Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet Highlights Davidson Event to Honor Gill Holland
Gill Holland and a student on the front steps of Chambers Building.
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4/10/2004
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
by Elizabeth Redpath ’04
Poet Charles Wright, winner of the National Book Award and a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, will read and present creative writing awards to Davidson College students on Thursday, April 15. But the real star of the evening will be English professor J. Gill Holland, whom Wright and others will honor for thirty-nine years of teaching at Davidson.
The event begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Smith 900 Room of the Alvarez College Union, and there is no charge to attend. For more information, call 704-894-2140.
Holland is retiring this spring, leaving in his wake generations of students enchanted by his teaching into a love of literature. Some of Holland’s students excelled and became winners of the same Vereen Bell Memorial Award for Creative Writing that Wright will present Thursday night. But most of Holland’s students simply matured into readers who enjoy literature from a more educated perspective because of their time under his influence.
Gill Holland consults with his student, Kate Fiedler '03, in his library "office."
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Throughout his career Holland’s teaching methodology reflected a desire to know students and to share with them his passion for books. He has been known to pass around a text in class with instructions to “feel” and “smell” the cover.
His discussion-based style, with students arranged in a circular fashion, has allowed him to see faces, learn names, and hear from every student. Early in his career, he abandoned his office for a table on the first floor of Davidson’s E.H. Little Library. He explained, “When I tell a student about a book, it is important to show them the book.”
Gill Holland receives congratulations for his ODK Teaching Award from faculty colleague Jerry Putnam.
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Students have responded gratefully to his attention, electing him winner of the college’s top teaching prizes—the Omicron Delta Kappa Teaching Award in 1994, and the Hunter-Hamilton Love of Teaching Award in 1995.
Raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, Holland wanted to follow his father into medicine, and enrolled at Washington and Lee University on a pre-med track. But he soon found himself enamored by books and changed his major. In pondering what might have been, he laughed and said, “Think about all the people walking around today, healthy and whole, who would be mangled and twisted if I had become a doctor. Now I just twist minds.”
He first came to Davidson in 1961 and taught for two years while pursuing his Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 1967 he joined the Davidson faculty in a tenure-track position.
Gill Holland in class, urging his students to respond.
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Holland said that the allure of Davidson was the opportunity for close association with students. “In those early days, every Sunday after Vespers we would have open house and students would come by and sit in a big circle and talk,” he said. “The students here have been good since day one.”
When asked how her husband would handle retirement, Holland’s wife Siri replied, “He will miss the students so much. They’ve been his whole life for thirty-nine years.”
From the very beginning, Holland was a visible part of campus life. A college wrestler himself, he practiced with the Davidson wrestling team daily until he turned forty.
He has also compiled a respectable publishing record, but doesn’t dwell on it. He describes publication as “getting away from the number one priority at Davidson–teaching,” and laments the pressure to publish. He has written a number of articles and reviews of Norwegian literature and art, but his favorite writing has been poetic. Holland published a book of translations of classical Chinese poetry, and in 1994 he published his own work in a collection entitled The Tao Comes to Davidson.
“Poetry is a way to try to be honest when you’re surrounded by a lot of window dressing and hype,” he said. “In poems, you can be in Italy walking down the path to the Mediterranean and the next line, talking to one of Faulkner’s cows in Mississippi. You just soar. It frees you. It’s the way a liberal arts education is supposed to be—liberating.”
Though he has primarily taught British, American, and Victorian literature at Davidson, he has explored other genres. He decided to study the Mandarin and classical Chinese languages at Stanford University for three summers in the 1970s, and added Chinese literature to his slate of Davidson courses. He and Siri spent a sabbatical year in China in 1989, and were eyewitness to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. He used a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to write about the experience, and hopes to expand upon that work in his retirement.
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