A Chautauqua Remembrance
Keith Kopka
I could have almost been convinced that the first floor of the grand Victorian house I was staying in was still without electricity. Its white clapboard seemed to cocoon it in the history of Chautauqua, and inside, each wall was decked with pictures of men and women in poses of nineteenth-century modesty. However, what kept this house out of the clutches of mere historical society plaque nostalgia were the shelves and piles and stacks of educational and library records that dominated each spare corner of space. Every afternoon when I finished my editorial duties at the Chautauqua literary journal and before I climbed the polished staircase to my small room, I found myself drawn into these cubbies of catalogue and history. At first, I would wander through the rooms and draw random volumes from the shelves with the hope that a secret passage would open or that I would find a love letter hidden between the pages of some obscure ledger, but, after a while, I became awed with the achievements of the people who were, and still are, the Chautauqua Institution and with what they were able to do for education in America. After reading account after account of the adversity that the Daughter Chautauquas faced to help create economic, gender and racial equality in education, I began to understand that even if I’d never have heard the name Chautauqua, these people and this place had shaped what it is to learn and to be an educator in America.
I started my work for the Chautauqua Institution and the Chautauqua literary journal in 2009 as a MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. I had worked with literary journals before, and I was excited to travel to New York in order to spend a summer writing poems and promoting Chautauqua’s fantastic, but lesser known literary journal. I had heard bits and pieces of what Chautauqua was like, but no description by my editor, or anyone else, could have really prepared me for the Chautauqua experience. When people ask me about it now, my own weak description is that the Chautauqua Institution is like traveling back in time with the benefit of any modern convenience that one might actually miss. This comment often breeds raised eyebrows, and in defeat, I mutter half-heartedly, “You just have to see it,” knowing deep down that seeing it is the smallest part of the impact that Chautauqua has made on me. My summer at Chautauqua literally changed the course of my life. My experience at the institution is the reason that I now live in Florida and am lucky enough to be pursuing a doctorate in English and Creative Writing. It was my time in this educational paradise that afforded me the opportunity to present my own work to my contemporaries in an open forum where I was treated as a peer, and not merely as an underling.
The people that I met during my summer spent at Chautauqua are some of the kindest that I have ever encountered. When I first arrived, my luggage had been lost, but it was only a couple hours before a kind Chautuaquan had taken me into her home and let me choose clothes to wear from her own son’s wardrobe until mine had been recovered from the depths of TSA purgatory. But this act of kindness was only the beginning. Every person I met at Chautauqua was warm and welcoming and treated me with a kind of respect that, unfortunately, is uncommon among strangers, but maybe what is at the root of the tangible goodness present at the Chautauqua Institution is that no one is actually a stranger. Each person who has experienced Chautauqua is a part of a shared history. Whether or we realize it or not, the Chautauqua experience continues the belief in tolerance and education so dear to the people in those photos that I spent countless hours creating elaborate histories for. My fantasies were unnecessary. A history suggests recalling something that is no longer happening, but this isn’t the case with the Chautauqua Institution. Each summer, Chautauqua reinvents itself. It becomes a living moment, a living history that once again realizes the faith and the ideology of those original Chautauqua pioneers and reaffirms their attempts to better the lives of anyone they encountered. I know that my life is certainly better because of Chautauqua, and I am thankful for the opportunity to have spent time in such a special place.
Keith Kopka’s debut poetry collection, Count Four, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. He is also the author of the critical text Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry. a former touring punk musician whose poetry and criticism have appeared in Best New Poets, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Tampa Review, and the International Journal of the Book.
You can purchase Count Four from the University of Tampa Press, at Barnes and Nobles, or Amazon.com.
You can also purchase Kopka’s critical text Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry from Great River Learning Press.