How OHIO Saved Me from the Parapet

As a student at OU in the late 1970s, I did well in classes I liked and poorly in those I didn’t. The classes I liked: literature and creative writing. The ones I didn’t: everything else.

I especially benefited from Hollis Summers, a Southerner and gentleman of the old school. Named a Distinguished Professor in 1964, he regularly invited students—even undergraduates like me—to his beautiful home at the top of Congress Street. He’d serve drinks and his wife, Laura, would lay out hors d’oeuvres, and we’d talk about poetry as though we were all adults. Once I brought a girlfriend I was particularly taken with, but who, not being a student, felt out of place. She stood quivering at the window that early evening, ignored by the student poets, although she was good-looking in a maybe trying-too-hard kind of way. Hollis introduced himself, as I’d forgotten to. He took her hand and said, “My, aren’t you lovely in this light.” She was charmed.  That was Hollis—sly, insightful, empathetic.

Most of all, he did me the great favor of acting as though I might be onto something with my poems, even when I didn’t think I was, even when I had no idea what I was doing. What he did, too: not let me get away without trying. Sometimes I would meet with Hollis during his office hours, bringing my fledgling poems. People smoked then at OHIO, even in Ellis Hall, and Hollis used a cigarette holder, either ivory or tortoiseshell, I can’t recall which. What I do remember: the way he’d smile up at me, smoke drifting over the sheet of paper my poem was typed on, and, if he didn’t like it, say, “Well, this one’s a little thin, isn’t it?”

He taught me to be strict with myself, to work against inertia, my inherent diffidence. He taught me that mere creativity, something I’d always had, wasn’t enough, that making art was real, important work. I try to pass this lesson on to my students, when they’re ready to hear it.

A few years before he died, I came across Hollis and Laura on Columbia Avenue in Athens. They sat forlornly in their green MG two-seater, which had stalled near the steep drop-off above Columbus Road. I stopped, pulled off behind them, and jumped out of my car. I could smell gas—I guessed that the MG’s engine was flooded.

“Thank God you’re here,” Hollis said. “I was about to leap from the parapet.”

We opened the hood, let the fumes clear. Then Hollis started the car and they drove away, waving and smiling.

It’s almost too easy, as metaphors go. What I did for Hollis that afternoon, he and other OHIO creative writing faculty (most notably Wayne Dodd, a 1993 Distinguished Professor who would publish some of my more mature work in The Ohio Review ) did for my entire life. There I was, stalled in my own fumes—failing botany, partying too much—and along came Hollis Summers and creative writing to save me from the parapet.

But just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it isn’t true. This was the value of my time at OHIO—the value of a liberal arts education, with an emphasis, for me, on the arts. A sense of purpose—the radical notion that I might be good at a difficult thing, if I kept at it. The discovery, maybe, of a talented self I didn’t know I was, or could become, even if I had to retake Spanish 101 and earned a D in oceanography. You can’t ask more of a college education than that. — Jon Loomis, AB ’81, is an associate professor of creative writing, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire