Jason Taylor
If you were part of the SUNY New Paltz Graduate Program in English in the early 1990s, you might have seen copies of the first volumes of the English Graduate Review, featuring 8 1/2 by 11-inch printouts of essays delivered at the spring Graduate Symposium, joined by a plastic comb-style binding. I think I still have a copy of one in my basement.
Sometime in early 1998, I told Harry that I had pretty good desktop publishing skills and volunteered to typeset the essays from the last two Symposia and arrange for them to be printed and bound in a proper “journal” format. The result was the first Shawangunk Review, distributed at the 1998 symposium. Harry and I were both really pleased with how the 84-page volume turned out.
Now at that point I had known Harry for four or five years, so I knew that he liked to think big. I had seen the Methuselah-sized bottles of wine come out of the cellar. I had observed the vast quantities of leeks harvested from the garden. So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised as Shawangunk Review started to get bigger and bigger. First, it expanded by including a transcript of the symposium keynote presentation. Then we started adding poetry and book reviews and side-by-side translations. The Symposia got more expansive, too—the 2005 Robert Penn Warren Centennial Symposium stretched over two days and featured seventeen poets and writers and twenty-four speakers. The resulting Shawangunk Review was over 250 pages long!
I continued typesetting Shawangunk Review through 2017, decades after my last official involvement with English Department. Working on each issue offered a chance to connect with Harry’s irrepressible spirit and served as a reminder that everything worth doing is worth doing to the utmost.
