Mary Gilliland ’73 MAT ’80 retired from her senior lecture position at Cornell to pursue writing full-time.
Nearly two decades later, Gilliland’s pursuits have resulted in the award-winning poetry collections “The Devil’s Fools,” “The Ruined Walled Castle Garden” and “Ember Days.”
At Cornell, Gilliland was heavily involved with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. Here, she directed the Writing Walk-In Service, composed The Writing Walk-In Service Handbook and developed a pilot for Peer Writing Mentors. She taught the creative writing and expository writing class “America Dreaming” for the Department of Literatures in English.
In 1983, Gilliland created the first interdisciplinary course for the First-Year Writing Seminar Program — “Ecosystems and Ego Systems” — for the Biology and Society program. She taught the course annually at Cornell’s campus in Doha, Qatar until 2006.
While Gilliland became a full-time author after retiring from Cornell in 2007, she has been writing since she was six years old and throughout her entire time working at the institution. She retired early from teaching at Cornell to completely devote herself to poetry.
Gilliland said this was a necessary step for her development as an author, noting that poetry requires extensive time and dedication.
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“[You need to] give it the time that it needs,” Gilliland said about poetry and writing. “That’s the most important thing — practice.”
Gilliland’s work reflects and questions themes of “faith, justice, militarism, madness and the joy of intimate relationship,” as written in her “Ember Days” press release.
Through the use of enjambment and environmental symbolism, Gilliland weaves stories of herself, her relationships, myths and magic and the world around her.
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This assessment is echoed by the review of Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver, who emphasized Gilliland’s emotional depth in her work.
“Mary Gilliland brings to her work the rich flavors of the natural world, yet her destination is clearly news of the inner self, its perceptions, its relationships with others,” Oliver wrote in a review of Gilliland’s work. “She is not afraid of delight, neither does she shirk the hard tasks of anger, pain and deep caring.”
Gilliland’s personal highlights of her most recent collection, “Ember Days,” involve the pieces “Blossoms Burst Every Which Color,” “Ember Days” and “Lincoln in Another Bardo.” This last poem recently won a prize for the International Literary Seminars in Kenya, co-sponsored by Fence Magazine.
“Blossoms Burst Every Which Color” is a work that delicately balances the musing of a garden with commentary that speaks to Gilliland’s stance as an activist. According to the poet, the idea and first line for this work — “When I took charge of the cemetery” — came from conversations had with someone in her garden.
“One way I write is I’m just listening, or I’m seeing, and it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ ‘and so here’s this phrase,’” Gilliland said. “It’s not like I am original with this language, but I’m doing original things with it.”
Her writing process incorporates “bits that come to [her]” that slowly accumulate throughout a day or many days. These “bits” become the start of many of her poems.
In addition to her engagement in the Cornell community, Gilliland remains active in the broader Ithaca community. Gilliland helped build the Light on the Hill Labyrinth and contributed to the enlargement of the Standing Stone Circle at the Foundation of Light. Additionally, she has been a board member of The Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Light On The Hill Retreat Center, the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies and the Dalai Lama’s seat in North America.
“Ithaca has everything I want,” Gilliland said. “It has good people. It has amazing geology. It has cultural institutions.”
While Gilliland continues to write and engage with her local and global community through her work, she emphasizes the importance of maintaining a connection with both the natural world and other people.
“Learn the flowers,” Gilliland said. “Respect the cycles of nature, and be aware of the maintenance that’s needed for yourself and also your words.”
Dorothy France-Miller is a reporter from The Cornell Daily Sun working on The Sun’s summer fellowship at The Ithaca Times. This article was previously published in The Ithaca Times.