Chemeketa Voices
A Mightier Pen:
Justus Ballard
Our first lessons are often some of the hardest. Case in point: Justus Ballard, Chemeketa Community College English instructor.
Ballard’s first foray into higher education as a student was in pursuit of a philosophy degree far from his hometown in California at Boston University, and his first lesson was something of a jolt.
“I learned $120,000 for a useless degree was a bad idea, illogical,” said Ballard. “For people interested in pursuing specific careers it’s great. It just wasn’t for me.”
Full of humor, both self-deprecating and many other kinds, Ballard personifies the notion that writing itself is as much about living as it is about putting pen to paper. While he’s good with words, his enthusiasm for all he does is evident in the way he half-crosses his legs in an office chair and leans over them as he relates the long and winding tale of how he landed at Chemeketa.
Ballard returned to California and took a semester at Fresno Community College before enrolling in the English literature program at UCLA where he earned his bachelor’s degree and landed a job working for a literary agent. Ballard had grown up loving movies and making home videos with friends, but working in Hollywood itself sucked all that joy right out of him. His primary function with the literary agent was mining screenplays for either good content or good writers and then providing the appropriate feedback. The work wasn’t bad, but the culture was a grind.
“Getting a job in Hollywood is incredibly easy. You just go down there and you work for free until somebody starts paying you,” he said. “But, while you are working for free, you are out and about spending money that you don’t have making yourself available to the social scene, which is where all of the work gets done. So it is actually that easy to get a job as long as you have somebody you can fall back on, or really generous friends that don’t mind you crashing and taking advantage of their hospitality.”
After paying off student loans, he traveled back to Boston where he picked up a gig evaluating literature sites on the Internet for a start-up company that pulled out when it realized the venture was unlikely to earn it any money. He was working for the U.S. Census Bureau in 2000 when he got a call from a friend asking if he would be willing to be a nanny to her newborn while she finished her last term at UCLA.
“They couldn’t afford childcare, but they could afford a ticket to bring me out to their place where I would watch their kid and they would give me food,” said Ballard.
He moved back in with his parents in Fresno after the nanny work ended and started working for a package delivery company.
Ballard’s description of Fresno begins and ends with, “It’s a nice place to be from.”
It wasn’t exactly a mecca of youth culture, but Ballard and his friends believed there were enough of them to support an alternative weekly newspaper. Ballard was appointed the arts and entertainment editor because he was one of the few that had lived in other cities and read the publications his would be modeled after. Between writing reviews of the local entertainment, Ballard also wrote and drew the paper’s comic strip.
“We had a syndication package, but the best strips it had were “Cathy” and Ziggy,” neither of which fit the mold we were striving for,” he said. “I cannot draw to save my life. I drew a shark because that is the one thing I can draw. The strip was basically this shark and I would Photoshop in whoever he was going to bite.”
View a SHARK strip.
For a time it made life in Fresno more bearable, at least for the employees of the newspaper, but administrative shake-ups drastically changed the direction of the product.
“I stayed on because I needed the money and I was being paid quite a bit of money to put out a product that I had lost all faith in. We only lasted about eight or nine months and only the first six of those were fun,” said Ballard.
His experience with the newspaper and Fresno had two positive impacts on his life. (1) He met the woman who would become his wife and (2) it provided him the illusion of being “gainfully employed,” which, he admits, significantly helped his chances with No. 1.
During a trip to the Pacific Northwest, Ballard and his wife fell in love with the Portland area and decided that they would make a move north. They arrived on Sept. 9, 2001. The job market dried up two days later.
Ballard decided to return to school. He was accepted into Antioch University’s MFA program. While working on his master’s degree he wrote The Cubist Infant, which would later become his first novella. He also met a classmate, Eric Delehoy, who was editing and publishing a GLBT literary journal, Gertude. Delehoy was contemplating the end of the journal, but Ballard convinced him otherwise.
“I convinced him that he should continue publishing, and he then convinced me that for that to happen I would have to help him do that. So I became the fiction editor,” Ballard said.
He’s held the position ever since.
After completing his master’s degree, Ballard found himself in a somewhat unusual position. He was qualified to teach, but he had no in-classroom experience. The only comparable experience he had was teaching magic tricks to students in an after-school program as a teenager.
When he started applying for jobs, he focused solely on community colleges, because even if he didn’t have the experience he knew he had the mindset.
“Both my parents are educators so I knew there was never any chance of me doing something else. But, I knew to be a good teacher it required you to be not as selfish and self-absorbed as I was when I was in my early twenties, so I needed some time to kind of do things that I wanted to do first,” he said.
Ballard was hired by Chemeketa to fill in for a class without an instructor four days before the fall term began in 2005. His course load has increased each year since with creative writing, composition and film classes occupying much of his time. He’s also helping to create Building 45, a new online literary/arts journal.
When it came to choosing between community colleges and four-year programs, there really was no choice. Of all his education experiences, the single term Ballard spent at Fresno Community College proved to be his most enjoyable and his most memorable.
“The instructors were all real human-beings who would actually sit down and talk to you, not only about the subjects they were teaching but about how things were going. They took the time to know your name, and they took the time to make their classes interesting and to share their enthusiasm,” Ballard said.
While he enjoys all of his classes at Chemeketa, he’s still actively pursuing some personal goals: writing a novel, making a film, and recording an album (He’s already got a couple of the latter under his belt as part of a band with his wife and sister. Ballard writes, sings and plays guitar).
“But they have to be good. You have to put ‘good’ in front of each of those,” he said.
By Eric A. Howald. Have a great Chemeketa story? Send us an e-mail.
Updated May 7, 2008 by Marketing and Student Recruitment.