Chemeketa Voices

Called and Herded:
Jan VanStavern

When friends learned she was adopting a child, Jan VanStavern received a lot of advice.

“One of the things they would say was that as soon as I had a kid, my neighborhood would seem more dangerous,” said the award-winning poet and Chemeketa Community College writing and literature instructor.  “I thought, ‘No, not me.’”

Shortly before the adoption was final, the tires were stolen off her husband’s car. Then the whole car was stolen shortly after the couple returned from China with their daughter, Zoe.

VanStavern had already been preparing to move because of tight financial times, but she had of less an idea of where the family would move. She’d though about Portland, but she’d grown weary of listening to friends talk about the city “like it was a religious experience.”

Nothing bores me more than people talking about the places where they live. I figured it rained a lot.”

They’d talk about Powell’s.

“I’d be, ‘It’s a bookstore,'” said Van Stavern.

When a friend moved back to the Rose City, VanStavern relented and made a trip north from Oakland, Calif., to Oregon.

Not		right or wrong
	(He is the person who seems "off," to some,
  walking oddly--)


			He prefers right hand turns
only. It is awkward anyway


	being a boy.
Large, strong, with red hair


(my sister's hair)-


The mind has filters
		trained like silia
in a blue whale's mouth: saying,


	I am only letting in small fish.
But the larger mind,
     	Filter-free,


Invents its own rare patterns.
He can remember any number.
At six, knew the freeway grid of Boston.


     The computer 	of such data
repeats his favorite song. Gets lost


	looking at stranger's garage doors.
Is held up by blood and love-his


and those of his people.  (They smile and frown)


	All that math
		working its busy way


through one quiet keeper.

“I had a conversion experience. I felt called to move to Portland,” she admitted. “I was a poet and my husband was a bronze sculptor. It’s sort of insane for two people in those professions – who have figured out how to pay rent – to just drop everything and move.”

Then, one day, she heard voices outside, looked out her window and saw a police officer with a megaphone and a rifle at the foot of the steps leading up to her house. A person with a gun was loose in the neighborhood.

“I called up my husband, told him not to come home with our daughter, and started packing boxes. We were moving,” she said. “We say now that we were called and herded at the same time.”

Odd jobs

Writing has been a passion for the Ohio-native since she was young. In the sixth grade, she wrote a “really bad,” 50-page novella. Her teacher at the time refused to read it because it was too long.

VanStavern is something of a legend in her hometown. Legend in that she managed to get her father, an agriculture man, to pay for a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.

“All his friends would ask him how I was ever going to find a job. I think they’re still surprised it worked out,” she said.

When she moved to Philadelphia, Pa., and began writing for a local newspaper, part of Van Stavern’s agreement with the paper was a copy of each edition had to be sent back to her parents to prove she’d gotten a job in a field related to her degree.

After her newspaper job, VanStavern took on a job as a fictional nun. She was hired to write “thank you” letters to donors supporting a Catholic organization. She wrote under the nom de plume Sr. Agnes Ann. She gave up the gig when she moved to California to attend graduate school at the University of California-Davis, she eventually received her doctorate from the school.

In addition to meeting her future husband at the school, VanStavern developed a love of Chinese poetry in translation, and particularly that of the Tang dynasty.

“I think for people on the West Coast, the poetry of early China sounds and feels real. It led me to a love of Chinese culture,” she said.

When she and her husband started thinking about adopting a child, knowing about some of the difficulties domestic adoption can bring with it, they decided to adopt internationally. She was teaching Chinese poetry at the Dominican University of California when she traveled to China to meet Zoe.

“I would send pictures back to them, but people still ask me what China was like. I have to tell them I don’t know because I had a toddler,” she said.

She wrote about her experiences adopting Zoe in a poetry chapbook, “Round New World,” due out this fall from Conflux Press.

VanStavern was already applying for teaching jobs when the changing atmosphere of her neighborhood in Oakland prompted the move.

“I had a couple of near misses, but it wasn’t until I interviewed with Chemeketa that I felt as though I liked everyone I met,” she said.

No easy answers

VanStavern still remembers walking through Building 2 on the Salem campus, on the way to her interview, and trying to assess the climate of the college as a whole. The exercise left her stumped.

“Now that I’ve been teaching here for a while, I know that the great thing is that there is no easy answer. Everyone here is their own individual answer, but I’m always impressed at how open our students are and how hard they try,” she said.

As a creative writing instructor she is often privy to some of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the students she teaches and it’s given her new perspective.

“I admire each one of the students here. We can rebuild ourselves a million times in one lifetime and Chemeketa is a place where almost everyone is actively doing that,” she said.

By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.

Updated July 24, 2008 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.