| By Thea Jarvis
William A. Sessions, Regents professor of English at Georgia State
University (GSU), is a recent recipient of the 1992 Outstanding Teacher Award
for Ph.D.-granting institutions from the South Atlantic Association of
Departments of English (SAADE).
Dr. Sessions, a parishioner at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Atlanta,
was honored at the University of Knoxville in Tennessee last November by the
South Atlantic Modern Language Association, representing almost 700 colleges
and universities in 11 states. He was chosen from an academic field that
included professors from the Universities of Virginia, North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Duke, Vanderbilt and Emory, among others.
Professor Sessions
is an astute and deservedly renowned scholar
and his approach to classroom teaching earns him consistently high praise from
his students. Wrote Virginia Spencer Carr, chair of Georgia States
English department, in nominating her colleague for the award.
As a teacher, he is an illuminator, she said,
unlocking the vistas of history and literature for his students to absorb
into their own busy modern milieu, taking pains to translate, as he likes to
put it, the words of the past into the urban present.
SAADE gives four awards annually, one each to a junior college teacher, an
instructor, a professor at a senior university and a professor at a university
granting doctoral degrees.
Dr. Sessions was named a Regents professor in November, becoming one of just
10 so designated at Georgia State, where faculty number over 900 and the
student population is 24,000. The Board of Regents for the states
university system grants such appointments to professors nationally recognized
for their scholarship and leadership.
The Regents appointment, which took effect Jan. 1, was something
I had anticipated, Dr. Sessions said during an interview at his home near
Oglethorpe University. The other award I had not anticipated.
He has authored or edited countless books and articles on Renaissance
literature and his poetry has been featured in The Southern Review, The
Chattahoochee Review and The Atlanta Quarterly. His play, A
Shattering of Glass, won the Southern Theater Playwrights Competition
at the University of Mississippi in 1988. He is currently finishing a lengthy
manuscript on the poetry of Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, while teaching at
Georgia State.
I have enormous projects ahead, he said with characteristic
energy.
Dr. Sessions former student, Atlanta Magazine editor Lee
Walburn, said the professor has always been a step ahead of everyone else.
Hes not only ahead of everybody else, hes above everybody
else, Walburn said.
Despite Dr. Sessions keen intelligence and scholarly bent, he is not
easily packaged in neat academic trappings. He was a civil rights marcher in
the fifties and traded literary criticism with E.E. Cummings and William
Faulkner. He spent three colorful years in the New York theater. Only a damaged
knee prevented his becoming a professional dancer.
At the core of Bill Sessions, you also have an artist, said
Victor Kramer, professor of English and American literature at Georgia State.
The pleasant surprise of being named outstanding among an
impressive collection of peers came after over 30 years of teaching. Dr.
Sessions believes he presents not only whats being said in
literature, but the relevance of the studies. For him, making the
classics come alive involves translating the past into the present, helping
students draw relationships from ancient texts to todays world. He feels
such teaching parallels the way the Catholic Church applies its doctrine and
tradition to contemporary culture.
At GSU, where he teaches everything from small graduate seminars in
Renaissance poetry to crowded sophomore survey courses, Dr. Sessions enjoys
reproducing in my teaching what the Catholic Church does, imbuing
the present with the truth and stability of the past.
Dr. Sessions embraced Catholicism in 1956 after an exhaustive exploration of
theology chipped away at his youthful agnosticism.
Raised a Southern Baptist in the little town of Conway, NC, he had left his
early faith behind when he moved into his teens. Baptist teaching was a
very good training for me. I knew the Bible very well, he remembered.
But, my real problem was that I simply didnt believe in God. I
couldnt see that there was any inevitability of the relationship from the
individual to anything else.
At 19, Dr. Sessions graduated from the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill, where he was founding editor of The Carolina Quarterly. He
went on to pursue a masters degree at Columbia University in New York
City and there met Catholic author Caroline Gordon, a member of the Columbia
Faculty. I began reading theology over the next five or six years,
he said, coming back to a concept of God.
After a career in New York that included a stint with the Metropolitan Opera
Ballet Company and a job on Wall Street, he left the city to teach at West
Georgia College in Carrollton. His interest in Catholicism heightened with
trips to the Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, where he
began religious instruction under Father Paul Bourne, OCSO. During that time,
he developed a unique friendship with author Flannery OConnor, who, like
himself, reviewed books for The Georgia Bulletin.
The transition from bright city lights to life in a small southern town was
like coming to the moon, said Dr. Sessions. Carrolltons tiny
Catholic church was only as big as his living room, he recalled, but it boasted
notables like actress Susan Hayward, who married a Carrollton resident and
visited the parish from time to time.
Dr. Sessions said he made the formal move into the Catholic Church at the
age of 27 when the concept of an act of faith was given to me.
From the moment I took first communion I had total
belief, he later wrote to Flannery OConnor. In the 35 years since
becoming Catholic, he says now, there has been not one doubt. It simply
took with me totally from that point.
Dr. Sessions faith was his steady companion when he traveled to
Germany as a Fulbright scholar in 1958. He visited countless shrines throughout
Europe and, at each one, prayed for a wife, If it was Gods
will, he recalls now.
On holiday in Greece during his Fulbright year, he met young Jenny
Delijannis, who became his wife in 1961, after a two-and-a-half-year
intercontinental correspondence. Mrs. Sessions teaches foreign languages at
Tucker High School in DeKalb County and the couple has two sons. Andrew, 30, is
finishing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. Eric, 27, is
a third year medical student at the Medical College of Georgia.
Before he made Georgia his permanent home, Dr. Sessions taught for two years
at Jesuit-run Spring Hill College in Mobile, where he formed a close friendship
with Catholic author and fellow convert, Walker Percy. He returned to New York
to complete his doctorate in English and comparative literature at Columbia
before joining the staff at Georgia State in 1967.
As an academic and a Catholic, Dr. Sessions brings a unique perspective to
education and its place in the fabric of faith. For him, private education
the Catholic high school in particular is more workable and
efficient than the public system.
This is where the church is at its best, he said.
The rich tradition of Catholic schools needs to be revived.
Too much of the churchs financial resources are put into social
programs, said Dr. Sessions, yet poverty is perennial, like original sin.
Its going to be there.
Teaching sound Catholic doctrine ultimately enhances the churchs
outreach to the poor, he believes, since charity to others is fundamental to
the faith.
Unless we have centers of education, were not going to have a
Catholic identity that knows how to deal with knotty moral and social
issues, he said. Catholic schools are designed to train the
intellect. In its schools, the Catholic Church has a forum
for promoting values and leadership.
Dr. Kramer described his colleague as a king of Catholic
presence at Georgia State. He said Dr. Sessions faith is
absolutely central to his life and work.
He has had a direct influence on students who have subsequently become
Catholics, said Dr. Kramer, a member of St. Thomas More parish in
Deactur. He shares the experience of his Catholicism, even bringing
loaves of monastery bread to GSU secretaries.
The Monastery of the Holy Spirit continues to be an important part of Dr.
Sessions life, Dr. Kramer said, adding that his friend usually schedules
a trip to Conyers at the end of every academic quarter.
Father Paul, whose longtime friendship with Flannery OConnor began
when Dr. Sessions introduced the monk to the author, said Dr. Sessions is
well-known for his conservative Catholicism.
But hes not a narrow-minded conservative at all,
Father Paul said. His strict Catholicism is conservative. His attitude
toward life is well-grounded.
He is so smart, brilliant, said Father Paul.
Hes just deeply attached to the Catholic faith.
|