Photo by Kelly Gorham

"I was hired on a fluke and got to stay," Keeler said. In fact, Keeler almost didn't get to stay. After his first two years at MSU, his job was opened up and other candidates were brought in for interviews. Keeler found out about that when his job was offered, coincidentally, to one of his father's graduate students, who took a job elsewhere.

Keeler said the issue was that he wasn't publishing in professional journals, although he was making a name for himself, even then, by writing popular poems, sonnets and songs. Although Keeler endured some tough years at MSU, at one time hiring a lawyer to help him through a successful battle to gain tenure, his bitterness did not last long.

"In fact, this place has rewarded me," Keeler said. "It has been good to me for years." Indeed, Keeler has become one of MSU's most recognized professors in the humanities. He has received a Governor's Award for the Humanities and last year's designation as an MSU Distinguished Professor for the College of Letters and Science, as well as critical praise for his writings.

"In a way, this place has made me the way I am with writing and creativity, which is to not look at it as a career, but something that I do. It's not a hobby either. Writing and poetry are just part of how I live."

And writing poetry is something that Keeler still does regularly.

"There was a long time that I wrote a poem every day. The sonnets were just coming out. I wrote 450 of them when I could hardly do anything else because I was so messed up emotionally," he said of what he admits to being a rocky mid-life crisis that cost him his long-time marriage to his wife Judy, a former MSU adjunct professor of English. The two have since remarried. Keeler writes honestly about that time in Trash Fish.

"To get out of (the crisis) I turned to painting," he said.

Keeler said he started painting by buying a small learn-to-paint kit.

"At first, I said, 'OK, I have a job, so I can afford to waste paint and canvas while I learn.' So I went out and bought more paint and a bigger canvas."

Keeler progressed and found other people liked his acrylics. He said he likes to paint with acrylics because they are easy to clean up and he began painting in his kitchen. Nowadays he has a small studio in his garage.

"I'm still not invested in any of it, but I enjoy it," Keeler said. "Everything in painting is an illusion. It has to be. It's just paint.

"It is rewarding, painting a window on a little world. Music exists in space and time, and poems go out of print. So, sometimes I find working with paint to be the most rewarding because I have something to show for it."

Keeler said he believes there is some truth that creativity probably does lead to more creativity, in part because of resulting endorphins. "But whether they come from the process or the end result, I don't know... A lot of this is just a compulsion."

Hear Greg Keeler in this story's Web exclusive.

Return to regular view	Text-only              Email this article	Published: 4/27/2009