What's Up - Your guide to what's happening in Fayetteville, AR this week!
Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/1364938
BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette T he description "Alaska's Fiddling Poet" conjures up the expectation of a truly unique character. And Ken Waldman seems to live up to the hype. He looks like a professor — because he was; not a stereotypical Alaskan outdoorsman — because he isn't. Neither was he ever the bespectacled little boy reading under the covers; instead, he was a tennis player growing up in suburban Philadelphia who went on to study business at Duke University. Pressed to say when he started writing, he posits it might have been after college graduation. "I spent a year driving around the country with a friend I'd taught tennis with," he remembers. "A highlight was collecting old postcards and writing on them to various friends. Maybe that counts." His road to music was equally uncharted. After the cross-country trip, "I was back in North Carolina, in and around Chapel Hill, just 10 miles or so from Durham and Duke," he explains. "I worked in a bookstore, waited tables, taught more tennis, and through happenstance — or, better, serendipity — lived in a house with two musicians. I was the boring housemate who didn't play music. This was maybe 1981-1982, almost 40 years ago. My housemates liked to host music parties, and my line is that the musicians showing up at those parties were good then, and they're good now. But one guy who wasn't so good decided to quit playing, and left his fiddle, bow and case, and was selling them all for $100. I wouldn't have walked across the street for that fiddle, but since it was in the living room, I bought it, and that was a start. "At the time, I thought I might want to be writing, since I was reading contemporary fiction, and I had one story of my own I particularly wanted to write," he continues. "But I didn't see how to get to it. Eventually I moved to Seattle, gutted out that story, but, again, it wasn't very good. It lacked something essential; I understood that. A few months later, with [a] failed relationship, I joined [a] writers' group, wrote [a] story that was so much different and better than anything I'd written before. That's what I remember. I felt as if my writing had somehow jumped a rail, and I could now do this. And if I nurtured it, I'd always have it. And so, in a way, here I am." "Here," however, is rarely any one place. From Seattle, Waldman went on to grad school in Fairbanks — "where there was an MFA Creative Writing Program, similar to the famed program you have in Fayetteville" — to a year in Juneau doing various jobs, to a visiting assistant professor position in Sitka, to a tenure track teaching job in Nome, he explains. "By my time in Sitka and Nome, I was making real strides. Then I had an illness time, which changed my trajectory, some body issues so I couldn't play for a few years, and because of which had to take a leave of absence, and then had to resign my university teaching job," he says. "When I was thankfully on the other side of all that, I had my fiddling, had my writing — by then I was getting more and more work published in literary journals — and this career as a fiddling poet came to be." He is, he says, still a resident of Alaska — "I have to be from somewhere" — but has been "mostly itinerant since summer 2001, and a rare sighting in my home state." Waldman spent the year of the pandemic holed up in rural southwest Virginia with Lizzie Thompson, a musician he intended to visit for 10 days. During that time, he's had "a ridiculous eight books out in 2020 and 2021," and now he's on the road again, making his first visit to Northwest Arkansas for a residency at the Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow. "I'm really looking forward to it — and while I'm in residence, I'll be doing an online reading through a series in the Washington, D.C., area, and taking part in a music podcast out of Salt Lake City, and then facilitating a panel of sports poetry for a festival in Massachusetts, so I'll be in Northwest Arkansas and buzzing around a bit simultaneously, something new for this tech-unsavvy guy!" After that, he's taking it a day at a time in the strange new post-covid world. "There's no typical day, which is what I really love about the work. It's always different. Even in a pandemic time, there's not enough hours in a day to do what I need to. I'm perpetually behind. But I keep at it since I love the work, and feel that I'm being of service." April 25-MAy 1, 2021 WhAt's up! 7 EurEka SpringS 'Alaska's Fiddling Poet' serendipity spells success for itinerant artist Ken Waldman followed his muse to Alaska, but becoming "Alaska's Fiddling poet" was pure happenstance. he'll be artist-in-residence at the Writers' Colony at Dairy hollow in May and will perform and teach during his stay in Eureka springs. (Courtesy photo) Faq 'Alaska's Fiddling Poet' WHEN — 4:30 p.m. May 2 WHERE — Writers' Colony at Dairy Hollow, 515 Spring St. in Eureka Springs COST — Free; donations accepted INFO — 253-7444 or writerscolony.org BONUS — Waldman will also teach a workshop called "go places With Your art" on May 15 that will also benefit the WCDH scholarship fund. Cost is $35. Sign up at 253-7444.