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The words of Marilyn Krysl’s grandparents, who read the Bible aloud every morning before breakfast, still echo in her mind. And Jesus said… . And Paul said… . Thou shalt and thou shalt not… . There is a time to sow and a time to reap.

Such words were enthralling and musical. “I had little understanding of what the words meant, but I fell under the spell of the music in that language,” she recalled in an interview with the University of Notre Dame.

She also became enamored of music itself. But the mumps took the hearing from one ear. “I felt deeply wounded, and I felt this loss prevented me from continuing in music,” she said.

Though she endured a loss, there was also a gain: “That loss made me feel more sensitive to, more aware of, loss, my own and the losses of others. Perhaps it engendered an ability to feel compassion for others,” she said.

That compassion, combined with a deep love of and appreciation for language, no doubt helped propel her into a life of writing. But her conception of “writing,” like the depth of her compassion, might fairly be described as atypical.

“As a child, I thought words came out of the ground and wind blew them into our mouths,” Krysl said in a recent interview with Mary Crow, Colorado’s poet laureate.

“Then I was taught not to believe this, but now I believe it again. Everything in the natural world is connected, and I am a place, a location in space, time and greenery where arrangements of language arrive on a current of air, and I write the words down, word for word. ‘I’ do not make these soundings up; they appear.”

Krysl echoed this view in a 2009 interview with Oregon Quarterly, the Magazine of the University of Oregon, saying: “I feel that as writers we trick ourselves into imagining that we are actually doing this thing called writing. Such egos! I am very sure that I’m not doing anything other than occupying this place where some interesting language seeps through.”

If so, she’s held an auspicious place. Krysl, a retired English professor from the University of Colorado, was named as a finalist for a 2010 Colorado Book Award. The nod was for her most recent collection of poems, “Swear the Burning Vow.”

Another poet, Bin Ramke, won the award. Krysl describes him as a “formidable talent.” But Krysl’s credentials are no less impressive.

Krysl has published seven books of poetry and four of stories. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and others.  Her stories appear in Best American Short Stories 2000, O. Henry Prize Stories, Sudden Fiction, Sudden Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and the Lawrence Foundation Prize for fiction, is former director of CU’s Creative Writing Program and a founding editor of Many Mountains Moving, a literary journal.

Her work draws praise from many corners.

The late John Updike, who won two Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction, wrote. “Krysl is funny, fierce and feminist in the best possible way, and a technician of variety and resourcefulness. I read her short stories with considerable pleasure, surprise and admiration.”

Katherine Eggert, associate professor and chair of the English Department, said Krysl has left her mark on the university. “In her nearly three decades of teaching creative writing in the English Department, Marilyn Krysl was a profound influence on several generations of student poets and a great mentor for younger faculty,” Eggert said.

“Her powerful and lyrical writing, both poetry and prose, focuses on the profoundest of topics: pain, war, famine, and injury, but also healing, human connection, and love.”

Krysl has faced these profound and painful topics directly and in person. She has taught English as a Second Language in the People’s Republic of China, served as artist in residence at the Center for Human Caring, worked as a volunteer for Peace Brigade International in Sri Lanka, and volunteered at the Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying administered by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity in Calcutta. She volunteers with the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Her passion for teaching is as palpable as her commitment to being a conduit for poetry.

Beginning writers, Krysl told Crow, should start with immersion: “Steep yourself in the rich soup of raw language. And choose as your addiction reading the great works from the past and present.

“I urge students to listen to the music in language,” Krysl continued. “We’re mostly unconscious of this inherent musicality, but when a waiter asks you what you want to drink, and you say ‘a glass of California chardonnay,’ you’ve spoken an iambic pentameter line, the most common line in English poetry.”

She added: “Writers are musicians, you body is your instrument, and language jams.”

But such music might never be heard without encouragement. As Krysl told the University of Notre Dame, a good teacher’s influence can be profound. She recalls in high school having a “wonderful teacher named Jane” who urged her to write. “One day, I used the word ‘ligneous’ in a composition, a word I’d learned reading Faulkner, and Jane didn’t know this word and had to look it up.

“She was delighted with me; I could feel her delight. I felt truly loved by this teacher, and I’ve never forgotten it. The right teacher at the right time can make a very great difference.”

Also see the University of  with Krysl. See “” in Oregon Quarterly.  And see the .