Jay Curlin

I followed Northside with four years at Ouachita Baptist, from which I took a B.A. in English in 1983. An M.A. from Fayetteville came two years later, followed by a wife, Bonnie Kesner, who would join me in Ann Arbor after my first year of doctoral studies. After my classwork, we spent a year in Germany, where I was Michigan Exchange Lector at Johannes Gutenberg University and where we had our first son. We then returned to Ann Arbor for me to complete my Ph.D., and twins Adam and Jason had joined us by the time the degree was complete. I took my first job as an assistant professor at UCA in Conway, where two more children arrived, Gideon and our only daughter, Charity. We then spent a year at Southwest Baptist in 1997-98 before returning to my alma mater Ouachita in the fall of 1998, where I served as chair of the department for six years and now hold an endowed chair as Kathryn Maddox Professor of English. Along the way, two more sons have joined the quiver, Gabriel in 1999 and Benjamin in 2006.

I wish you all a wonderful reunion and shall be looking foward to learning all about you through the updates posted here, but I doubt very much that I shall hazard another reunion until I no longer have enough memory of how ghastly they can be. I have still not recovered entirely from our reunion of 1999, when I looked with horror at the ruins of my classmates and the absolute tatters of my memory, only then to be voted Most Changed by the rest of you, all clearly as horrified by me as I had been by you. We have lived daily with ourselves for thirty years now, during which our physical, mental, and spiritual changes have been gradual enough for us not to notice them. Returning suddenly to a reunion in which we find that the same transformations have been going on in our friends is terrifying, for it confronts us suddenly and unexpectedly with evidence that our daily mirrors have kindly concealed from us. Rather than have that illusion shattered again, I believe I shall stay home this year and imagine you all as when we were young and only stupid.

What seems funny in retrospect was generally traumatizing at the time, and I certainly did not appreciate the humor of the situation when some friends and I copped my stepfather's pickup truck and used it to carry a large bearish sort of thing around Southside during homecoming. We were quickly blocked in by other cars that seemed to have a limitless supply of eggs, and they would not let us go until the eggs were exhausted. All I could think of was that my stepfather was going to kill me, but he seems to have taken it much better than I would surely respond if any of my sons had similar ideas. Fortunately, at least, I have never owned a pickup truck, and none of my sons seem particularly tempted to go cruisin' with my bicycle.