Anacapa Fellow: Hale, Well-met

Nancy Boutilier may have begun her Anacapa Fellow month as Writer-in-Residence, but that surely wasn’t all she was, or for very long. In a matter of hours after alighting in early January, Ms. Boutilier had settled into Life @ Thach just about everywhere it plays out on campus, her embrace of the Thacher community energetic and total. Jam sessions with the improv group (she’s a guitarist, singer, and songwriter), hoops in the gym (she’s a player and a coach) and polar pool dips, open mic with the Literary Society, kitchen counter yammering with Open House regulars or any-old-mealtime conversation with students or faculty or both, shadowing a senior mucking a stall, loping into the hills on yet another new friend—

she saw, hungry-eyed,

every day of her stay

as the dropping of a bucket

deep, deep

into the well of this place,

where waters black

and hardly burbling far below

are clear as light on closer sight,

sustaining all who draw and drink.

(You see what she got us doing?!?)

During much of her time here, Ms. Boutilier—on a winter break from Oberlin College, where she is a Visiting Instructor in Rhetoric and Composition—was words-working and reaching out, over and over again, as a writer and a teacher. All month long, she sought and was sought by all levels of students, many teachers, both in and out of the English Department, in formal class and seminar settings and in less structured venues. She read her poems and answered questions about them. In workshops, she offered advice and encouragement (“If we don’t write it, it may disappear!” and “Where’s the tension—the things moving against each other?”), probed for our favorite words (melancholia, platypus ,myriad, octopus, pterodactyl, onomatopoeia, quotidian, zoom, soliloquy xenon, gobbledygook, bourgeois, linen ambidextrous, infinity, tabernacle), inviting us to fling them out. (“Great! Having favorite words, of course, predisposes you to be a writer.”) Which of what we’d shouted, if put to paper, would boomerang, which would hit some distant unseen target? She asked us to commit to all of them and just see.

During her quiet time in the Anacapa House, Ms. Boutilier was working on her own poetry and on a novel.

“I am not a writer,” Ms. Boutilier said by way of introduction at her first Assembly, “until I sit down and write. But I don’t want to be. I want to do! I hope you will join me in living in action verbs this month.” Many in our community jumped into that action, and became more confident, more prolific out of the leap. Hands clapping for many, many minutes at the end of her farewell to us was the final do-ing—and a send-off in keeping with that original exhortation.

Ms. Boutilier is the author of two collections of poems, According to her Contours (1992) and On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone: New Poems (2000); her work is also present in several anthologies.