Friday from the Archives: “What I Learned at Black Mountain – More!” essay by Fielding Dawson from NCLR 6 (1997)
Editor Margaret Bauer and Founding Editor Alex Albright both attended last weekend’s NC Writers Conference at Black Mountain College. In addition to our feature issue on BMC, we have published many articles and essays about the famed NC artistic college.
Renowned writer and multi-media artist Fielding Dawson wrote a remembrance of his time at Black Mountain College for our ’97 issue. He published The Black Mountain Book in 1970; it was revised and expanded in 1991. Dawson wrote, “At Black Mountain, that wide open nightmare paradise I was free, but. BUT. Being free, like underdeveloped, immature people in prison, I didn’t want to learn. I knew I could, if I wanted.”
He did learn and became known as one of the Beat-era poets. Later, Dawson’s career took him to Sing-Sing Prison to teach inmates. His time at BMC directly influenced his work with the incarcerated:
“I have learned from teaching in prison that the more creative, the more sensitive, aware and intuitive prisoners are, the worse things are for them. Having no (or very little) education, structure (or identity), while in Prison they discover attributes, character, creative potentials and an identity they never knew, but don’t know what to do with except in understood ways, through drawing their romantic dream (anima) girls and images tigers/ eagles (= freedom, power), writing greeting card type poems, developing illusions / day fantasies and night-wishes of fame, fortune, movies and more as they work on their novels. This “low-level” art causes contempt in academics and certain publishers. But, this kind of art is contained in a free form with a high energy dynamism that I not only first recognized at Black Mountain but identified with, as I still do with Ben Shahn’s crooked-poor-people’s-lettering on signs and storefronts. It helps to have gone to that school to be able to recognize what’s going on in the classrooms at Sing Sing, to see what it is: as is.”
The archivists at Black Mountain College have a plethora of work by former students. We encourage anyone looking for writing inspiration to check out the writers who studied there. Our John Ehle Prize is annually awarded to an NCLR-published piece highlighting a forgotten or neglected North Carolina writer. No doubt there are quite a few in the archives.
Read the entire essay on Gale Cengage or purchase a copy of the 1997 issue.
