By Steve Seepersaud
As a student at Harpur College, with class schedules full of male professors, Molly Peacock '69 turned to poetry books to find female role models, and hoped she'd eventually be one herself.
"I thought, 'If only I could just become one line in a table of contents...I felt that I somehow would last,'" Peacock said.
With a career as a poet, biographer, essayist and short fiction writer that has spanned nearly 50 years, it's an understatement to say Peacock has lasted.
She returned to the University March 5, to read some of her published works and share Binghamton memories with 50 people, including students, alumni and local community members. The Binghamton Center for Writers sponsored the reading.
Peacock said she didn't enroll at Binghamton specifically to take creative writing, but found inspiration in a poetry elective.
"I discovered that my professor was speaking about literature in a way that I always felt," she said. "And, I had some feeling to climb inside a poem."
She said it's important for writers to remain true to their own voices, rather than trying to guess what audiences will want in the hopes of producing marketable works. Peacock started her session by reading "The Flaw" to emphasize that a writer's work will never be perfect, even when packaged into something as compact as a poem.
"There are no perfect poems," she said. "You can see the hand of the maker in the poem, and there are sometimes mistakes."
Her latest book The Analyst is inspired by a relationship she formed at Binghamton. This collection is about Joan Stein, a campus therapist who counseled Peacock. The therapy continued long after both had relocated to New York City.
"It isn't always the case that one writes about one's life," Peacock said. "But there are stories you feel that you must tell. And, why would you tell the story in a poem? Because the development of characters and the circumstances are not what you are after. What you're after is the still point of emotion. And, that is what happens in a lyric poem."
The campus visit also included seeing her manuscript collection at the Bartle Library – she joked that it's unusual for a living writer to do this – and speaking to a class taught by Christine Gelineau, associate director of the Binghamton Center for Writers.
Peacock offered encouragement to aspiring writers, saying the road ahead of them will be a tough one to navigate, but worth the struggle.
"You have to keep pushing forward. All of you. If you're serious about what you're writing, you must keep pushing on."
