Cappello, Mary, James Morrison, and Jean Walton. Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration. <\/i>New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018. 249 pp. ISBN (paperback): 978-1-947980-16-7. <\/b><\/p>\n
Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration <\/i>collects memoirs by James Morrison, Jean Walton, and Mary Cappello in which the writers reflect on their shared time in the English graduate program at SUNY Buffalo in the early 1980s. As the writers acknowledge, the program was, at the time, a hotbed of theoretical inquiry, and we see them, as students, at once buzzing and grappling with the influence of this fecund intellectual space. However, as Walton warns, \u201cif you seek in these pages an accurate portrait of the talented and influential professors who taught at SUNY Buffalo in the eighties, you will be disappointed, and maybe even disapproving\u201d (111). Buffalo Trace <\/i>provides, rather, a compelling and deftly woven account of the three scholars\u2019 intellectual development through Morrison\u2019s memories, Walton\u2019s journals, and Cappello\u2019s correspondence with a beloved teacher and colleague. In each memoir, the writer pairs academic work with the work of becoming, allowing textual exegesis to inform and share space with personal and intellectual excavation. The three pieces reflect the various shapes pedagogy takes during one\u2019s graduate education\u2014some expected, others less so\u2014in these honest, humane accounts.<\/p>\n
Though all three memoirs trace different ways of seeking out one\u2019s teachers, the first, James Morrison\u2019s \u201cHis Masters\u2019 Voice,\u201d engages most overtly with those he found at Buffalo. In vivid, amusing anecdotes, Morrison recounts his search for masters as part of the sometimes-harrowing professionalization process. The section on Morrison\u2019s first semester of teaching hits all the right notes\u2014we see him grappling with imposter syndrome, trying to glean value from his \u201cIntro to Teaching\u201d proseminar, dealing with the smart-aleck student, and eventually recognizing his own expertise\u2014and would be a welcome addition within the kind of proseminar he describes. Teachers also emerge outside the classroom in conversations, at parties, through new forms of queer relationality, and sweetly awkward crushes as he seeks out \u201csomething else, something even deeper and yet to be explored that would blend…sensibility, spirit, sexuality…and integrate [his] life\u201d (31). Morrison presents Buffalo, both program and city, as the kind of liminal space in which such integration might occur.<\/p>\n
Jean Walton, in \u201cBuffalo Trace,\u201d eschews generic restrictions, throwing off the masters Morrison sought. She opens with a journal entry from 1982 that digs into the psychical thicket of her preoccupations with love, life, and an essay on Proust that she could also send as a letter to her grandmother. In these early pages she asks parenthetically, \u201cwhat on earth is this wall I keep coming up against\u201d (103), inviting the reader to imagine, or perhaps recall, this raw, but common, feeling. Frequent references to her journals remind the reader that these experiences are filtered through Walton\u2019s thought and language, creating a vibrant affective portrait of a scholar seeking her voice. She notes early on that \u201csomething had to crumble, for something else to emerge in its place\u201d (104); Walton\u2019s mode of self-fashioning entails the breaking of the habitual through multiplicity\u2014by allowing herself to shift in and out of identities, intimacies, locales, and historical periods, she makes dust of the wall and \u201cbecome[s] the I that flows from my pen\u201d (165). The reader meets two \u201cI\u201ds in \u201cBuffalo Trace\u201d\u2014Jean\/Jeannie\/Djinn of the journals, and the authorial \u201cI\u201d interpreting those journals (the one I met as Professor Walton in the late 1990s). The interplay between the two creates a comforting counterpoint between the earnest worry of the student and the authoritative reassurance of the other \u201cI\u201d that recommends \u201cBuffalo Trace\u201d to anyone considering, in the midst of, or well beyond graduate school.<\/p>\n
In \u201cMy Secret, Private Errand,\u201d Mary Cappello inhabits the unwavering, confident voice of an experienced writer, one who sees in the past its undeniable value for the present. The memoir splices memories from Cappello\u2019s time in Buffalo with her friend and teacher Marty Pops with passages from one of his cassette-recorded lectures and those from letters and emails they exchanged in the time leading up to Pops\u2019s death in 2011. Cappello reminds, \u201clike you, I have stolen and been robbed repeatedly\u201d (185), an apt metaphor for the lessons students take in and for what is taken in return. In this way, Cappello presences Pops within the text through frequent citation and reminding the reader of the degree to which those whose thoughts intermingle with our own are never lost to us.<\/p>\n
Though graduate programs offer students countless resources, those resources rarely present the academic labor with such blunt sincerity as one finds in Buffalo Trace<\/i>. As Morrison aptly notes, \u201cTo go to grad school was always a kind of bid, a wager that things might actually work out\u201d (29). The fact that the three writers have enjoyed successful careers\u2014Cappello and Walton at University of Rhode Island, and Morrison at Claremont McKenna College\u2014will reassure readers newer to the profession. For readers long-since out of graduate school, it offers the nostalgic pleasure of revisiting one\u2019s earlier self during an intense time of self-discovery. And, for those who teach and advise graduate students, it offers a valuable reminder of how malleable their minds are, how mutable their affections and allegiances\u2014to ideas, projects, and intimacies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Harmony Jankowski, Indiana University Cappello, Mary, James Morrison, and Jean Walton. Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration. New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018. 249 pp. ISBN (paperback): 978-1-947980-16-7. Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration collects memoirs by James Morrison, Jean Walton, and Mary Cappello in which the writers reflect on their shared time in the English […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9762,"featured_media":0,"parent":1770,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1809"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9762"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1809"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1812,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1809\/revisions\/1812"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}