Earnest Occupations bookcover

Earnest Occupations

Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work

Richard Hague 

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Description

Dick Hague�s Earnest Occupations digs into the rich, complex soil of place, time, and rootedness. Like Frost, Hague seeks to make his avocation and vocation one and the same, so the work of teaching, writing, and gardening weave into the fabric of �an integrated life� full with the poetry of �the grackle-dazzled air.� Hague cultivates students; he hoes rows of words; he learns the language of a garden. And he shares it all with us. Read, dear reader, and be supped and renewed.

--Jim Minick, author of Fire Is Your Water

Product Details

PublisherBottom Dog Press
Publish DateFebruary 12, 2018
Pages200
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781947504059
Dimensions9.0 X 6.0 X 0.5 inches | 0.7 pounds

About the Author

Richard Hague is a native Appalachian, born in Steubenville, Ohio, just across the river from Weirton, West Virginia. From his boyhood on, he visited and later summered occasionally in Monroe County, Ohio, on Greenbrier Ridge, Perry Township. He taught for forty-five years at an inner-city high school in Cincinnati, while also working now and then at Edgecliff College, Xavier University, Northeastern University, The Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, Radford University�s Summer Highlander Institute in Appalachian Literature and Writing, and Thomas More College, where he began as Writer-in-Residence 2015. He has conducted workshops, lectures and readings in the East, Midwest, and Appalachia.

Winner of four Ohio Arts Council fellowships in poetry and creative nonfiction, he is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Appalachian Studies Association, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, The Mercantile Library, The Literary Club of Cincinnati, and the Irish Heritage Center of Cincinnati.

His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life (Bottom Dog Press) was a National Book Award nominee. For Ripening (Ohio State University Press) he was named co-Poet of the Year in Ohio in l985. Alive In Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press) was named 2003 Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association, and During The Recent Extinctions: New & Selected Poems 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press) won the Weatherford Award in Poetry. His latest collections are Beasts, River, Drunk Men, Garden, Burst, & Light: Sequences and Long Poems (Dos Madres Press, 2016) and Studied Days: Poems Early & Late in Appalachia (Dos Madres Press, 2017). He has also edited two anthologies for Dos Madres, Quarried: Three Decades of Pine Mt. Sand & Gravel (2015) and Realms of the Mothers: The First Decade of Dos Madres Press (2016) He continues to live in Cincinnati, and to operate Erie Gardens, a small urban organic farm.

He is married to Pamela Korte, Assistant Professor Emerita of Ceramics at Mt. St. Joseph University. They have two sons, Patrick and Brendan, both of Cincinnati.


Reviews

Richard Hague�s exquisite book of essays, Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work is an exploration through layer upon layer of literary paleontology, anthropology, and archaeology. It begins with the very soil beneath our feet, �as we sift it through our fingers�we sift�a living and vividly present community astounding in its diversity and numbers.� From the local quiet of �back doors and back yards� and �slouching and loafing places,� Hague�s writing expands out into a substantial volume that maintains that �the coalescing of atoms, molecules and movement into crickets, kremlins, moons, thrushes, earthworms, grocery stores, and [us]�is a set of stories.� The vision here comes from Whitman and Thoreau and rises through such contemporaries as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. His poetic prose �includes wasps and lard and zeppelins, that makes [us]� weep�not sadly, not sentimentally, but reverentially, gratefully.� Here in the words and memories of a poet, teacher, husband, and father is an excavation of time and place, bringing the reader, at last, from gravitas to grace.

--Christina Lovin, author of Echo: Poems, and A Stirring in the Dark



Long admired as a poet, Richard Hague is also a masterful essayist. These essays exploring the creatures (human and otherwise), places and occupations which make up community are a joy to read.They contain a wisdom we need now more than ever. Covering land as broad and richly diverse as ground sloths, pre-Vatican II Latin, backdoor teaching, guerilla gardening and travel along the Ohio River, this book is nonetheless an ode to the art of staying put, of being in and of a place long enough to know and be known by it. --Pauletta Hansel author of Palindrome

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