Tod’s time: Marshall relishes next role as Washington’s poet laureate

The past few months have belonged to Tod Marshall.

The poet and professor won the Washington Book Award for his third poetry collection, “Bugle.” He was named the Powers Chair for the Humanities at Gonzaga University. He won the Humanities Washington Award for his work with its Prime Time Family Reading Program.

Even his beloved Kansas Jayhawks are sitting at No. 1 in the college basketball polls – at least they were until they lost this past week to West Virginia. But still. It was a good fall.

That good fortune continued into 2016, as Marshall was appointed Washington’s new poet laureate by Gov. Jay Inslee.

His two-year term begins Feb. 1. And while previous poet laureate Kathleen Flenniken was raised in the Tri-Cities, she lives in Seattle, as does the current laureate Elizabeth Austen. The first laureate, Sam Green, lives on Waldron Island, in the San Juans. Marshall is the first Eastern Washington resident to serve as poet laureate.

All three of his predecessors had a hand in Marshall applying for the appointment, he said.

“I got a lot of encouragement from Kathleen and Elizabeth,” he said. “And even years ago when Sam Green was here for the (Gonzaga) Visiting Writers Series, he said to me something along the lines of ‘One day you’re going to have to take on the union job and do it.’ ”

Poet laureate is not a ceremonial title. Previous poets laureate have trekked to every corner of the state, holding readings and workshops. Marshall will do that, too. And at the end of his two years, there will be a book produced of made-in-Washington poems – one for every year of the state’s existence. He will ask some of the state’s great poets to contribute. The rest will be created by citizens, solicited in workshops Marshall will hold in communities big and small around the state.

He knows he’ll be busy. He knows he’ll spend a lot of time in his car driving to far flung spots.

He’s OK with that.

He’ll use that time to listen to poetry, or favorite podcasts such as “Serial” and “Limetown.” He likely will blast the ’70s and ’80s rock he loves – Rush, Styx, Van Halen, Kansas – over his car stereo.

He admits to feeling sheepish, in fact, when people remind him of all the work he does for the arts in the region, from supporting other writers to organizing Gonzaga’s popular Visiting Writers Series, and more.

“I’m doing a lot, but come on. There are 3.5 billion people or more around the world who have bone-numbing labor as what they look forward to every day” he said. “So I can rally and find more energy and do a little bit more.”

While appointed by the governor, the poet laureate is funded and supported by Humanities Washington and the Washington Art Commission, with grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The laureate receives a small honorarium and some travel expenses.

Julie Ziegler, executive director of Humanities Washington, has known Marshall for several years, through the annual Bedtime Stories fundraiser and Prime Time Family Reading, which brings reading and storytelling programming to libraries, with the aim of reaching under-served families.

In selecting a poet laureate, Ziegler said, they look for someone with “knowledge of the state, experience and connections around the state, and more than someone who’s just worked really locally or with a particular organization.”

Marshall has all that, and more, Ziegler said. “Tod is an incredibly generous person, in addition to being a talented poet,” she said. “He is able to relate to a wide variety of people on many different levels. I think his accessible manner and genuine interest in people and the craft is going to enable him to do great things in the position.”

A reputation for good work

Generous is just one of many words that float to the surface when talking to people about Marshall. There’s also humility, collaboration, energy.

Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at GU, pointed to Marshall’s networking skills as a real boon, not only to GU, but to the laureate position.

“Tod is an incredible networker. He works with faculty and staff, fellow poets from Whitworth, from Eastern, around the region here, and he’s the most generous person in terms of working with students who are aspiring writers, working with a group of poets on our campus,” she said “He really helps nurture and foster that culture of poetry, creation and community on our campus.”

Nance van Winckel taught Marshall when he was working toward his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at Eastern Washington University. That student-teacher relationship has evolved into a 25-year friendship. Van Winckel was one of the poets who joined Marshall on stage when he celebrated the launch of “Bugle” in October 2014.

“Tod will be a superb laureate for our state. He has amazing energy. And he is passionate about poetry. That’s a great combination,” she said. “This year has been a great year for him with many much-deserved awards. He puts his ALL into everything he does.”

Spokane’s poet laureate, Laura Read, credits Marshall for helping foster the region’s burgeoning writing scene.

“He’s made Gonzaga’s reading series the rich program that it is.” she said. “It’s made our whole town more literary by giving people access to these wonderful authors. But he never seeks attention for the work he’s done for that. I’m really glad that he’s getting some recognition for that.”

Then there’s his poetry.

“He’s a really great poet in the position, because he is a nice combination. His work is cerebral and challenging, so someone who is an experienced poet or poetry reader, and who wants to be challenged intellectually is going to get that,” Read said. “But also, some of his work, especially in his most recent book ‘Bugle,’ he’s more intimate with the reader. It’s about some very difficult subject matter, some painful subject matter, so some readers who want to engage a little bit more emotionally or personally can get that from his work. I think he has a broad appeal.”

Van Winckel loves the risk Marshall takes with his work.

“His poems often deal with ordinary folks embroiled in ordinary trouble and heartache,” she said. “I love this about his work and his aesthetic. He’s a fearless and risk-taking poet.”

Finding his voice

Marshall’s life story is not one that makes the journey to Washington poet laureate seem obvious.

He was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1967. His family – he was one of five children – moved around a lot when he was younger as his parents worked to make ends meet. When he was 5 or 6, the family moved to Wichita, Kansas, where he stayed until after high school.

College was not on his radar after graduating from high school in 1985, he said. After all, no one in has family had ever attended college. But after a semester away from school, he said, he noticed his friends who were in college had more going on than he did, so he applied to Wichita State and got in.

He went there for a year and a half, “floundering about” as a philosophy major.

“I think I decided on philosophy as a degree because I connected that with smartness,” he said. “It was like ‘I can get my secret decoder ring and people will accept me as a philosophy major.’ ”

A pretty good soccer player, it soon became a “nice meal ticket” for Marshall. He got an offer to attend Siena Heights University, a small Dominican college in Michigan, to play.

“So I went, sight unseen, and fell in with some Dominican sisters, and as is their tendency, they whipped me into shape,” he said. “It was one of those moments, when you arrive at a new place you can reinvent yourself. So that’s what I did. I saw their great example of completely dedicating themselves to what they do.”

He was editor of the college newspaper and briefly flirted with a career in journalism. But he also enjoyed creative writing as well. A professor mentioned to him something called the MFA degree and that appealed to Marshall. After hearing good things about the MFA program at Eastern, he applied there. When EWU came back with a good offer, he took it.

“So I came here without having ever visited Spokane or without really knowing anything about the place,” he said.

He was here from 1990-92, then headed back to the Midwest to get a doctorate at the University of Kansas.

“I knew I had some holes in my reading I needed to attend to, and I knew it was incredibly hard to get an academic teaching job with just an MFA degree,” he said. “Having connections with Kansas, I went there.”

He was married, and he and his wife were raising their son and her son from a previous relationship. She was in law school, which she finished in three years, and he was done in four. From there, they moved to Memphis, where Marshall landed a teaching job at Rhodes College.

“I like Memphis. Memphis and Spokane are similar in lot of ways,” he said. “I loved that place.”

After three years, his soon-to-be ex-wife wanted to move back to Spokane, where she was from. Marshall agreed to the move, and gave notice at Rhodes before he had something else lined up.

“A week after I resigned Gonzaga advertised for a visiting professor and I applied,” he said. “I got it. I always see that as my lotto ticket because in academia that never, ever, ever happens that you actually get to go to a place that you need to go to.”

He started on a one-year appointment in 1999, and now is entrenched. Spokane is home.

Finding his place

Marshall wears Spokane well. It’s provided a backdrop to much of his work.

“For the last 15 years, much of my writing has been propelled by Northwest landscapes and textures,” he said. “This place has plenty to give in terms of landscape and some of the social conflict.”

An avid outdoorsman, he finds plenty to like about the Inland Northwest. “I don’t know that I could come up with a place that I’d rather live than Spokane,” he said. “It’s wonderfully affordable. It has more than enough culture for me. I don’t know what kind of culture vulture needs more than two or three events a night. I can’t make it to half the things I want to go to.”

Marshall and his second wife, Amy Sinisterra, a photographer who teaches at North Central High School, have been married for nearly 12 years. “She is a very patient spirit to put up with me,” he said.

When he’s not teaching or writing poetry, he reads it: works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Li-Young Lee.

“I also try to read as much contemporary poetry as I can,” he said. “We have a wonderful acquisitions person in contemporary poetry at the Spokane Public Library. I don’t know who it is, but that person is beautiful. I love that person. So I walk up the hill and get a stack. I might not read a whole book, but I’m checking out poems constantly. For me as a writer, trying to find different directions is incredibly important.”

The road ahead

He talks often about being the first person in his family to earn a college degree. (He proudly points out, however, that his mother later in life graduated from the University of Oklahoma). He always reminds his own students about what a gift it is to be involved in learning.

“I always quote Adrienne Rich’s ‘Claiming an Education’ lecture to my students and urge them not to receive but to claim,” he said. “That is the difference between a passive life and a life fully lived.”

He sees his work as poet laureate as helping to bridge different communities and bring everyone to the arts. Poetry doesn’t belong isolated in an ivory tower.

“The arts afford us a number of different things that the other ways that we live in the world maybe don’t. Looking at a painting, or listening to a poem, or listening to a piece of music can create a quiet space that most of life doesn’t really offer us. Art also can challenge us. It can challenge us to think about who we are in a different way, it can challenge us to think about other people’s experiences of the world that we may never consider.

“It’s my hope to bring poetry to as many different audiences as I can.”