Fielding Dawson

Fielding Dawson's fiction, essays and art/literary criticism appeared in books, magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad for over thirty years. He published 23 books during his lifetime-stories, novels, memoirs and poems. His writing roots reach back to Black Mountain College in 1949, where he went to study art and stayed to write and make images. After years spent writing in New York City, he taught writing in U.S. prisons for 17 years, while also working with at-risk teenagers in alternative high schools. Fielding was chairman of the PEN Prison Writing Committee and director of the PEN Prison Writing Workshop Program. His literary archives are held by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut at Storrs.

Fielding Dawson (1930—2002)
American writer and painter
by Wally Dobelis, reproduced with permission

A prominent book editor stopped me on the street to comment, bitterly, that no one in the big press had seen fit to remark on the passing of Fielding Dawson, a local NYC resident and one of the last survivors of the literary era that is associated with Black Mountain, the Beats, and their contemporaries in other forms of art-Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Shaped Canvas-as well as early Rock.

I knew Fielding as one of the stalwarts of Max's Kansas City, the legendary artists' hangout from 1965 to 1974, as a short story writer and baseball fan. He was the pitcher for Max's softball team, and he had a pitch for me too, to support Shortstop Press. Fielding knew small press publishing; he had written and drawn illustrations for such literary journals of the era as Jonathan Williams's Jargon, Sparrow, Kulchur, Caterpillar, El Corno Emplumado, Joglars, Rockbottom, Mulch and The Zealot. The names bring back the flavor of the era. We talked a lot, in the company of the Old Curmudgeon, a prominent lawyer friend. OC fondly remembers traveling with Fielding to the Cedar Bar on University Place, and to Lion's Head on Christopher Street, two prominent watering places for artists and writers.

In 1930, after the birth of a son in Depression-bound New York, the Dawson family lived in Florida and Pennsylvania before returning to his mother's home town, Kirkwood, Mo, near St. Louis. His father had found a job in journalism, remaining in NYC, and eventually young Fielding acquired a taste for drawing and writing. In 1949 he joined the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina and studied painting under Franz Kline and writing under Charles Olson.

Black Mountain College was founded in 1933 as a community of students and teachers, to live and work together, by John Andrew Rice of Florida. It gained strength with the arrival of Joseph and Anni Albers, fleeing Germany after the Bauhaus was closed. Poet Charles Olson led a group that became known as the Black Mountain Writers that included Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and Fielding Dawson. Among the 300 people who taught at BMC before the school closed in 1956 were also John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Buckminster Fuller.

The school experience shaped Dawson's life. After being drafted in the Army in 1952, as a conscientious objector, and experiencing military service in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was a cook, he came to New York. Here Franz Kline was setting the world of art on fire. The old (before the fire) Cedar Bar on University Place was home to Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and occasionally, Jackson Pollock, and Dawson wrote about them all. The recognition gained with his memoir of Kline, published in 1967 (the artist died in 1962), freed him of the drudgery of a service manager's job at Bon Marché on 5th Ave, and he could concentrate on writing and design (he created collages and artwork for a number of magazines). And he wrote and continued to publish short stories.

Fielding Dawson taught writing to prisoners at Sing Sing and Attica, near Buffalo, the site of the bloody 1971 uprising. His first creative writing class there in 1984 changed his life and gave him a purpose, a commitment to facilitate self-discovery for convicts. Not an easy thing, violent men came to his classes with an attitude, and he had to learn how to criticize, all over again, in an environment of threat.

Recognizing his commitment, Larry McMurtry, then president of the American PEN, appointed Dawson to chair their languishing Prison Writing Committee. He also had a radio program on WBAI, 1993-2000, reading prison inmates' writings on the air.

Of Dawson's recent books, No Man's Land, (Dec. 2000) was a fictionalized account of his teaching in prisons, and The Land of Milk and Honey (Fall 2001) was a collection of short stories. A review in the New York Times, described his style as loose, almost bebop. That was the way his generation wrote. Creeley and other reviewers have described it as fast shifts, doubling back and reversing, a way of telling a story that immediately convinces.

Of the historiographers of Black Mountain College, Fielding Dawson was the only one who actually studied there, and his eponymous 1970 book, revised and reissued in 1990, is in print.

His 22 books were written over a nearly 50 year period, on a range of subject matter. Most are collections of short stories (his mother bought him a typewriter at 15, remarking "we could use a new Saroyan.") There are also biographies, criticism, poems and novels. The title of the novel Penny Lane gave birth to Two and Three Penny Lane.

Black Sparrow Press, a recognized publishing house of many important poets of the era, took him on in 1969, with Krazy Kat, a collection of short stories. This press was organized in 1966 by businessman John Martin to print the poems of Charles Bukowski, and took on a life of its own, as the flagship venue for Diane Wakoski, Clayton Eshelman, also Paul Bowles, Ed Sanders, William Everson and Tom Clarke.

Fielding Dawson had lived in his East Midtown-Gramercy neighborhood for 38 years, in the same house, sharing it for the past 25 with Susan Maldovan, a free-lance editor, and frequently traveling to prisons and universities to lecture on writing and on the literary period of which he was an integral part. He was a periodic visitor at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO and had recently lectured at the University of Alabama in Montgomery, Wayne University in Detroit, and Kenyon College in Ohio. He and Susan were active locally, as members of the Union Square Community Coalition and the Samuel J. Tilden Democratic Club.

Fielding Fielding died suddenly, on January 5, 2002, after returning home from a stay in the Lenox Hill Hospital, where he had been fitted with a pace maker.

The survivors include a sister, Cara Fisher, of Canyon City CO. There was a memorial service on Sunday, March 3, 2002 in the Parish Hall of St. Mark's Church In The Bowery.

Reproduced with permission from Town & Village weekly newspaper (Hagedorn Communications).

Here are some memories of Fielding, posted on Tom Raworth's site. I'll repro them here because they're damn near impossible to read there, with that biege-green background.

FIELDING DAWSON CITATIONS AND AWARDS

PEN American Center sponsors annual writing awards, named in Fielding's honor, for federal, state and county prisoners.

Fielding Dawson Citation for a Body of Work: David Wood, Released, St. Petersburg, Florida
Fielding Dawson Citation for Outstanding Achievement: William Van Poyck, Sussex State Prison, Waverly, Virginia
Fielding Dawson New Voices Prize: The Glove Compartment, Yvette N. Louisell, Iowa Correctional Institution for Women, Mitchellville, Iowa
Fielding Dawson New Voices Prize: In the Infirmary and Outside the Kentucky State Penitentiary, Joe R. Knight, Kentucky State Penitentiary Eddyville, Kentucky
Fielding Dawson New Voices Prize: Tragedy and Basketball, Peter T. Paulson, Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, Carlisle, Indiana
Fielding Dawson New Voices Prize: Man, The Island, William Tyler III, High Desert State Prison, Susanville, California