The following profiles are provided courtesy of the
EPISTULA
editor, Ms. Tutt-Stapp Harris. These articles were published as noted.
Faculty Profile: John Hood
This article was originally published in the EPISTULA, Winter 2009 edition.
So...What are YOU Doing at 5:30 am?
John Hood, for one, is writing. His third book will be released in December-but by then he will have completed a first draft of the next one.
How does he do it, you ask? The answer is simple: One page at a time.
Before school.
Ask John Hood about the content of his published books, and he is happy to pare things down and help the relatively-uninitiated get oriented—and since his scholarship is in ancient and medieval Christian theology, this interviewer took some comfort in the fact that most people would, like her, fall into the category of the relatively-uninitiated. Still, it must be said that even the one-hour, theology-lite version is tantalizing in its complexity and implications—paying simultaneous tribute to Dr. Hood’s skill as a teacher and his depth of knowledge in his field.
But we’ll get to all that medieval theology in a minute. Because at Wakefield, only one question could possibly be on the minds right now of always-stretched-thin students, faculty, and staff upon hearing that a faculty member who completed a 400-page book last summer is finishing another one even as they are reading this: How did he do that??
The “How”: Dr. Hood’s Process
If you have ever wanted to write a book, but believed you would have to wait until you retire because you simply have no time, you will now need a different excuse.
Rule One appears to be, “Have patience.” For his first book, a study of the thinking of Thomas Aquinas, Dr. Hood spent three and a half years reading and doing research, and two and a half more years in the actual writing of the book.
Rule Two: Keep a schedule. Dr. Hood wrote his first and second books, and most of his third, while teaching full time. By doing constant all-nighters and living on coffee, you ask? No: by writing for one and a half hours each morning before school. Period.
Rule Three: Have an output quota. Dr. Hood’s output quota: one page per day Monday through Friday. Three pages per day on Saturday and Sunday.
Rule Four: Have a method. Dr. Hood’s method: Outline a section. Go through your notes and type out the quotes you plan on using in that section. Then, above the list of quotes, begin writing, and when you come to the need for a quote, cut and paste from below. (Tip for Rule Four: When you write your last paragraph for that day, always end by beginning the next paragraph, so you will have something to get you started the next morning [other than coffee]).
Rule Five: “Kill your darlings.” As per Faulkner’s storied advice, this means that you must edit ruthlessly after you finish your first draft. When Dr. Hood finished the first draft of his current book, he had 800 manuscript pages. He edited it down to 690 pages before submitting it to the publisher—but when the book was accepted, it was with the stipulation that he cut another 190 pages. Though it seemed impossible at first, he did it.
That’s it—five rules, one page per day! Simple it might sound, but easy it is not. Yet Dr. Hood speaks calmly of his process, and with great satisfaction at what the steady work has yielded, by any standard an enviable combination.
The “What”: Dr. Hood’s Writings
Dr. Hood’s particular fascination is with the work of the 13th century theologian Thomas Aquinas (he had the opportunity to acquire from one of his university mentors a library of all of Aquinas’ writings, which he has read in its entirety). In 1995, Dr. Hood published his first book, Aquinas and the Jews, which examines Aquinas’ writings on the Jews “in the social context of the escalating intolerance towards them in the Christian West in the 13th century,” according to one review. Aquinas’ writings on the Jews stand out as models of a more tolerant tradition, both in this 13th century context, and when compared to Augustine and Jerome, the 4th century Christian writers to whom Aquinas had most referred in the development of his own thinking
Dr. Hood’s second book, The Essential Aquinas, was published in 2002, and is a translation from the original Latin of selections from Aquinas’ broad writings. The book to be released in December, however, which is now undergoing revision following the peer-review process, is actually an outgrowth of his first book, though not in chronological order.
The new work is entitled The Tragedy of Christianity: Jerome, Augustine, and the Translation of the Gospels. Working backwards from the material in his first book on Aquinas, Dr. Hood examines in this book the two seminal 4th century thinkers who had such a strong influence on Aquinas, but from whose thinking on the role of the Jews in a Christian society Aquinas substantially departs.
Jerome (the translator of the Bible into Latin) and Augustine were prolific writers, producing “the equivalent of an Encyclopedia Britannica each,” says Dr. Hood, and they strongly influenced all Christian theology, not only because of their volume, but because of their placement in time: immediately before the collapse of the Roman Empire, so that their works served to anchor Roman Catholic thinking right before a period of great instability.
But, he goes on to say, they also “enshrined a pessimistic Christian view, characterized by focus on original sin, on humanity’s making of the same mistakes through our generally sinful nature.” Early Christianity, Dr. Hood maintains, did not have this pessimistic focus. Further, he says, Augustine and Jerome carried on a high-profile controversy at one time on some theological matters, characterized equally by disagreement, blending of ideas, and long angry silences. A result of this public disagreement, he says, is that they “brought a ‘macho’ intellectual style to Western discourse.”
Asked how he felt about Jerome and Augustine after these findings, given their ongoing infleunce, Dr. Hood says he feels about them “a bit like I do about Sparta and the Stoics. I admire the structure they created, and how it made a hardy castle. But—I wouldn’t have wanted to live in Sparta!”
And next on the agenda...
This spring, though, the revising of The Tragedy of Christianity is not the only writing Dr. Hood is working on at 5:00 am.
His new book, whose first draft may be completed sometime in April, is entitled A Blessing and a Curse: The Jews in 12th Century Christian Theology. It will comprise Volume II, along with Aquinas and the Jews, of a projected five to six volume history of Christianity’s view of Jews in Christian society. The question raised by the well-documented and shocking decline in Christian tolerance for Jews from the 12th through 15th centuries, Dr. Hood says, is, “What happened in 1098?” Dr. Hood’s thesis is that, contrary to popular opinion, it was society’s views of Judaism that drove the Church’s response, not the other way around. But it will take another three or four books to lay all that out.
And after that? A definitive biography of Thomas Aquinas. Stay tuned!
Note: Dr. Hood teaches Latin and is Chair of the Foreign Language Department.
Faculty Profile: Gary Genther
This article was originally published in the EPISTULA, Fall 2005 edition.
Gary Genther Completes 20 Years of Freeing the Artist Within
So imagine this is you:
It’s 1981, and, only recently out of college, you are already a successful enough artist that you can afford to paint full-time. Your wife also has a job in her career of choice. You have no children yet. Your work hangs in one of the most prestigious galleries in the U.S., as well as in private collections—and within just a few years Andrew Wyeth, your idol, will have purchased one of your paintings.
But in 1986 a friend tells you that a tiny, eight-year-old school down the road is looking for an art teacher. At first it seems like not such a big deal, just four hours per week. But the next year, they are so pleased with you that they tell you they will fund a full salary, add facilities, and re-tool the school’s schedule—if only you will come to work full-time.
Would you do this? Would you trade in one of the most enviable and hard-to-achieve situations in the fine arts world—a full-time artist—to pursue a career teaching children?
Gary Genther did. With scarcely a glance over his shoulder, he came to teach at Wakefield—putting his own painting into the margins of a full-time job, and giving himself wholeheartedly to the task of helping kids learn to love what he found so much to love about—art—but most of all, committing himself to a teaching style that is all about helping them love the art within themselves.
Early days
“That first year there were two Upper School art students, and I taught the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders once a week,” say Mr. Genther. “The next year, there were 15 Upper School students, and I was teaching pre-k through twelfth!” One of those first Upper School students was Cory Caulfield—now a successful professional artist herself. But including a list of former Gary Genther students who are now successful artists would shift the focus of this article—there are quite a few.
Although beginning to teach certainly affected how Mr. Genther was able to do his own work, he says that for the first five years he really could still paint. “I actually could paint at school,” he says. “I’d bring my work in and sit and paint with the kids.” Incredibly, in those early days, with such small classes, he would let the students contribute to his paintings, literally picking up brushes and painting right onto his canvas.
But when his own family began to come along, there was no ambiguity about priorities. “Painting will still be here when my kids are grown,” Mr. Genther says firmly. “And I’m always painting—there’s always a work in progress. But art is not the end-all of my life.”
“I’m a painter”
While Mr. Genther is a committed career teacher, there is no debate about his status as a respected professional painter (a title he much prefers to “artist,” by the way—“Artists are trying to make a statement. I’m a painter. I paint what I see.”)
For many years he has had a relationship with the Hardcastle Gallery in Wilmington, Delaware, in the heart of the famous Brandywine Valley, an area with one of the richest artistic heritages in the country. Painting what he sees, apparently, works very well indeed.
And what does he see? “My subjects are just what I see when I’m out walking,” he says simply. Mr. Genther describes his style as “rustic,” as coming from nature. Pressed to define his work further, he says, “If there is one thing that connects my work, it is that my subjects are un-datable.” Each image, he says, could be from now, or from a hundred years ago.
In general, his method is to walk his property, a small farm near Strasburg, and look. When something strikes him, he will return to that spot to sketch, to get down the details. But the painting, he says, is done in the studio. Painting what he sees doesn’t mean that he is looking for a photo-realism type of image. “If you look at the finished painting and then saw what I saw originally—they would look different,” he says.
The art of teaching
“I don’t teach,” says Mr. Genther. “I support. I move people along. I think of what I do as guiding.” He says that he had professors in college who tried to “teach” art—and he hated it. “Art has to be yours,” he says with conviction. “How can it be anything else?”
Still, though, his job is to know what his students need next. “There’s plenty of ‘That stinks’ that has to get said, too,” he laughs. “You can tell them that. But you always comment on the positive first.”
He says that the greatest challenge with teenage artists is to get them to not simply repeat what they’ve seen, but to find what’s inside them. He believes that at Wakefield, students can be themselves—one of the things he values the most about the school—and this helps them to be able to express the art that is within them.
“When we were a tiny rural school it was easier. It was more sort of free-spirited,” he says. “Now we have a more urban and suburban student body, and that free-spiritedness is a little different. But it’s still here.”
Of teaching, he also says, “I think people forget all the time that the kids cue off us. If you are calm, they will be.” One day, he said, he was conferencing with a student and the whole still-life display, including a full size road bike surrounded by who knows what else, came crashing down. According to the kids, Mr. Genther finished what he was saying before he turned around to see what had happened.
“They all said ‘You were so calm. We were watching you,’” he reports, smiling. “That’s what you can’t ever forget.”
Note: Mr. Genther teaches fine arts to Middle and Upper School students.