Ned Stuckey-French

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I don't think I've posted this before. When I opened it, I only briefly noticed the elderly gentleman in the center. I assumed it was Ned's father, Chas.


Sometime after that, I was away from my home and I realized it couldn't have been Ned's father in the picture because Chas had passed away.

When I got home again, I took another look at the card and had the same reaction you're having.

As Ned explained it to me, Plains, Georgia is a doable drive from Tallahassee. They knew Jimmy was going to teach Sunday School, so they took a chance.




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Ned Stuckey-French Obituary







Thank you for the kind words and support you've shown Elizabeth, Flannery and Phoebe in recent days.
Elizabeth would like you to know that Ned's memorial service will be on Friday, September 27, on the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, FL.
Further details will be forthcoming.

Love

Sara


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The Family at Ned's Memorial Service

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Ned Stuckey-French

Tallahassee - Ned Stuckey-French died peacefully Friday June 28, 2019 at his home in Tallahassee, Florida. He was surrounded by his loving wife Elizabeth and daughters Flannery and Phoebe.

Born in West Lafayette, Indiana Ned graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1972 and earned his master's degree from Brown University in 1992. In 1997 Ned earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He went on to become an Associate Professor at Florida State University and Director of the FSU Certificate Program in Publishing and Editing. Ned was a gifted teacher. He generously shared his talents, enriching the lives of students and colleagues. A prolific writer, Ned concentrated his professional efforts on personal essays and championed the essay as an art form. His efforts were instrumental in saving the University of Missouri Press. Many of Ned's works may be viewed at http://nedstuckeyfrench.com/.

During his life Ned was a devoted husband and proud father. He enjoyed the beauty of the world around him, whether in the woods, on the lake, on the running track or on the football field. Generous, kind and passionate about his convictions, ethics and political beliefs, Ned always appreciated a good laugh and Facebook conversation.

Ned was preceded in death by his father Charles French and his mother Dolores French. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth and his daughters Flannery and Phoebe, his brother Hugh French and his sisters Sara French and Paulette Murphy.
Published in Tallahassee Democrat on July 1, 2019
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My eldest brother, Ned Stuckey-French, died today, after a short and spirited battle with cancer. In addition to his siblings — Hugh French, Paulette Murphy and me — he is survived by his wife, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and two wonderful daughters, Flannery and Phoebe.Ned and Elizabeth both grew up in Lafayette, Indiana, but on opposite sides of town. They didn’t meet until much later, after they’d had adventures elsewhere and returned home to regroup. When they did finally meet — thanks to some extremely competent hometown matchmaking — they became engaged in record time!

Over subsequent decades they built tandem careers as English professors at Florida State University. Ned specialized in nonfiction, and Elizabeth continues to teach and write fiction.

I miss Ned dearly.

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For those of you who don't know, my father Ned Stuckey-French passed away this evening due to complications from bladder cancer that had spread to his liver. If you spent any amount of time with him, you knew he was something special. I tried today to think of someone who has ever once said a bad thing about my father and I truly cannot think of anyone who ever said anything negative about him. I debated making this post for a while but I know my dad loved Facebook, conversations, and the sharing of information. If I tried to list everything he has ever taught me I'd never stop writing. His deep love and wonderful relationship with my mother Elizabeth Stuckey-French showed me not to settle for anything less than a relationship like theirs. Their relationship will always serve as a model to me of what a caring, communicative, loving partnership looks like. The way he constantly encouraged my sister Phoebe French, myself, and many others to follow our dreams will forever stay with me. How he treated every single human he came into contact with with kindness and generosity is truly spectacular. A writer, a teacher, a reader, a father, an activist, a husband, a traveler, a homebody...my dad was all that and more. I know so many people are thinking of him tonight, and somehow I am certain that he is somewhere saying "Awwh shucks!" and being his humble self.

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We are heartbroken for you and your family, Flannery. He was truly one of the best human beings I knew. How fortunate to have him as a dad. When I talked to him last he spoke about how much he loved you and Phoebe. I know he will be deeply missed. Love to you all.
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What a beautiful tribute to your dad! He taught me at FSU between 1998-2002. He would always share little stories about you and your sister. I actually didn’t know who Flannery O’Connor was until I’d heard of you! I’m so sorry for your loss. He really was a wonderful person. ❤️

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Flannery, the drumbeats have been going out to all the old guard and we’re sharing stories and memories and tears and sending all our love and support to you, Phoebe and your mom. And you’re right, the stuff this enormous circle of friends is saying would embarrass the hell out of him. But we’re going to say it anyway.


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(September 3, 2015)  Today is the birthday of the great Louis Henry Sullivan. I was fortunate to grow up in West Lafayette, IN where I regularly passed by one of his buildings (though in time the bank that built the building was bought by a bigger bank that blasphemed the building by sticking an ATM in Sullivan's beautiful front door, suggesting perhaps that function does not always follow form).



Ned Stuckey-French, Associate Professor and Director of the FSU Certificate Program in Publishing and Editing, B.A., Magna cum lade, Harvard College (1972), M.A., Brown University (1992), Ph.D., Universit of Iowa (1997).
Dr. Stuckey-French specializes in the personal essay and modern American literature and culture, especially magazine culture. His study of the personal essay, magazine culture and class construction, The American Essay in the American Century, was published in 2011. With Carl Klaus, he edited the collection Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. He is the co-author, with Janet Burroway and his wife Elizabeth, of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, the nation’s most widely adopted creative writing textbook, which is now in its ninth edition.
His reviews and critical work have appeared in journals such as American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Fourth Genre, culturefront, Tri-quarterly, Assay, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Iowa Review, and in The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia of the Essay.
He also writes creative nonfiction and is the book review editor for the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. His personal essays, which have appeared in magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Pinch, Guernica, and Walking Magazine, have been listed six times among the notable essays in the Best American Essays series.
He is working on a collection of personal essays and a study of the progressive tradition in 20th century American middle-class culture. He has taught in the Nonfiction Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

NED STUCKEY-FRENCH, Associate Professor and Director of the FSU Certificate Program in Publishing and Editing, B. A., magna cum laude, Harvard College (1972), M.A., Brown University (1992), Ph. D., University of Iowa (1997). Dr. Stuckey-French specializes in the personal essay and modern American literature and culture, especially magazine culture. His study of the personal essay, magazine culture and class construction, The American Essay in the American Century, was published in 2011. With Carl Klaus, he edited the collection Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. He is the co-author, with Janet Burroway and his wife Elizabeth, of Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, the nation's most widely adopted creative writing textbook, which is now in its ninth edition.
His reviews and critical work have appeared in journals such as American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Fourth Genre, culturefront, Tri-quarterly, Assay, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Iowa Review, and in The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, The Walt Whitman Encyclopedia and The Encyclopedia of the Essay.
He also writes creative nonfiction and is the book review editor for the journal Fourth Genre. His personal essays, which have appeared in magazines such as In These Times, The Missouri Review, The Pinch, Guernica, and Walking Magazine, have been listed six times among the notable essays in the Best American Essays series.
He is working on a collection of personal essays and a study of the progressive tradition in 20th century American middle-class culture. He has taught in the Nonfiction Program of the Columbia University School of the Arts and in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

BOOKS

  • The American Essay in the American Century (University of Missouri Press, 2011). Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 2012.
  • Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (forthcoming, University of Iowa Press, March, 2012).
  • Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, 8th Ed. (New York: Longman, 2010). Co-Author.

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:

ESSAYS

  • “Best American Essays 1987.” Essay Daily (December 11, 2015).
  • "A Real World Education: Revisiting Studs Terkel's Working." Creative Nonfiction. 57 (Fall 2015).
  • "In the Saddle." Iron Horse Review. 16.1 The Duet Issue. (2014). 36-37.
  • "Essays and Encyclopedias." Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction website (Fall, 2013).
  • "Don't Be Cruel': An Argument for Elvis." The Normal School (Fall, 2012): 7 – 11. Listed among the Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, 2013. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013. Reprinted in Longreads(December 5, 2013).
  • "Dear John, I'm Afraid It's Over…" Brevity Blog (March 8, 2012).
  • "Meeting Bobby Kennedy." Cedars (Fall 2011).
  • "Nightmares." New South (Summer 2011) 60 - 62. Listed among the Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, 2012. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2012.
  • "The Edsel Farm" (personal essay), Why We're Here: New York Essayists on Living Upstate (Colgate U P, 2010).
  • "Good Fences." (personal essay), Guernica (July 2009). Listed among the Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, 2009. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009.
  • "South Side" (personal essay), The Pinch (2006). Listed among the Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays, 2007. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

AWARDS

  • Robert Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching. 1994.

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Ned French - writing on Facebook: September 13, 2017:

Trump and the threat I think he poses sent me to an outtake from my book in which I discuss the Red Scare of 1919-20 and how J. Edgar Hoover and A. Mitchell Palmer used anti-communism, nativism, and extra-legal force to squash labor:
"1919 was a particularly incendiary year. It began in February with a general strike in Seattle. That summer, which James Weldon Johnson called the “red summer,” was a bloody one. At least 43 Black men were lynched, riots and attacks by white mobs in 26 communities nationwide, including Washington, D. C., Chicago and Omaha, left at least 100 Black people dead and 1,000 wounded. At the beginning of October in the small town of Elaine, Arkansas an armed white mob descended on a group of Black sharecroppers, some of whom had dared to attend a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. An armed battle ensued and Governor Charles Hillman Brough, who had earlier called Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette a “Bolshevik” in a speech in Milwaukee and declared in St. Louis that there was “no twilight zone in American patriotism,” sent in troops. Before the shooting stopped, five whites and somewhere between 20 and several hundred Blacks were dead.
In September steel workers went on strike again seeking higher wages, an eight-hour workday, and union recognition. Soon about 350,000 workers walked out nationwide. U. S. Steel president Elbert Gary refused to meet with the union. Big Steel successfully reframed a dispute over specific working conditions between union and company as a war between Americanism and Bolshevism. The company banked on nativism and racism (even as it brought in more than 30,000 Mexican American and African-American workers to break the strike), and with the help of important newspapers, especially the New York Times of Adolph Ochs and the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer, it raised the specter of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Stories in the World targeted William Z. Foster, the secretary-treasurer of the strike’s national organizing committee, as an International Workers of the World member, syndicalist and radical, and soon other papers nationwide picked up on its lead. Red baiting paved the way for both federal and local government intervention. State troopers broke picket lines, raided offices and arrested thousands in Delaware and Pennsylvania, and then in October federal troops occupied Gary, Indiana where martial law was declared.
The United Mine Workers also went out on strike during the fall for higher wages, a six-hour day and five-day week (down from six eight-hour days), and other reforms, but President Wilson invoked a wartime agreement between the union and the coal operators, and declared the strike illegal and called in federal troops to make sure coal was mined.
During the summer of 1919 the newly organized Boston Police Union had been lobbying for better pay, improved pensions, a reduction of their 80-hour workweek, and recognition of their union. Police Commissioner Edwin Curtis refused to meet with the mainly Irish Catholic police and suspended eight of the their leaders from the force. The reform-minded mayor of Boston in an attempt to mediate set up a committee to investigate the situation. The committee recommended compromise, but Curtis, with the backing of Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge, refused to budge. On September 8, 1919 the police voted 1,134 to 2 to strike. Coolidge sent in state guardsmen who fired on angry strike supporters in South Boston killing three and wounding eight. In a secret ballot vote eighty percent of the delegates to the Boston Central Labor Union, representing 100,000 rank-and-file garment workers, firemen, telephone operators, streetcar operators, and electrical linemen, voted for a general strike to support the police, but their conservative leadership, cowed by red-baiting, delayed.
In November, the U. S. House of Representatives voted 311 to 1 to refuse to seat Victor Berger, a Wisconsin socialist who had previously served in the House and, though convicted of sedition for opposing the War, had just been re-elected. A special election was called for December, the Socialist Party re-nominated Berger, and even though Democrats and Republicans united behind a single candidate, Berger won a majority yet again.
As the “Red Scare” had been escalating, President Wilson’s Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer; Palmer’s young assistant J. Edgar Hoover, who served as head of the General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation; and the Commissioner of General Immigration Anthony J. Camminetti developed a plan to use anti-communist fear to quash the rising labor unrest. With the help of undercover agents, informants and local police Hoover put together a list of 150,000 suspected undesirables and on the night of January 2, 1920 federal agents with the help of local authorities arrested over 10,000 people nationwide. The New Republic criticized Palmer, and The Nation likened the raids to seventeenth-century witchhunts, but the “Red Scare,” Hoover’s new surveillance methods and Palmer’s mass arrests had served their purpose.
The coal miners did get a wage increase but no change in the length of their workweek. When the Boston Central Labor Union waffled, Commissioner Curtis fired all the Boston policemen and replaced them with new hires, mostly returning servicemen. Massachusetts Governor Coolidge won re-election and soon stepped onto the national stage the next fall as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee. On January 9, 1920, a week after the Palmer Raids, the Steel Strike collapsed. Elbert Gary had granted no concessions and defended his open shop (his company would not recognize the union until 1937). Later that month, the House of Representatives refused again to admit Victor Berger, leaving his seat vacant and his Milwaukee district unrepresented. The New York State Assembly quickly followed suit and banned five duly elected socialist members from its chambers."



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“A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation.”
Oh, what a tough end to an already tough week. I’ll miss my friend Ned Stuckey-French, whose Facebook wall was a digital salon where literature and sports and politics were openly and freely discussed, sometimes cordially and sometimes not. Ned never blocked anyone or tried to stop them from speaking, but, ever the teacher, chose instead to engage (usually cordially, but occasionally not!), in the hope that discussion might move us closer to consensus—or, at the very least, respect for one another. He was truly an inspiring host, and I am honored to have known him.

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I came to know Ned Stuckey-French after I wrote Divided Paths, Common Ground, a biography about Purdue University’s Lella Gaddis who was part of the beginnings of cooperative extension in the early 1900s. Ned wrote to me to tell me that as a teen he mowed Lella’s grass at her home across from West Lafayette High School. We became FB friends. He saved the University of Missouri Press from shutdown. I signed his petition. We only knew one another through Facebook, but I feel I understood his stellar character well. He knew many Purdue-connected people through his West Lafayette upbringing and our mutual knowledge of those people would make for interesting conversations. My heart is with Elizabeth Stuckey-French and daughters.


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I've just learned that Ned Stuckey-French passed away today. Like so many people, I feel myself tremendously blessed to have known and spent time with Ned, conversing, joking, considering the world in all its many facets. I got to know him well only lately, but he was such a generous, humorous, welcoming soul that he treated me as if we'd been friends forever. We were roommates for a weekend in Boston for the ACLA conference, and I felt like I was afforded a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to sit at the feet of a sage and ask all the questions I wanted. Turns out it was a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as last year Ned graciously picked me up and drove me from Tallahassee to Tampa for the AWP conference. I will forever treasure that mind-expanding drive and my many soul-deepening experiences with Ned, a truly great man. Man, I'm so sad. I miss him terribly already.

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It is with sorrow that I share that my step-brother, Ned, passed away today. Ned was intelligent, true to his beliefs, and a loyal man whom it was a pleasure to know. I will never forget how much it meant to me when he made the long trip to help me move Dad into his second nursing home. I just couldn’t do it again myself. And Ned was there. I will never forget that. Thank you, Ned, for always being kind to me and welcoming me and my mother into your family. Peace and Grace to all who mourn your loss.
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Such sad news! Hard to believe, hard to bear. In college, Ned helped me learn about politics and the world, & decades later, he was still at it. He had a gentle humor, a combination of tenacity and kindness that made him a pleasure to be around, and a source of strength for friends and comrades. Taking the right things seriously, never over-serious about himself. Hard to believe that he’s gone. Love and strength to you and all his family, in whom Ned is reflected.


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I am stunned and deeply sorrowful. I had just started to get to know Ned via facebook, and I enjoyed every exchange. He is one FB friend I would dearly love to have known in person, to have met and shared some time with. Deep, deep condolences to Elizabeth and to everyone close to him.

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I am so sorry. I worked with him and with Bruce Joshua Miller on saving the U of Missouri Press and loved and respected him so much. He was a hero, and so many in the academic publishing world have no idea of what he was doing for them. He will be missed.


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Ned was one of those men who showed us what it really means to be a man in this world—work hard, love deeply, speak your feelings. Stand up when it’s time to stand up. He made the world a little bit better for his being. Thanks, Ned.


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Ned French was an incredible, wonderful man who I had the pleasure of knowing (off and on) for over 50 years.  He cared for a lot of things and was also a most loving, caring man!   He wrote passionately about literature and strongly supported his wife's work.   He spoke out on political issues - spreading the "liberal radical gospel"  - in ways that I respected greatly.   I learned a lot from things he posted links to.    He cared about track meets and West Lafayette's successes.

He was much, much more!


This is a huge loss!

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I've been spending a lot of time in the last 16 hours walking down Memory Lane and thinking about Ned Stuckey-French memories... I have quite a few...one of my favorites was during the months right after I had flunked out of college due to chronic non-attendance...so stupid. I was living at my parent's house in Lafayette and working to save up enough money to leave the Midwest behind. Ned used to send me Che Guevara post cards peppered with all kinds of inflammatory and radical comments, knowing of course, that Howard and Betty would read them!! Ahhhhh, the 60's....good times....🤣😂😀

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With Jim TatlockDavid PutnamGreg FosterDavid JohnstonGordon GreenmanNed Stuckey-French,Michael Ronald ShayDan ShawStephen Russell,Van AndersonD Bell and Tim Jones.- back row, with glasses fourth from right with hands folded

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 I like the clothespin story. Eddie Ragsdale and Julie Oesterle were inside Julie’s house for a long time. Ned was waiting for him outside. He got bored and rearranged all the clothespins in some funky way. Julie’s mother never could figure out who did that :)))


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Our community and Florida State University lost one of its best last night with the passing of Ned Stuckey-French. When I was fairly new to FSU Ned reached out and began a conversation about something I'd written. I was flattered he'd taken the time. Over many years of being on committees together, and always Facebook conversations, Ned showed what a special guy he was: generous, patient, engaging, smart, and he had some amazing stories from a life well lived.

At a meeting in April Ned revealed that his cancer had returned. He laid out the details unflinchingly. That it took this talented son of the midwest so soon is just hard to awaken to today.

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Our paths were similar though several years apart...West Lafayette High School, track and field enthusiasts, Harvard College English majors...and now Ned has sprinted past us all to whatever comes next. At moments like this, I take comfort in a wise reflection: "From Love springs all creation. By Love it is maintained. Toward Love it progresses, and into Love it enters."

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I am so sorry for your loss. Ned was such a kind, thoughtful, intelligent and passionate man. He was a wonderful writer and teacher. We met while at Purdue b/w 1985-87, engaged in anti-apartheid activism. It was so, so nice to reconnect with him through FB several years back, where those same gifts (and his fantastic sense of humor) came through. May you, Elizabeth, Ned's daughters find strength and support through family and friends, and with the wonderful memories he's left. He will be sorely missed.

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Not 15 minutes after I pulled out of my parents’ driveway yesterday, my old friend John McNally wrote to tell me of Ned Stuckey-French’s death. That’s a lot of sad for one afternoon, and I have had 1000 miles alone in my car the last 24 hours to ponder departures.
Ned and I were the two finalists for a nonfiction job at a Jesuit school on the Eastern seaboard way back in 1997. I was 27 and he was 47, fresh out of Iowa I think. The school was deadlocked: the administration preferred me because I was Jesuit-educated but the department preferred Ned because he was, well, much preferable. Neither of us got the gig.
I found all this out the following year when Ned and I were hired at St. Lawrence University, Ned and his wife Elizabeth to one-year jobs and me on the tenure-track. The late William Bradley was a senior in our department that year. I see in retrospect it was quite a confluence of essay power— Natalia Singer brought us all together— and I like to think we made the most of it.
I remember I drove Ned to the Ottawa airport in a driving snowstorm for one of his interviews that spring, and babysat their daughter Flannery while they both flew to Tallahassee to interview for the Florida State jobs that took them away from us. Before they left, Elizabeth played matchmaker between me and her hairstylist, who became my wife and the mother of my two sons.
Ned and I remained comrades despite their leaving. He added me to every AWP panel he proposed, it seemed. When he organized a very small conference on the essay-film, he made me a respondent just because I thought it was so cool. I put together an anthology of upstate NY writers and Ned contributed an essay and connected me to several other eventual contributors.
When my book GREEN FIELDS came out, he walked up to me at the NonfictionNow conference in Iowa City and quoted the book’s last line “What are you doing here, Bobby Cowser?” He had read it, he was saying, and carefully. But he was also saying he was going to hold me to account the way my childhood friend had. And he sure did that.
I have regrets about the way my marriage ended. I was brash and selfish, lost many friendships and strained others, (including mine with William Bradley, which I never had the chance to mend before he died). But Ned said only, “I hope you can both put this behind you and find happiness again."
Pretty soon, though I was in a major writing sulk, he was asking for a review of Richard Ford’s memoir about his parents for FOURTH GENRE. I was finding writing difficult, but Ned insisted. When I finally sent him something, he wrote that it was “absolutely wonderful.” Now it was only a book review, but I learned a couple of things from the experience. The first was that sometimes it wasn’t about you but about the work, serving the tradition. And I also learned why integrity is so valuable: in a world where we toss around compliments so carelessly, it’s hard to find one you can trust. Ned was a man of unimpeachable integrity, and him you could believe.
Just last week I assured my co-editors that we could ask Ned to write us an essay about EB White for our forthcoming companion. He would be fine. I genuinely believed that. The alternative was so profoundly sad, so unfair, that I could not accept it. Yet here we are.
The last comment Ned made to one of my (innumerable, I know) FB posts was to a photo I’d posted about my younger son winning the Literature Appreciation Award for his 8th Grade class last week. How sick must Ned have been? “Congratulations, Mason,” Ned wrote, “A love of literature can take you everywhere! You’re a rockstar.” Ned is right, and if you’re very lucky, as I was, you can walk a few miles of that journey with a man like Ned.

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Earlier tonight, I learned the terrible news about Ned Stuckey-French. He was, without question, my favorite professor. Even my parents learned his name because I spoke admiringly of him years after graduation.
Ned’s class introduced me to some of my favorite writings (including his own) and authors whom I still love to revisit today, but his impact went beyond the classroom. Ned’s outlook on life, his devotion to family, his compassion, social responsibility, conviction, and decency made a lasting impression. I will always remember a giant smile spreading across his face when he told us about meeting and falling in love with his wife Elizabeth. He loved her and their two daughters fiercely and let everybody know it.
8 years ago, a few weeks before my graduation, I visited his office hours and told him I felt unsure about my future. Most of my friends were moving on immediately to pursue their Master's and I felt behind. He assured me there was no greater gift than to experience life and let the world be my teacher. With that advice, I moved to New York City a few months later and began living outside my comfort zone, away from everything I'd ever known.
Ned also graciously allowed me to profile him for a senior project. During our chat, he told me: "I think most everybody, if they're really honest, will be able to tell you a story about how the reason they came to do what they have done with their life, whatever it might be, that somebody mentored them."
I remember being frustrated with my word limit for this assignment. His life was so much more complex than this dated piece that only captures a tiny fraction of the light he gave to the world, but I'm sharing for those curious about the wonders of Ned Stuckey-French: http://pub.lucidpress.com/nedstuckeyfrench/
I feel blessed to have known Ned and will carry his lessons with me forever. I'm certain everyone he crossed paths with will agree.
Thank you for the gift of endless inspiration, Professor 

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 I’m so sorry for your family’s loss, Sarasue. Ned always spoke so highly of your parents and of his childhood in Indiana. I hope you find comfort in knowing he was loved by so many. His legacy will live on in everyone whose life he affected.


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Just devastated to hear of the passing of Ned Stuckey-French, FSU professor of nonfiction and one of my favorite teachers and human beings. Unremittingly sweet, good-humored, generous, and upright. He could tell you anything you needed to know about the history of the essay (and where your own essay might fit), as well as nearest rally or protest. Always political and never hopeless. I cannot picture him not laughing. My heart goes out to Elizabeth, Phoebe, and Flannery. This is the worst.

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Sean and I were at a Buddhist Monastery on Mount Koya (Japan) when I got news that a beloved colleague and friend, Ned Stuckey-French had died. I knew he had been ill, but the loss has shaken me. Ned had an encyclopedic knowledge of the essay's traditon and he was always happy to share. If, for example, you ever needed to know what to read on themes like snakes or rivers or train travel (as I often did and do), then Ned was your guy. You could count on him to come up with titles that would feed your imagination and work. He read widely and without prejudice, and championed the careers of writers whose work he discovered and believed in. He did this for me. Intellectual generosity and ethical ferocity were his hallmarks. I will miss him dearly. Our writing community is so much poorer without him. Godspeed, Ned.

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I lost my mentor last night. Ned Stuckey-French and I spoke just a month ago about creative non-fiction, essays I’ve been working on, a genre I didn’t know existed before he taught me. He was quite simply the best teacher and mentor I’ve ever had. I don’t have the words to express the unfairness and sadness this brings me; they fall short. Especially for you Ned, a word magician. I want to sit and cry, but you wouldn’t want me to do that. I think you’d want me to go outside, observe, and write. Below quote is from his essay, “A Real-World Education.”https://www.creativenonfiction.org/onl…/real-world-education

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The essay is a "slippery business. Our selves are and are not. They once were lost but now are found. But isn’t this the way life is? You grow up and move on. You become someone else and yet are always yourself .." ~ Ned Stuckey-French, RIP

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It's another Saturday and I'm at the library again. I used to keep Shabbat in my own secular way but for the past six months or so, I've been spending every Saturday alone in the stacks, hammering away at this book proposal. Today, I happen to be sitting at the same desk I was sitting at the last time I got an email from Ned Stuckey-French , which was just a few weeks ago. I'd realized that he was sicker than I thought and I'd written to ask what was going on and to let him know that he was in my thoughts and prayers. He'd responded with an update and, at the end of his email, asked about a major life decision I've been struggling with for the past year and a half or so (something I'll share, perhaps, in another post). I told him I still wasn't sure what to do and I gave him a summary of the things I'm agonizing over (though I kept it short because I felt guilty for talking about myself while he was sick).
His one word response: Jump.
I didn't know it at the time but that would be our last correspondence. Because he mentioned the possibility of resuming treatment in the fall, I thought that autumn would come and he would be here and I'd check in again and tell him what I'd finally decided to do and I imagined, for some reason, that he would be on the mend.
JUMP
I was sitting in this very desk.
And, from that day forward, I started thinking "Jump" not just about this life decision but about everything--when I sit down to work on this draft and I'm struggling to be as raw and honest and real as I want to be, I think JUMP. Because you have to do that on the page. You have to JUMP. Or, as Ned used to tell us in workshop, you have to risk sentimentality in your first draft.
I think JUMP when I walk into the classroom because if you want to be passionate and earnest as a teacher, you have to take a risk, you have to be really present and you have to listen and respond not as a "teacher" but as a human and that means being vulnerable.
Jump.
And I think about it with my kids and husband. That if I want to be a good mother and wife, I have to set my ego and defense mechanisms and all kinds of other bullshit aside and JUMP.
This is true for any relationship, for any encounter you have with another human being, really.
Jumping is about stripping yourself down and throwing yourself into the world with faith and approaching everything you do with your whole heart.
And I'm here on another Saturday, after waking up early with the kids and taking them out to go mango hunting. I hope that I was kind and present and that I jumped for them this morning. And now I'm at this desk again and I'm opening this draft and I'm going to try real hard to jump.


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Here's one little glimpse of Ned's spirit and sense of fun, from a few years back at our daughter's bat mitzvah celebration.

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Devastated to learn that my dear friend and colleague Ned Stuckey-French passed away last night after a battle with cancer. It's impossible to find the words in a Facebook post to capture all Ned has meant to me and to so many others here at FSU, where he and his wife Elizabeth have been my colleagues, friends, and neighbors for almost 20 years. But suffice it to say that Ned was a powerful and vital force for good in our department and our community for two decades, beloved by everyone, and a tireless cheerleader for all. A deeply generous, kindhearted, and funny person, Ned was passionate about his convictions and ethical and political beliefs but always remarkably open to lively dialogue, which seemed to fuel him. Although he was modest and self-deprecating, Ned was a wonderful essay-writer and a groundbreaking figure in the world of creative nonfiction as a scholar of the essay as a form, as well as a lifelong activist and community organizer (as can be seen in his recent heroic efforts to save the University of Missouri Press).
Ned was also an all-around enthusiast, whose life-affirming excitement about, well, just about everything could be contagious -- whether it was Montaigne or Whitman, Joan Didion or William Gass, or the latest feats in the world of track and field. A voracious reader, he was endlessly curious about literature, music, art, culture, sports, and politics -- as anyone who has benefited over the past decade from his Facebook presence alone would know.
Ned was also so supportive of me personally, as he was with countless other friends, colleagues, fellow writers, and, especially, his students, to whom he was extremely devoted. He took a genuine interest in my work and was always such a generous champion of my writing. Over the past two decades, we watched each other's kids grow up and he was always so kind and concerned about our children from the time they were born to the last time we spoke. Above all else, Ned was an utterly devoted, loving husband to Elizabeth and father to his wonderful daughters. I just can't believe he's gone. Our hearts are with Elizabeth and Flannery and Phoebe and their whole family in this very difficult time.

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n Essay for Ned (warning: long post)
My late fifty-year-pal Ned Stuckey-French was a practitioner, a professor, and an editor of essays. He deserves a more considered appreciation than the gout of heart’s blood I heaved onto FB in the minutes after hearing of his death. As the golden anniversary (with its attendant requests for gold) of my graduation from Harvard approaches, let me tell you about Ned Carleton French, the golden thread that wound through my four years in Cambridge.
In the fall of 1968, I arrived at Harvard College with what was probably a fairly ordinary mix of confidence and insecurity. If the College was no longer a 17th-century institution for training Protestant ministers, it still retained a lot of its early-20th-century status as a breeding ground for those with breeding: a place for upper-class young white men from the Northeast who had gone to the better sort of prep school. Well, I was a young, white man from the Northeast, but I felt keenly the lack of overflowing pockets and even more keenly the lack of the easy, to-the-manner-born insouciance of those gods who strolled around the Yard in J.Press jackets ripped at the elbow and taped-up Bass Weejuns with no socks.
Assigned to Holworthy Hall in Harvard Yard, I hung out with two fellow public-school guys in the next entry whom I had met that summer at a Harvard Club of NYC get-together for local prospective freshmen: Bill Connet and Robin Shaffer. From the group of their roommates and roommates’ friends, we eventually assembled a group of seven to apply to one of the seven-man suites in the new tower of Leverett House: Bill, Robin, myself, Ned French, Stan Wilson, Chris Grant and Tom Ellis.. Leverett House admitted us but broke us up four and three, with Bill, Stan, Ned and myself — the four middle-class public school guys — sharing a quad in the old Leverett House.
The four of us had a great time that sophomore year, and each of those three owns a large chunk of real estate in my heart. As we were planning our junior year move to that seven-man suite in the Leverett tower, Ned declared that he was applying to move up to Radcliffe. This was outside the box: outside the box of the Yard, the River Houses and the Harvard classrooms; outside the box of the standard Harvard student life; and certainly outside the box of my thinking. Yet when I considered the idea, it had great appeal. Of my three roomies, I was arguably closest to Ned, and life at Radcliffe promised a healing stream of estrogen to counterbalance and complement the testosterone-heavy life at Harvard. So Ned and I moved up junior year to Barnard Hall in South (now Cabot) House; our senior year I lived in Barnard Hall and Ned moved to “the Jordans” for its hybrid off-campus life.
Although we were only officially roomies one year, I think of Ned as the constant in my Harvard life. We had many things in common: a shared sense of humor; an appreciation of English literature and Firesign Theatre; the good fortune of high draft numbers; a pretentious predilection for smoking pipes and a ridiculous one for drinking Scotch with Coca Cola; a taste for Joe’s pizza, Elsie’s sandwiches, and the South House Grill cuisine of Jim Koch and Steven Peterman; and a talent for abusing pinball machines — particularly Flower Power in the Leverett House grill and Airport in South House.
Ned led the way for me in contemporary literature and in politics. He introduced me to Barthelme, Barth, Coover, and, perhaps his personal favorite, William H. Gass. (If you have not read Omensetter’s Luck, you have a treat ahead of you.) Long after I stopped reading contemporary literary icons and abandoned my vocational plans to become an English professor, Ned continued to keep abreast of cutting-edge literature, and he became an English professor, one beloved by his students.
Ned also outstripped me in the field of politics. Though I’d like to think of myself as a feminist, I am much more stuck in the patriarchy than Ned was. When Ned met and married his fellow Hoosier Elizabeth Stuckey, he became Ned Stuckey-French. Simple as that. Elizabeth was no more (or less) a French now than he was a Stuckey. They were each other’s, a partnership, a sharing. Ned talked the talk (NED talk!) and he also walked the walk.
I am a garden-variety liberal Democrat. Ned was well to the left of me when we were younger — a democratic socialist if not a communist. Ned not only had no particular use for the prep-school Brahmins I admired (to this day, I wear a popped-collar polo shirt under a button-down oxford), he was an active champion of the proletariat. He put his money, time and life where his mouth was. While at grad school at Brown, he abandoned his Ivy League professor-to-be life to become a hospital janitor, secretly working as an undercover union organizer at Mass General. For ten years he spent his days with a mop and bucket — ironic echoes of his Harvard scholarship job cleaning bathrooms — while attempting (in two unsuccessful elections) to give the workers a fairer chunk of the means of production. Although I have spent a large part of my life in union politics and union leadership, I cannot imagine making such a ten-year sacrifice.
Part of Ned’s appeal to me and perhaps to others was his absolutely genuineness, his comfort with who he was. Today, I am content with who I am; but, as I have said, I envied my prep-school classmates their wealth, their entitlement, their comfort with the levers of power. (Acting has given me a taste of my aspirations: I am frequently cast as men of wealth and power.) If I am a faux member of the Eastern elite, Ned was always himself: a Midwestern regular guy who liked beer and sports and his wife and kids. He was not only content with his social status, he saw the issue as raising less-fortunate others up to his level rather than climbing higher himself. He had no problem using his formidable intelligence and education to do intellectual battle, but he had no need to show off. I never knew his SAT scores and it was only upon reading his obituary that I realized he graduated magna cum laude.
“Only connect,” says E.M. Forster in Howards End (a book we were both assigned but which only one of us read), and Ned took it to heart. Before he turned to Facebook and email, he was a devotee of the U.S. Postal System. He did not write letters; he wrote postcards. I probably have dozens in a bookshelf pile of correspondence worth keeping. Each one is filled to the edges with Ned’s tight Palmer script. Even if my missives to Ned had been worth keeping, they would not have equaled Ned’s in number.
Ned’s ability to connect and drive to acquire knowledge found a happy social medium in FaceBook. He cultivated both longtime friendships and more casual acquaintanceships; he reconnected with long-lost pals. He found kindred souls in a number of different communities, and unlike many, Ned did not create a self-serving social media bubble reflecting his own political views — all were welcome on his home page. He cordially (his characteristic postcard closing was “cordially yours”) considered the viewpoints of libertarians, conservatives, second-amendment fans, Trump apologists, etc. and refuted, parried, joked about, and occasionally accepted their points. Even if their point of view was anathema to him, he took the time to state why he found their opinion objectionable, misguided, and/or factually wrong. He was a gentleman.
I admired Ned enormously. I admired his self-acceptance. He was who he was, and he was okay with that. And then, from the security of that self-acceptance, he made it a point to help others. He was an academic, but he was IN the world. He was a father and he was a teacher: two roles I strive to fulfill myself. He aided and nurtured and helped and explained: he illuminated. He brought light to the world and to many people’s lives. Our world is a little darker with his passing.
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I came to know Ned Stuckey-French after I wrote Divided Paths, Common Ground, a biography about Purdue University’s Lella Gaddis who was part of the beginnings of cooperative extension in the early 1900s. Ned wrote to me to tell me that as a teen he mowed Lella’s grass at her home across from West Lafayette High School. We became FB friends. He saved the University of Missouri Press from shutdown. I signed his petition. We only knew one another through Facebook, but I feel I understood his stellar character well. He knew many Purdue-connected people through his West Lafayette upbringing and our mutual knowledge of those people would make for interesting conversations. My heart is with Elizabeth Stuckey-French and daughters.

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Feeling shocked and saddened by news that Ned Stuckey-French passed away last night. Ned was a sunbeam and a creative force in countless people's lives. For me, he was a mentor and an advocate, and I always felt surprised by and unworthy of his support. He was a great professor at Florida State University and empowered me to share my papermaking experiences through the beautiful form of the essay. Today, I am studying at the University of Iowa because of him, and he is always on my mind when I roam the halls of EPB and see distinct traces of his influence among my creative non-fiction colleagues. I have felt closer to him, being in Iowa City for the past two years, but I realize this morning that we were actually quite far apart. I wasn't aware that his cancer had returned until yesterday, and I'm afraid that my prayers came too late. I didn't know Ned for very long, yet his impact on my life has been profound. I'm sending my love and deepest sympathies to his family and those who knew him well. I cannot imagine how intense your loss must be.



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I hope you will read this great essay by Ned Stuckey-French, a brilliant, compassionate, fierce essay scholar who left this for us all.   And if you are teaching essay writing this year, please let your students encounter his crucial book, The American Essay in the American Century.

A Real-World Education

Required Reading

Ned Stuckey-French







In the fall of 1976, I lied on an application in order to get a job as a janitor at Massachusetts General Hospital. I left out the fact that I’d graduated from Harvard and done a couple of years of graduate work at Brown, claiming instead that I’d worked as an oil field roughneck, carpenter, liquor store clerk, trash collector, and groundskeeper. Indeed, I had done those things, but I stretched summer jobs to cover entire years and gave references that couldn’t be traced.
For the next decade, I worked at Mass General as a janitor and communist trade-union organizer, living a semi-secret life. I wasn’t the only one doing this: there were about fifteen of us at the hospital, trying to organize its several thousand workers into a union. Our larger democratic-centralist organization had cadres working throughout the Boston area—in the Quincy shipyards, the Lynn GE plant, the Framingham General Motors factory, a meat packing company, a steel fabrication place, and various community organizations. Nationally, there were hundreds of young, predominantly white, middle-class activists like us who had been politicized in the civil rights, antiwar, student, and women’s movements of the late ’60s.
It was during this time that I first read Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (Pantheon, 1974). I read it, as did some of my comrades, because we’d grown up as students and were now studying how to join the working class. Though we’d find that proletarianizing involved more on-the-job training than book learning, Terkel’s interviews with more than 130 American workers were a great help.
Terkel, who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era, talked to a garbage man and a hooker about dignity. He talked to a meter reader and a postman about dogs. He talked to organizers, a receptionist, and a professor about talking. He talked to people who worked in factories and big offices, and he talked to people who worked alone—a piano tuner, a bookbinder, an elderly farmwoman who lived in a cottage on a mountain in Kentucky. He crossed the class divide and talked to a factory owner, a couple of executives, and a supervisor about being in charge. He talked to a few famous people—actor Rip Torn, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, and Washington Redskins coach George Allen—but mostly he talked to people who were unknown, giving them a chance to explain how they spent their lives.
Working is a good read. It’s a big (nearly 600-page), almost encyclopedic book, but the profiles are short and placed in helpful groups: “Working the Land,” “Cleaning Up,” “Bureaucracy.” Terkel offers short descriptions of both his subjects and where he’s interviewing them, and, for the most part, edits out his questions and lets the people talk. The pieces read like personal essays—digressive, honest, conversational.
Like Terkel’s workers, I filled my days at the hospital with routines: empty the trash cans; clean the bathrooms; clean up messes (blood, glass, vomit, and shit); sweep, mop, wax, and buff the floors. Like most of the people profiled in Working, I lived on a skimpy paycheck, had little job security, and received few benefits, but unlike most of them (the nonprofessionals, anyway), I had an out. I could take my white privilege and my Harvard degree and move on... as I eventually did.
My commie group cannibalized itself in sectarianism; at the hospital, we lost two union drives, and then the jig was up. We faced too much money and fear. But those years spent talking with people about their lives and learning to listen to them and working with them to write leaflets and organize meetings changed me. I’m a professor now, but not the same kind of professor I would have been if I hadn’t worked in the hospital—or at least I hope so.
Working changed me, too, in smaller but no less essential ways. Terkel’s book is a classic. Its people are real, rounded, and fully human. They disrupt our stereotypes: the garbage man plays golf every weekend, and the meter reader volunteers that his job would be much harder if he were black. Off-duty, they are reflective and unflinchingly honest. “You were the lowest of the low if you allowed yourself to feel anything with a trick,” says Roberta Victor, a prostitute since the age of fifteen. “The bed puts you on their level. The way you maintain your integrity is by acting all the way through.” Terkel told Chicago magazine that his method was no method at all. Mainly he just listened, but with real interest. “I don’t have written questions,” he said. “It’s a conversation, not an interview.”
I suspect that when I first opened the book back then I jumped ahead to Bill Talcott’s section. His title was “Organizer,” and that’s what I wanted to be. He says:
My work is trying to change this country. This is the job I’ve chosen... I try to bring people together who are being put down by the system, left out. You try to build an organization that will give them power to make the changes.
Of course that resonated. Now, it sounds a little grandiose—still worthy, but grandiose. I could never be a working-class hero. A déclassé revolutionary, perhaps, but objective conditions would have had to be ripe for a revolution, and they weren’t. Instead, Studs Terkel and the hospital took me outside myself and my class, if only for a while, and for that I’m ever grateful.



Ned worked at bringing people home': Memorial held for FSU professor Ned Stuckey-French
CD Davidson-Hiers, Tallahassee DemocratPublished 2:04 p.m. ET Sept. 28, 2019
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An older photo posted to FSU professor Ned Stuckey-French's Facebook in 2015 of the writer and fellow professor, wife Elizabeth Stuckey-French. (Photo: Ned Stuckey-French Facebook)

An older photo posted to FSU professor Ned Stuckey-French's Facebook in 2015 of the writer and fellow professor, wife Elizabeth Stuckey-French.

Ned Stuckey-French was a Harvard man who quit grad school to work as a janitor and organize a hospital worker's union.
He was an arbiter of disputes, a champion of his writing students — and had a notable talent for inhaling jello off a plate without using silverware. 
Family, friends, faculty and students gathered Friday afternoon at Florida State University to celebrate the life of the beloved English professor, who died from cancer June 28 at his home in Tallahassee. He was 69. 
Stuckey-French's roommate from college, Nick Wyman, addressed a crowd of more than 100 people who gathered in the Longmire Building on campus for a standing-room-only ceremony. Wyman knew Stuckey-French for roughly 50 years and said he was always a man "comfortable enough in himself to be there for others." 
"Ned worked at bringing people home," he said. 
Students echoed Wyman's assessment of the teacher, adding Stuckey-French was fiercely compassionate, brash, brave, honest — and above all, gentle. 
"The most important lessons he taught me, I'm not sure he was aware he was imparting," graduate student Kelsey Ward said. 
She said Stuckey-French was an example of genius that was "never used to make others feel small." 
The writing professor from Indiana graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1972, finished his master's at Brown University in 1992 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa five years later.

He was a prolific, renowned essayist and authored several nonfiction books. His daughters, Flannery and Phoebe, both read from his published works at the memorial.  
"Ned always took the time to listen and honor my experience," former graduate student and poet Rita Mookerjee told the Democrat. She called the professor an "ally." 
"It was challenging being a queer woman of color in a predominantly white, heterosexual graduate program," she said. "He totally understood my politics and supported me as a student. I won't forget that...He was an incredible man." 
He met his wife, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, in Indiana outside of academia and they both grew to be FSU professors. 
"I never could figure out where Elizabeth stopped and Ned started," fellow professor and poet David Kirby said at the memorial. 
A childhood friend, Libby Weinstein, said she met Stuckey-French "over saltines and milk in a kindergarten class." They'd been friends ever since. 
Years ago when Stuckey-French was visiting, he convinced Weinstein to "spring" her kids from preschool so they could all go to the American Museum of Natural History. The writer wanted to "experience the dinosaurs with the experts," she recalled him saying about her children, and the crowd laughed at the memory.
Many of the speakers Friday marveled at how the essayist never turned down an opportunity to engage in spirited debate on Facebook, while keeping an even temper. 
"He was the voice who could bring everyone together," former English department chair Eric Walker said. "We need more of him." 
Stuckey-French's college roommate said the essayist's Facebook "was Facebook at its best." 
Wyman — a Harvard man — admitted to the crowd that he wasn't sure about the existence of an afterlife, but hoped his friend was there, "teaching people how to suck up jello." 


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The standing-room-only turnout in Tallahassee for the celebratory memorial for my colleague and friend Ned Stuckey-French at FSU.

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Florida State held a memorial service for Ned Stuckey-French yesterday, and I have a hunch Ned would've been so pleased.
There was Ned's work on the essay. There was Ned's family, biological and otherwise. There was so much laughter. There was deep sadness on the echoes of that laughter. There was Ned's favorite music. There was Ned's favorite literature. There was story after story. There was Ned.



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The West Lafayette Contingent...honoring and remembering Ned Stuckey-French...  — with Kit KildahlScott WooleryBill HughesMary Worth Everett and Molly Lillich Burkart in Tallahassee, Florida.

(Nick Wyman): Long post warning. Here are my remarks at Ned’s memorial:


Brevity is one of the salient characteristics of Ned’s chosen focus, the essay. It is also the soul of wit. Sadly, I am not witty enough to properly and sufficiently sing the praises of my fifty-year friend in a few minutes. But I shall nonetheless essay that song.
Virum Indianaque cano. I sing of the man and Indiana. With apologies to all the Tallahasseeans, Indiana was Ned’s home: where he was born and raised, where he met the transformative Ms. Elizabeth Stuckey. That home of Indiana molded Ned. He was a Midwesterner, a Hoosier. He was not a Southerner; he was certainly not some coastal elite. Unlike Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there was a lot of “there” to Ned’s “There.” He was present, solid, count-on-able. (He once took five hours out of his day to help me put together two monstrous IKEA armoires for my daughter — I still have Allen wrench nightmares.)
Unlike yours truly who went to Harvard to brand himself as a Harvard man and to master the traditional liberal arts of ping pong, frisbee and pinball, Ned came to Harvard to get an education. He actually read the books on the syllabus. Harvard didn’t really change him, except perhaps in one way. With something of a dispassionate social scientist’s eye, he observed his privileged colleagues and classmates, and it created or deepened a determination to champion the less privileged. That determination led to his interrupting his graduate education to spend TEN years working as a janitor at Mass General in an effort to organize and unionize the hospital workers. I’m a former union president, but I stand in awe of that commitment.
I don’t mean to paint Ned as some sort of super-studious stick-in-the-mud Joe Hill. We goofed off plenty. We smoked dope, we smoked pipes (pretentiously practicing for a future in academia,) we drank beer and scotch, we even dropped acid once (memorably touring the “frozen food section of life” around Fresh Pond in north Cambridge.). We played pinball & frisbee, and one time, in a freakish two-foot snowfall, tackle football. We listened to rock, folk, rhythm & blues, and Firesign Theatre. We solved the world’s problems in late-night bull sessions.
Through it all and through the rest of the fifty years I knew him, Ned was Ned (or as Gertrude would have it, Ned was Ned was Ned.). He was himself, comfortable in his shoes, secure enough in who he was to be there for others: for his wife, for his daughters, for his friends, for his students, for his fellow human beings.
Being there for others. Ned was good at staying connected: all those postcards filled to the edges with his tight script; the occasional solicitous phone call; in later years, e-mails and Facebook comments and posts. Ned’s Facebook was Facebook at its best: not a cesspool of self-aggrandizement and polemical trolling, but a place where Ned applauded, congratulated and acknowledged others, where his connections included friends and acquaintances with an astonishing breadth of political views. He often disputed or refuted some of these views, but he was never self-righteously dismissive; and I applaud him for not hiding away in a self-reinforcing, solipsistic social media bubble. Ned was there. In my memory at least, Ned will always be there.
Another Harvard man Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, says that in this life, “We’re all just walking each other home.” Tennessee Williams (not a Harvard man) wrote “I’ve walked a long and rocky road; and what really mattered, what should matter most to you is the rare and gorgeous experience of reaching out through your work and your actions and connecting to others. A message in the bottle thrown toward … a recently dejected man who can’t see his way home. We get people home; we let them know that we’re here for them. That is what art can do. That is what matters, baby. Bringing people home.” Ned worked to bring people home. He brought them home to their proper selves; he brought them home to their creative center; and he brought them his home, his stalwart Midwestern decency.
One of my favorite memories of Ned was his demonstrating in the Leverett House dining room how, by placing your mouth directly above a slab of jello on a plate and inhaling sharply, you could induce the jello to shake and then leap into your mouth. He performed this trick on some strawberry jello, and it was hilarious. We laughed so hard that we made Ned laugh until the strawberry jello came out his nose.
I don’t know about the afterlife — what this home is we are all walking toward — but whatever “there” there is, I hope Ned is there, demonstrating how to suck up jello.

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To Ned's Family and all those many who also loved and cared for him, I am sorry that I was not able to join those of you who memorialized Ned's life yesterday.    I knew Ned beginning over 50 years ago, but only felt a real connection to him in recent years through Facebook and email.   

I reached out to him May 19th, knowing that it probably would be my last opportunity.   His May 28th response:

Thanks for your kind offer, George. Just began immunotherapy, which is where the hope lies. Going to NYC to see our daughter who is living there this summer and juggling a couple of theater internships and to see my college roommate who is in the Broadway production of Network.

Hope your own life can settle down and you can find some peace.

Best,

Ned

was typical of him, being supportive of us all.

Ned did a lot of good for all of us!   His greatness however, was not primarily in all his many achievements, but rather in his incredible heart.   He gave so much to so many of us!

I am trying to support all of our memories beyond today as best I can at:  https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=518406393085326977#editor/target=post;postID=169349555258530130;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=10;src=link - which can more easily be accessed by many at:  www.WLHSMemorial.blogspot.com + 1968 + Ned French.   I hope that you and others will continue to share memories that the children and their children will appreciate.

Thanks again!

George

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Elizabeth Stuckey-French






Words are inadequate here, but I'll give it a try. I'd like to express my gratitude, something even deeper than gratitude, to every one who helped to organize Ned's memorial celebration, in particular the FSU English department (especially Gary Taylor, Carolyn Hector HallDiane Roberts and Barbara Hamby,) and to David Kirby who gracefully ushered us through, to those who bravely spoke--Margaret Little, Randall AlbersLibby Mickley Weinstein, Kit Kildahl, Nick WymanKelsey WardFlamerg French and Phoebe French, to William David Cooper who played a beautiful selection of songs ranging from old hymns to Van Morrison to The Mighty Wind, to friend and fiddler Scott Allman, who joined him at the end in sending us out with an Irish jig. Thanks to all the old and new friends and family members who came from near and far to pay respects. Even if I didn't get to speak with you, your presence gave us comfort. I know many others would've liked to be there and I appreciate your thoughts, prayers and notes. And I'd like to thank Sarasue French and Hugh French for all their help and support. Ned was their beloved brother. We'll all miss him and we will
never forget him.

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I think of my recently deceased friend, Ned Stuckey-French, often. Most of my closest friends have passed away by now, which is alarming, considering I have yet to reach the age of 70. Perhaps that is just another reason to avoid me, one might say.
Ned's passing is different because of its resonance. My other deceased friends had childhoods, then adult lives and, in most cases, families. I mourn them, their loved ones mourn them, and they live on in our memories, which grow more faint over time.

Ned's passing is a raw, open wound not likely to heal anytime soon.
Ned's childhood in West Lafayette was so normal one might describe it as Rockwellian. He was an avid student, a voracious reader, an athlete, and a kid from the neighborhood. He had his heart broken by a childhood crush or two.
He wasn't perfect, he was as callow as the rest of us. At least for a while.
Ned was a step or ten ahead of me when it came to figuring out what was important and what was real.
When we graduated from high school in 1968, I was floored by the news Ned would be attending Harvard. I still get a chuckle fifty years later when I remember how Bruce Parkhurst, a friend of ours from a different high school, reacted when Ned, who was visiting Bruce and me at our summer jobs on the Purdue University Ross-Ade Stadium crew, responded to Bruce's question about where Ned was attending college, "Harvard? Fucking Harvard?".
After college graduation, Ned spent thirteen years, the prime of his life, as a janitor working for Massachusetts General Hospital and a union organizer. I promise you those who knew him during that time have been rocked by the news of his passing.
Ned spent a lot of his life vacillating between the idealogical and the practical. In the end, I believe he had found a balance between the two few people ever achieve.
After union organizing, Ned pursued life as an academic, met the love of his life, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, became a teacher, a professor, an essayist, a husband, a father, a mentor to hundreds, and as always, a good friend.
I'm unable to travel and could not attend Ned's memorial service in Tallahassee in September, but I've read every account of the gathering I can find and I've pored over every picture posted to Facebook.
I'm amazed by the diversity of the mourners. There were childhood friends, college friends, professional friends, former students, all with one thing in common, they loved and admired Ned. It was like "Goodbye Mr. Chips" if Mr. Chipping had a life outside the classroom.
I assure you, in addition to the mourners in attendance and not, there are opponents, former high school track athletes and football players all over Indiana who remember him and have been saddened by the news of Ned's death.
As children, Ned was the best of us. It seems he never stopped being that.
- Tom Hamilton -
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The last time I ever saw Ned Stuckey-French was at an Honors thesis defense a year ago. He ran that meeting with kindness, discernment, and grace. He also spoke to us about his health and what was ahead.
Yesterday, we learned that Ned had won the FSU Honors Mentor Award, a most fitting exclamation point on his commitment to students and his career at Florida State.
I miss him all the time.
-Davis Houck (April 18, 2020)





1 comment:

  1. You were a awesome dude when you were a junior and senior at West Lafayette high school. I'm impressed at your long and impressive literature career. Rest in peace, Ned....u are a beloved friend to many, including myself.

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