Reading: “Earnest Occupations” by Richard Hague
Earnest Occupations:
Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work
by Richard Hague
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Every town needs a Richard Hague. I first came to know Hague’s writing from his unconventional book Lives of a Poem and, through that, learned about his community writing workshops, publishing, and teaching. He and I come from two different generations and two different places – he’s a Boomer from the Appalachian region of Ohio, and I’m a GenXer from the Black Belt of Alabama – but we do similar kinds of work. He was a high school writing teacher, so was I. He stuck around and wrote and taught in the same area where he was from, and so have I. He created projects to publish books by local writers and on local subjects, same again. And we’re also both poets, gardeners, and Catholics. The phrase “cut from the same cloth” comes to mind.
So I was glad when I found this collection of short essays and sketches with the subtitle: Teaching, Writing, Gardening, and Other Local Work. In the opening essay “Local,” Hague gives us his definition of the term, using his own family as examples: “They were all local people. And by ‘local’ I mean that they lived where they lived, steeping themselves in the lore and gossip and complex business, human and otherwise, of their neighborhood.” In my work, this is called a “sense of place” but Hague takes it further with a phrase here that is deceptively simple: “they lived where they lived” [italics mine]. Through the collection, he writes about living in this locale that for him is a long-term, multigenerational experience. We meet his neighbors, his students, his relatives, and his wife, of course, but we also meet his plants, his land, his roads and streets, his school, his church, his local officials and their work crews, some by name though some not. There are shorter essays, which only span a page or two, and a few longer ones, like “The Atmosphere of Names,” which carries forward a theme in multiple parts. One of my favorites was “Guerrilla Gardening,” in which Hague describes his semi-covert attempts over the years to reduce the destructive urbanity around him by adding small bits of Nature and beauty where he can.
The running theme of Earnest Occupations is right there in the title. The phrase comes up often throughout the book, alluding to the writer’s sense of a vocation in which he is making his little corner of the planet better in whatever way possible. Only a conscientious person could undertake such an attitude about life, especially when – and Hague mentions plenty of common examples – there are people in every community who seem, whether due to apathy or selfishness or both, to work in the opposite direction: diminishing beauty for profit, ignoring heritage to embrace throwaway culture, preferring easy solutions to doing things right. I call the kinds of ideas in Earnest Occupations “pragmatic idealism,” because we find hope in the opportunity for work, a cautious optimism coupled with a sense of life’s hard truths. This is where we are, writes Hague, and here is what we can do. Because it takes one to know one, I can say with certainty that that’s definitely the thinking of a teacher and of a writer and of a gardener.
