The Wurster Interviews, Part 14: The Advancing Years of PPE
Read previous installments: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13
City Books, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, etc.
Well, we covered the closing of Carson Street Gallery. Barbara had a successful gallery overall but it was never a moneymaker. Her accountant finally convinced her that it wasn’t making any — and people get burnt out sometimes.
So what happened was, after Carson Street Gallery closed, Ed and Chung-Ae made us welcome at City Books. We had already moved the first-Monday workshop to City Books after leaving the Joyce Building. The first non-Smorgasbord reading at City Books was by Arthur and Kit Knight. Arthur and Kit sat in the first-floor window as the snow fell behind them on the street outside. How’s that for a poetic image? Beautiful!
I had thought to discontinue the Poetry Smorgasbord because Barbara McClure had been at least half of the production equation. But Ed Gelblum convinced me to continue it. So it continued for a number of years and continued to be successful. Why the Poetry Smorgasbord was eventually discontinued, I don’t remember. Although I remember this was a period of transition on the South Side from arts, crafts, and antiques — to beer. Here are some of the shops that closed during this time:
- Andtiques
- Artists-in-action
- Destiny Studios
- Studio Z
As their colleagues retired and closed, some of the still-existing shops lost interest in continuing the Poetry Smorgasbord.
So at this point — the point at which we discontinued the Poetry Smorgasbord readings — we still produced other readings and held the workshop at City Books. We were active in producing poetry events at the Brew House, especially in conjunction with art shows.
In 1993, I had started teaching poetry and poetry writing at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts school. Some of the artists who studied poetry with me were Bob Qualters, Pat Barefoot, and Denise Suska Green. I remember helping organize poetry readings — one at the Brew House and one at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. One of the shows was a one-woman Pat Barefoot show; the other was a show by Pat Barefoot and other women artists. We continued to sponsor a poetry reading each year in conjunction with the South Side Summer Street Spectacular, the South Side’s annual “arts” festival. You may recall the festival was eventually discontinued once it became more of a beer festival. It had served its purpose by calling attention to the South Side.
I taught at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts school for 17 years — from 1993 to 2010. The woman who first hired me was named Darlene Durrwachter Rushing. She had been director of the arts center in Sewickley, and I had done a weekend workshop for her there. When she became director of the school at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, it made sense to her to hire me to teach poetry there. She did a great job running the school. Eventually, she left to get a master’s degree in choral conducting. Subsequent directors of the school were not quite as effective. There was a financial crisis and both the Center and the school closed briefly. The reason I finally left in 2010 was because they were having trouble getting enough students for me. I didn’t like the idea of finding out the day before classes were to begin that my course had been canceled because it was undersubscribed.
For the most part, my teaching career at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts school was quite successful. Many people who were already members of PPE studied with me. Many students, once they studied with me, became members of PPE. A list of my students would contain many well-known names: Joan Bauer, Joseph Karasik, Rick St. John, etc. Many of these folks now have one or more books and are nationally known. Many of my female students went on to study with Jan Beatty in the Madwomen in the Attic program at Carlow University.
For instance, Dorothy Holley. Dorothy started writing poetry at an advanced age due to a family tragedy. By the time she died, she had published four fine books of poems.
My most successful student was Joy Katz. Joy was a senior designer at Westinghouse. For some reason she hated that job, and quit in order to become a poet. The first step was to show up at my first-Monday workshop at City Books. Then she became my student at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Then she became a student of Jan Beatty’s at Madwomen in the Attic. Then she went to Washington University in St. Louis, where she got an MFA studying with Eric Pankey and Carl Phillips. Then she got a Stegner Fellowship to Stanford, where she studied with Eavan Boland. She had several handsome PhD offers, but elected to move to Brooklyn. Since then, she has had several published books. Her essays and poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review. Plus, she married a playwright, Rob Handel, who now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which has brought Joy back to our city. She teaches in several university writing programs.
Ed and Chung-Ae Gelblum were always very gracious. Ed had been a philosophy professor at Duquesne University. Chung-Ae was a nursing supervisor. When she retired from that job, she came to work with Ed in the bookstore. I don’t think that had been her life’s dream. As Ed and Chung-Ae got older, their interest in “extra” activities in the bookstore declined.
One Monday night, a mother-daughter team we had never seen before showed up for the workshop, which was open of course to anyone who wished to attend. The workshop was held on the second floor of the store. These two women found an excuse to go downstairs for a brief period of time. (The restrooms were downstairs.) The next morning, it was discovered that two very expensive art books were missing.
This created a very uncomfortable situation. Ed and Chung-Ae did not want to have to spend the extra time on watch; no one in the workshop wanted to remain downstairs as a “security guard”. It was decided to move the workshop.
Next in issue 17: After City Books
