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FEATURED AUTHOR—JEFF DANIEL MARION Jeff Daniel Marion's "Homestead/Where All Our Words Grow Warm" Marianne Worthington LIKE MOST NATIVE APPALACHIANS, Danny Marion did not fully understand his relationship to his home place until he moved away. In the late 1960s Marion took a teaching position in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he soon became deeply homesick for the mountains and trout streams of East Tennessee. He wrote letters to friends and relatives back home and slowly recovered through language the landscapes and locale that he couldn't find in Mississippi. While he was away from home, Marion wrote one of his earliest poems, "Watercolor Of An East Tennessee Farm," later collected in his first book, Out in the Country, Back Home: Always there is a backporch its screen door ajar framing an old woman who is pitching water outside, the water arching its back like the cat, ready to rub her legs. This small lyric, a still life of the rural ways in East Tennessee, was one of the first poems to fix the poetic vision and focus Marion has followed ever since. It was also enough to send him back home. After a year in Mississippi, Marion returned to Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, where he had been teaching and resumed his position as a professor in the English Department. Upon his retirement thirty-five years later, Marion remarked at his farewell reading in April 2002 that "home" had been his obsessive theme, his metaphor for a life's work. Born July 7, 1940, in Rogersville, Tennessee, Marion was the only child of J.D. Marion and Eloise Gladson Marion. Two of his father's brothers had also married two of his mother's sisters, and Danny Marion was the only child of those three marriages. Growing up 16 inside this extended family, Marion learned to listen. He once described his family as one "that spent a great deal of time talking." The families often gathered at his grandmother's house, and he would wander from room to room, listening to the conversations of his relatives. When Marion was three years old, his father took a war-time job in Detroit at the Alcoa plant. This two-year separation from the family homestead was perhaps Marion's first realization of what it means to be from a particular geographical location as he witnessed the exile, homesickness, and sacrifices of his parents in a foreign place. This family displacement later became the impetus for Marion's 2001 collection Letters Home. After his education in the Rogersville public school system, Marion went off to college at the University of Tennessee, in Knoxville, where he was somewhat reluctant to reveal his small-town origins to classmates and professors at a major university. Marion recalls that he had to learn over time how to accept his sense of place, birthright, and heritage. He received a B.A. in English from UT, then taught high school English in Knoxville and Rogersville until he returned to UT to earn a master's degree. In 1966, he began teaching at Carson-Newman and, except for his brief exile to Mississippi, was there until he retired in 2002 as Associate Professor of English, Distinguished Poet-inResidence , and Director of the Appalachian Center. Tracing all ofMarion's accomplishments during his teaching career is a difficult task. First, literally thousands of his former college students can attest to his talents in the classroom and his frequent and successful use of the Socratic method, described by one former student as a "civil, understated invitation to discovery." Second, perhaps thousands more students have been the beneficiaries of his many appearances as writing workshop leader, poet in the school, or writerin -residence at places all across the southern highlands. But Marion the educator seldom required students to study his work; rather, Marion featured and fostered the work of other artists in the Appalachian region and beyond. One good example is the "Voices Along the Way" series Marion originated at Carson-Newman with one of his colleagues in the mid 1970s. This authors' series was inaugurated by North Carolina poet Betty Adcock, who agreed to come to campus for a reading...

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