Epp Roger - Only Leave a Trace

Published by

The University of Alberta Press

Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

www.uap.ualberta.ca

Copyright 2017 Roger Epp

Illustrations Copyright 2017 Rhonda Harder Epp

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Epp, Roger, 1958, author

Only leave a trace : meditations / Roger Epp ; Rhonda Harder Epp, illustrator.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 9781772122664 (softcover). ISBN 9781772123128 (EPUB). ISBN 9781772123135 (Kindle). ISBN 9781772123142 (PDF)

1. Educational leadership. 2. School management and organization. I. Title.

First edition, first printing, 2017.

First electronic edition, 2017.

Digital conversion by Transforma Pvt. Ltd.

Copyediting and proofreading by Maya Fowler-Sutherland.

Cover design by Alan Brownoff.

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I am become a puzzle to myself.

AUGUSTINE, The Confessions , Book X

His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he is but a man.

SHAKESPEARE, Henry V, 4.1

Yet who among us has never, from time to time, been forced into playing some role? The important thing is to be conscious of that role and to be able to reflect upon it and ones relation to it.

VCLAV HAVEL, To the Castle and Back

To dwell means to leave traces.

WALTER BENJAMIN, The Writer of Modern Life

Contents

Preface

THIS BOOK OF MEDITATIONS is an unconventional artifact of my time as founding dean and head of the University of Albertas Augustana Campus. The remarkable series of small miraclesmostly right people, right timingthat brought Augustana inside the provinces flagship public university on July 1, 2004, as a distinctively undergraduate, liberal arts campus, in the small city of Camrose, and then the challenge of making that merger work, set in motion an intense transition period shaped by new financial resources, constant cultural translations, and, inevitably, sudden anxieties for the future over local integrity within a much bigger institution. There were no templates for this work, and no guarantees that it would be successful, as I think, on balance, it has been. While I have my own visceral memories of the long strugglesfinancial and otherwisethat preceded the merger, having taught at Augustana since 1990, and while I was interim vice-president (academic) in the year in which it was negotiated, these meditations are meant neither as memoir nor as front-row history of that period. They have no documentary ambitions. They do not dwell on the transition period. They do not pretend, moreover, to distill new insights either for higher education or for leadership generally in times of changethe kind that fills the shelves of airport bookshops. Instead they are short meditations on a deans life.

These meditations take their literary inspiration from the form of the prose poem, which, as I learned from the writer Holly Iglesias, trades in fugitive content, that is, in things that will not or cannot be said in other ways. Though these meditations reflect the rare wonder, the risk, of having done a new thing together with many others, they record only select experiences. They do so with minimal annotation. They recognize beginnings and endings, but otherwise are arranged not so much in linear time as by rough concentric circles, larger and smaller: students, office, community, family, a geographic retreat. Many of them come from the interior life or, rather, from the relentless negotiation between the personal and the public requirements of the role, to speak, intervene, judge, and act. Outside of that, they are sparingly particular. They tell only what is theirs to tell.

In a certain sense these meditations bear a resemblance to what once were called work poems, though they are written not from the shop floor, the lumber mill or the oil patch, but from the deans office. As such, they may lack the natural advantages that accrue to a muscular, proletarian voice and the reversal of reliable caricaturesas if the distance from pallets of 24s or wildcat wells to verse is inherently so much longer and more exotic. These meditations share the same ambition, though, to humanize and scrutinize and uphold the integrity of an unfamiliar world of work. Their subject will be familiar enough to others who have worked in senior leadership positions in higher education settings. The choice to set them in the third person seemed most appropriate to the recollection of having played a role, however defining it might have been, for a finite period of years.

The paintings reproduced in these pages are by Rhonda Harder Epp, a visual artist and my life partner for more than three decades. They were painted at roughly the same time as many of these pieces were written. In the original, they are 5" 5" and 5" 7" studies created in preparation for larger canvases. Some of them appear as modernist, colour-field paintingsa radical departure in her casebut their purpose is more conceptual and unfinished. The paintings are visual meditations on the subject of walls, on what they limit, obscure and separate, but also, at least as I saw them initially, on the small creative openings that appear around those same walls, through them, under and over them. As the memory of my deanship slowly has settled, and as Rhonda moved on to windows, ladders and picket fences, I have come to wonder whether the instinct to look for the openings and therefore to imagine walls mostly as obstacles is not just an occupational requirement of university administrators in complex times, which it surely is, but an impatient narrowing of the field of vision. These paintings, in turn, now seem to me to be as much about the complexity of the walls themselves as they are about the openings. In the meditations, there are walls to knock down and get past. There are walls that demarcate spaces and difficult crossings: above all, to what is commonly and only half-jokingly called the dark side of university administration. But there are also walls to build and times to build them. There are walls to scale, to straddle, to reinforce. There are walls behind which to withdraw. There are walls on which to make a mark, and walls on which to lean, to rest.

Only Leave a Trace

The poet is no stranger to the dean.

Here is what one knows and the other must learn: there are no innocent words; in print and in performance, precision matters; small numbers of readers, in the end, will make their own meanings mostly from the spaces left between the lines.