Martha Highers: Tribute to Heide Weidner
When Heide Weidner looks back at Under the Sun’s twenty-two years as a literary journal, one of the first of its kind devoted solely to creative nonfiction, the thing that surprises her most is that it’s still here.
“I’m amazed that we’re still in existence,” she says. “And also that we’re independent.”
That is all largely thanks to Heide herself. For most of the journal’s life, seventeen of its twenty-two years, Heide has been its editor. She has helped it grow from a print journal to an on-line publication and from a university-associated endeavor to an independent journal. She has shaped its design, its content, and its process, a commitment that she has undertaken by and large as a volunteer.
“In the beginning we didn’t even get a course reduction for doing it,” Heide says. Begun in 1996 as the brainchild of Michael O’Rourke, another Tennessee Tech English professor, the journal was something that he, Heide, and other faculty volunteers worked to publish, all while still teaching a full course load at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, Tennessee. (Heide’s job there was Coordinator/Director of First-Year Writing.) When O’Rourke said he wanted to give up the editorship in 2001, Heide agreed to take it on, and after about ten years of working with Under the Sun she did receive a one-course reduction from her department head. This is the only thing resembling “pay” that she has ever received from the journal, though, and when she retired from teaching in 2011, taking the journal with her, it became an entirely voluntary effort again.
As a member of the journal’s staff since 2013, I have seen how Heide pulls the journal into being each year. Not for the faint of heart, it is a nine-month commitment of time and mind. And it is also not the only thing Heide does during those months either as she is also an artist, a potter, a singer, a gardener, a great cook, and a traveler of the world. She has children, grandchildren, and many friends who claim and enjoy her time, and yet somehow she has also devoted a significant amount of her life to this creative endeavor of Under the Sun.
Why? What are the rewards? There have been many, she says. She cherishes the relationships she has formed with authors over the years. She is proud of the journal itself, especially the “Ruminations” section she created, a portion of the journal that discusses the writing process. She is proud that, for each year of its publication, some of Under the Sun’s essays have been recognized in Best American Essays. She is also proud of the feedback she and the staff give to authors. “In ninety percent of cases the feedback we give to authors is specific and personalized, even to essays that we reject. I’m proud of that. Authors tell me how much they appreciate that. And they tell me that level of response from a journal is rare.” (And next year, when I edit Under the Sun, I hope to continue that process.)
But there is more that I would say of Heide Weidner:
One is that an outsider coming to this journal for the first time might be most surprised to discover that its editor, Heide, is not a native speaker of the journal’s language, for Heide was born and grew up in post-World War II Germany, and German is her native tongue. She quickly read her way to fluency in both German and English (and she also knows Latin, French, and Italian).
“My mother used to say when I was young, ‘You don’t read books, you inhale them,’” Heide said. I can picture this easily: the small, puckish Heide, owlish and bright, smiling when her mother said this. I can picture it because Heide is still the same, sitting as she tells me this in her light-filled living room, its walls lined with books. I don’t need her to tell me that she is a great reader, or that it is this love of reading that has kept her, partly, with Under the Sun.
But there is another story from her childhood that resonates with me even more. Once when she was growing up, her father, lacking a beast of burden, enlisted the help of his daughters to till the soil.
“I told him he was the only man in Germany who hitched his daughters to a plow,” she said, laughing. And this is the image that lingers with me, as I think of Heide pulling Under the Sun along for the last seventeen years.
Fortunately, Heide plans to continue with Under the Sun next year, even as she hands the editorship to me. She will be a reader, my advisor, and assist with the publishing. In the meantime she plans to travel to Italy, to hike in the Alps and part of the Kumano Kodo trail in Japan, and to sing with the Cookeville Mastersingers at Carnegie Hall. We wish her light journeys filled with the rewards she has earned, and all of us at Under the Sun thank her for the work she has done with this journal. Heide is an artist, and that, perhaps says it all. As Isak Dinesen said, speaking through one of her characters, “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.” Certainly, in Under the Sun, Heide has done her best.