If you happen to see Don Riggs around campus, you might not immediately peg him as the English instructor and poet that he is, but you certainly will not mistake him for a finance professor. Something about the long hair and bushy beard screams “this guy has something interesting to say.” And if you’ve ever taken a class with Riggs or had a chance to speak with him, you know that this is, in fact, the case.
When I mentioned to Riggs that he didn’t exactly fit the mold of a university professor, he replied that this career choice was a sort of synthesis of his own dreams of being an artist – either a musician or a writer – and his parents’ position that he should find a job with greater stability. In the same spirit, this interview is a synthesis of my responsibility to create a coherent piece for ASK, and my goal of sitting around and getting to know a friend a little better.
I sat down with Riggs in his office in McAllister to talk about teaching, writing, and whatever else happened to come up.
: Where were you born? Where did you grow up?
DR: I was born in Baldwin, Long Island – Baldwin, New York, on Long Island. When I was one my parents moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, outside of Washington, D.C., and that's where I grew up. In fact, I walked a mile to junior high; we walked over the Beltway, which was just being built. And at first we laughed about it, because there was this six-lane highway, but there were no cars on it. But then I think they completed part of it, and cars started to go on it.
: How did you decide to become a writer?
DR: I started being introduced to poetry when I was pretty young. Well, at least I started being introduced to verse. And when I was in fourth grade I recited “The Night Before Christmas” for a Christmas Eve service at my church. And in sixth grade Mrs. Pirrung asked us to complete a notebook of our favorite poems – a scrapbook – and there is a section in that: “My Own Compositions.” And I guess since I was seeing poetry, and reciting it, I just started writing it in sort of imitation. And the rest is not quite history.
: You never know.
DR: Yeah, that’s true. I have to admit, during junior- and some of senior high I went through a great period of silence. But one evening, in eleventh grade I think, I was walking across the Beltway Bridge – a different one – Colesville road, crossing the Beltway to a recital of an orchestra for another church, and I saw this bloody full moon. You know what a bloody full moon is? It’s when the moon’s just sort of first rising. And on the spot on the Colesville road overlooking the Beltway looking at the new moon I composed a poem, and that sort of started me back again. It was a response to nature. Yeah, yeah – pretty much the Romantic Movement.
: I hear you. Any time I walk over the Walnut Street Bridge—
DR: Yeah, and the breeze is blowing—
: And the rain…So do you think that’s where your writing comes from? A response to nature?
DR: Well, that may be where it originates. It’s also a response to poetry. You know, because I’m a poet writing poetry in response to poetry. So I’m very conscious about the actual process of writing and being inspired by other writing and having my own experience of reality affected, inflected, by reading other poetry, and maybe a little prose here and there.
: You’ve been featured in a variety of publications. Do you have any horror stories about paying your dues?
DR: Paying my dues? Well, you know, some people pay their dues their whole life and they never get anything back for it, so I guess I’ve just gotten to be content with writing - doing my writing, occasionally getting published. I don’t try very hard to get published; it’s not really my focus. I think at this point my focus is that writing has become sort of an adjunct to my therapy. And so when I do my daily sonnet I’m interested in seeing what comes out in the same way I’m interested in recalling a dream I had in the morning. And very often that’s just what happens. I wake up from a dream, go down and get breakfast, go up into the bathtub and I know “I have this dream,” so I just write. Often I’ll bring a poem to my therapist, and sometimes I’ll also ask myself questions. I’ll write a poem where I’m asking myself a question or doing an exploration, and see if anything comes of it. Sometimes just the act of going in and asking a question leads to an inner bubbling up and helps make a connection that I hadn’t made before.
In fact I once had a dream and I told my therapist about it, and at the end of the session she said, “You know, I might look into that dog.” And so the next morning in the bath I was writing about the dog and I actually wrote a series of three poems, and at the end of the third I realized, “Oh, my God, it’s an allusion to a little dog in a renaissance painting, and the dog stands for fidelity.” And that’s basically the problem with the break-up of my marriage: that dog had gotten out of the house and I was running around outside looking for it.
Using the poems to consciously approach subconscious material, and see if I can develop an aspect of my own life, my own inner life.
: You spent a lot of time in school as a student - enough to earn two Master’s degrees - and now as a teacher. Which side of the classroom do you prefer being on?
DR: Teacher or student? Well, I get paid to teach. That’s the big difference. And I’m reaching a point in my life where…it’s like I’m on a raft going down a stream, and I’m beginning to see the end of the stream, where it [drops off]. And I guess I want to make sure I’m ready with a parachute – woops, that’s a mixed metaphor - maybe a parasol, to just kind of float down.