trick, not being too in or too out." 
 
This approach, of being simultaneously out and in, plays a significant role in Joan's writing process. "Poems start with emotion, but as you get it on the page and start looking at it and shaping it, you then begin to distance yourself from it. So again, you're in it but also out of it." 
 
Joan also reminisced about her friend, Frank Riggs '51. "I didn't realize it, but he was struggling to learn to read. He was clearly a gifted athlete, so he could do sports wonderfully, but he was just struggling. At the very end of that first year, Ms. Dye, in her very kind way, asked Frank and I to stay after everyone had gone to recess. And very quietly and very gently, she explained that Frank would not be joining us in our class next year because he had to stay with her. She went on to explain that he saw words upside down and backwards. It was a blow for me because he was my best friend."
 
Joan continued, "He and I were together all the time. It's fascinating to me, that there was his inability to read and my ability to read very quickly. His athletic grace, and although I was coordinated, I had a disability and didn't have that. Somehow we complemented each other."
 
Her poem, First Love, is about Frank. Of their separating into different classes, she concludes the poem with, "I went happily on, not knowing I had lost him." She credits Ms. Dye with being ahead of her time in recognizing dyslexia, not as an intellectual disability but rather as a brain difference. 
 
Joan, a member of the Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty for 30 years until 2013, has published six books of poetry and multiple essays and translations. She is currently at work on a novel.
 
 She lives in Vermont, where she started a library and later founded the Shrewsbury Agricultural Education & Arts Foundation, or SAGE, an organization that supports sustainable farming and the arts.
 
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