R.I.P. Robin Metz

Robin Metz, professor and writer, died yesterday after a long illness.  He taught writing for fifty years at Knox College, and was its longest serving faculty member at the time of his death.  He began teaching fiction in 1967, and eventually expanded the Knox writing program to become one of the school's largest.  He died in his sleep, on his farm in Wisconsin, with his wife and his daughters near him.

Robin with me in the background in
my Arlo Guthrie hat

I was one of Robin's first students and majors, and knew him for a few years at the very beginning of his teaching career.  He came to Knox directly from the Iowa Writers Workshop.  Since I was a senior, there was only about four years difference in our ages.  It also happened that we were near neighbors that year, both residing on West First Street.  So in addition to the campus classes and interactions, I spent many evenings at his house, sharing tumblers of bourbon and lots of talk--everything from politics to old Pittsburgh radio shows we remembered (we were both from western Pennsylvania) and even literature and writing.

We were in his living room to see LBJ announce he wasn't running for another term, and the night Robert Kennedy was shot.  He was on the bus of Knox students that went to Washington for the antiwar protest at the Pentagon.  At a rest stop on the way back, some women got fed up with the lines in the ladies room and invaded the men's.  He glanced back at them and said, "This is the most revolutionary thing that's happened this weekend."

 Robin was kind and helpful to me, and for awhile after I'd officially left Knox the guest bedroom in his new house was open to me on Galesburg visits.  He was married to a different Lynn then, the mother of his two little girls.

Robin was a fiction writer in those days.  Later he turned to poetry and plays, for which he won awards.  He was a teacher throughout, and his qualities and influence as a teacher I am sure will be fully praised by the following forty-nine years of students.

Robin combined warmth with an incisive sense of humor. He had great charm, and despite tragedies, he probably would have agreed that he also led a charmed life, and a full one.  May he rest in peace.