A Reflection on Stanley Plumly by Rosemary Winslow

 Professor Stanley Plumly was instigator and director, with Rod Jellema, of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland, a position from which he never retired. We in the DC metro area felt fortunate to take affordable classes for several years with Stan at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

When he moved to Frederick, Maryland, many of us followed him out there to continue benefiting from his astute comments on our well-worked drafts. We also enjoyed the continuing fellowship—should I say poetship?—of the group of 15 to 18 students who gathered regularly around a long seminar table, eagerly reading and gaining insight from Stan’s comments on each other’s poems. After four or five hours of listening, taking notes, and pondering our poems and Stan’s insights, we would walk to a nearby Middle Eastern restaurant to catch up with each other on our lives, our reading, and our writing.  

Since Stan’s passing two years ago, we have missed his class. The conversations in the carpools stimulated our poetic work and forged friendships that supported the work of all. Everyone was generous-minded, as Stan was, encouraging the best in each. Sometimes a draft would need major rethinking, redrafting. Sometimes he’d zero in on two or three words, accurately locating them as strangers to the vocabulary of the rest of the poem. Once, many of the class were riveted on one of my poems about a first date. Not Stan. He pronounced it “staged,” which it was. I have not over-dramatized a poem since. 

Stan once said that he liked teaching these classes more than any of his career. As a professor of 40 years myself, I like to think he enjoyed the mature students with full rich lives as material, and not having to assign grades to what was so close to writers’ hearts. Two of the close-to-the-heart essays in “Deep Beauty” were written by students from Stan’s Writer's Center class: Nancy Naomi Carlson and Bonnie Naradzay. These writers, like the vast majority represented in the collection, are accomplished writers. And still we gathered at the table to learn from Stan. He was the Master Poet and Teacher.

When I asked Stan four years ago to write an essay for “Deep Beauty,” he agreed in a heartbeat. He’d planned to write on his beloved Keats, but the next summer, in the midst of chemotherapy, he was deep into reflecting on life and death. He’d returned to his Ohio home ground and wanted to contribute an essay on his birth, during which he very nearly died. “Barnesville, O” tells the story of being born in two states, his life saved by his blood aunt, his childhood summer spent in the country on firm ground. He was not on firm ground the summer of 2018. He would not live out the year. Stan’s essay leads “Deep Beauty.”

We miss you, Stan.

Rosemary Winslow