a letter from the executive director
Dear Friends,
When asked to write my “swan song,” I immediately agreed. My mind quickly filled with images—of swan-boats in the Boston Public Garden, Swan Lake with Nureyev and Fonteyn, Schubert’s Schwanengesang, Leda and the Swan, even Swann’s Way, the subject of our most recent Winter Weekend. But what was a swan song, anyway? I headed to Webster’s.
Sure enough, “the parting work or performance by an artist, writer, musician, etc.” As a lifelong printmaker, that artistic note had some appeal. But why associate such moments with a bird? On I read. Definition 2: “the song sung by the hitherto mute swan at the moment of death.” Or as Orlando Gibbons put it more nicely in a famous motet:
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlock’d her silent throat....
No thanks! There’s plenty of life yet in this old bird. More in the spirit of Proust’s Swann than Gibbons’s swan, let me say farewell with a few reminiscences of an extraordinary quarter century at the Maine Humanities Council. From a memory-bank filled with both joys and anxieties, with the power and pleasure of ideas and the real-life pangs of trying to realize them, three truly pivotal moments stand out.
July 1981 | There I was, standing uncertainly on Exchange Street in the Old Port, waiting to go in for my job interview with Karen Bowden, the director of a five-year-old non-profit which until that year had been known as the Maine Council for the Humanities and Public Policy. After years of teaching art and studying counseling, I wanted to try something different. It was just going to be an experiment; I had no idea I was about to launch my life’s work. I went on to become interim director, then in 1985 director, working closely with the multi-talented Richard D’Abate as my associate.
The Council in those early days was a small grant-making agency serving as a “pass-through” for federal money from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We had a low profile. Aside from some museum people, librarians, and college professors, few Mainers had ever heard of us. Yet what remarkable things we accomplished with very little money! The Maine at Statehood celebration, the state’s first AIDS conference (with Susan Sontag as keynoter), the many historical projects we helped fund, the early encouragement we gave to the work of two historians who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Alan Taylor), the grant support that helped establish a number of Maine institutions, such as the mediation program in the Maine court system, the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine, and Northeast Historic Film…these are just a few highlights from a distinguished list.
But the experience was a humbling one: although I’d lived in Maine since 1964, I soon realized I had had only a small “window” on the state. The learning process continues to this day as I travel around this wonderful place, meeting the people in every community who care deeply about the humanities. It soon became clear that you can accomplish far more working with partners than setting out alone.
January 1995 | That lesson came in handy when the Crisis of 1995 struck the quiet and unsuspecting world of state humanities councils. It was as if the bottom had dropped out when Congressional attempts to eliminate the NEH and the NEA came very close to succeeding. But I didn’t want my staff to lose their jobs, and I couldn’t bear to think that everything we’d accomplished would be lost. I knew I was a competent administrator, but could I become a different kind of leader? Could we save the Council?
It took a great marshalling of many forces. The state councils banded together and made their voices heard in Washington. At home, our courageous board members redefined the nature of our relationship to the people of Maine. We had been badly shaken, but the Council came out of it stronger and far more visible. What had been a small, grantmaking organization affiliated with a federal agency suddenly had to re-invent itself. We had to be nimble and pro-active as a fully operating nonprofit, and we realized we had to do a much better job of explaining to people why what we did mattered.
How very proud I was of our board members, under Geoff Gratwick’s leadership, when they voted in 1999 to accept the NEH Challenge Grant we had been offered—and when, a year later, they proved with their own checkbooks that we could start to meet the match. I quickly learned that asking people for money was not an embarrassment, but a noble deed—as long as your cause is a worthy one. My mentor in these matters was a dear and much missed friend, the late Harriet P. Henry, who in her own path-breaking career as a lawyer and judge had already taught the women of Maine a lesson in what they could accomplish in public life.
And that led to key moment number three...
September 22, 2000 | ...when I stood in front of the gold picket fence here at 674 Brighton Avenue, in Portland, our new home, the nerve-center of our statewide activities, made possible by that capital campaign. We officially moved into the beautifully renovated building that day and have hardly caught our collective staff breath ever since then.
There are so many other projects, so many other people I remember with thankfulness and affection. I contemplate with great pride our close collaboration with the state’s cultural organizations, academic institutions (whose scholars serve us in so many important ways), and service agencies, our nationally-replicated literature and medicine project, our innovative teacher programs, the work in prisons and youth detention centers, and in literacy initiatives for adults, teens, and young children, our New Century projects around the state, our quick response with community programs after 9/11—programs which brought together over 1,000 people in 64 libraries throughout Maine. None of this could have been possible without a brilliant, creative, and energetic staff, one of whom—Erik Jorgensen—has been chosen in a national search to succeed me. I leave the job in the best of hands. It gives me comfort, too, to know that associate director, Victoria Bonebakker, whose wisdom has guided me for the last seventeen years, will continue to work with Erik.
But swan songs can be tricky to sing. There’s the famous story of the night when Leo Slezak (the father of the movie actor Walter Slezak) was singing the title role in Lohengrin. In the final act the hero is supposed to leave on a swan-boat. Stagehands missed their cue, and the boat came in behind Slezak as he sang his farewell aria. The boat then moved stage left without him. As he saw it pull away, he leaned over the edge of the stage and asked the conductor: “What time does the next swan leave?”
I promise not to miss my boat.
Dorothy Schwartz
Executive Director
