Marjorie Swann

Hendrix first lady loves literature, teaching

Marjorie Swann, whose doctorate is in British literature, sits at her desk at Hendrix College in Conway with the book she spent three years editing and a vintage ashtray she got off eBay and uses as a candy dish. She said students sometimes rub Shakespeare’s bald head and take a piece of candy before an exam. Swann is married to Hendrix President Bill Tsutsui.
Marjorie Swann, whose doctorate is in British literature, sits at her desk at Hendrix College in Conway with the book she spent three years editing and a vintage ashtray she got off eBay and uses as a candy dish. She said students sometimes rub Shakespeare’s bald head and take a piece of candy before an exam. Swann is married to Hendrix President Bill Tsutsui.

Marjorie Swann’s resumé, which includes her doctorate in 17th-century British literature, is intimidating, but her personality isn’t.

For example, in her office in the English department at Hendrix College, she has on her desk a ceramic dish, indentations spaced evenly around the outside, with a small bust of Shakespeare in the center. The dish holds bite-size Butterfinger and Baby Ruth candy bars.

“Do you know what that is?” the 52-year-old asked. It was an ashtray. “It was my best find on eBay. The thought of Shakespeare floating around in a sea of cigarette butts in a pub — the irony of this really appeals to me.”

She played a game with students during conferences last week. They could take a piece of candy, but if they could guess what the dish was originally, they could take two pieces.

“Only two out of six could identify it,” the teetotaler and nonsmoker said.

“Students … they’ll rub Shakespeare’s bald head before an exam for good luck; then they’ll grab a Butterfinger,” she said, laughing.

Swann, the wife of new Hendrix President Bill Tsutsui, does not take teaching so lightly. The professor of English has won “a slew” of teaching awards, as her husband put it on his blog.

Among her many teaching honors, the most recent is the Golden Apple Award she received from the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where she and her husband were employed before coming to Hendrix. An accomplished former student nominated her, which she said made the award that much sweeter.

Tsutsui warned Hendrix students in his blog: “Dr. Swann will work you hard and have no patience for sloppiness or laziness.” He also gave them this advice: “Take Dr. Swann’s classes, because you will learn more in one semester about reading, writing and thinking than you ever thought possible.”

Swann has a passion to support and inspire students as her mentors supported and inspired her.

“I am a child of my teachers,” Swann said, pressing her hands to her chest. “I have high standards; I have high standards. I will not settle for less than my students’ best.”

Swann grew up on St. Joseph Island in Canada.

“I lived half a mile outside of the Village of Hilton Beach, population 326,” she said. “It’s absolutely gorgeous.”

Her mother was a teacher at an elementary school on the island; Swann’s father was postmaster in one of the larger cities on the island.

Her grandparents lived next door, and that’s where she usually could be found — either there or in a tree.

“I was a real tomboy and spent as much time in the trees as I did with decorous things. Often, I was up in the tree with a book,” she said.

There were moose and bear in her backyard, and learning to bait a fishhook was “a childhood rite of passage.”

She left the island to go eight hours away to Queen’s University in Ontario, where she had a rude awakening.

“I had no self-confidence,” Swann said. “I was in a rural [high] school that did not have, as I now know, high standards. I was not prepared that first semester. I had read less than anyone else. … It was so upsetting. I was just totally deficient and scared stiff — absolutely scared stiff.

“Professors in the English department saved me. That’s the only way to put it — they saved me.”

They pushed, mentored and supported her. She went to college with the simple idea that she would get a teaching degree and go back to the island and teach, like her mother.

“It was my undergraduate professors who really gave me the confidence that I could teach, but on a collegiate level. Really good teachers challenge and support at the same time,” she said. “They would not accept anything less than my best.”

She dedicated her first book to her professors. It is Curiosities and Texts — The Culture of Collecting in Modern England.

Swann also spent three years editing The Compleat Angler, and the new edition was released in the spring. She pulls one off the packed bookshelves in her office.

“I know where every comma is,” she said.

Written in 1653 by Izaak Walton, it is the most reprinted book other than the Bible, she said.

“The Compleat Angler is, I argue, one of the earliest and most important books about the environment ever written in the English language,” Swann said.

Walton was centuries ahead of his time, she said, which means that his work applies today.

“It’s very topical,” she said, with all the discussion of global warming and the environment.

Swann also is working on a book about The Compleat Angler and its post-17th-century afterlives.

The other half of the eclectic couple is an author, too. Tsutsui is well-known for his expertise on Godzilla, and he is author of Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters.

Had it not been for her professors, Swann might still be in Canada and would not have met her husband.

Swann said her professors at Queen’s University didn’t accept it when she said she was going to stay there to get a master’s degree.

“My mentors — to their eternal credit — they pushed me out of the nest,” she said.

They persuaded her to apply for the Commonwealth Scholarship, an international competition, and she won.

All expenses were paid for her graduate degrees, and she went to Oxford University in England. That’s where she met her Tsutsui.

“Where is a nice Canadian girl going to meet a Texan but at Oxford?” she asked.

In the fall of 1985, she attended the first drinks party. “It was an open bar,” she said. Swann saw another student drinking the same drink as she — straight orange juice. It was Tsutsui.

“We were mega nerds,” she said.

Things got serious when they started proofreading each other’s manuscripts. The Canadian and

Japanese-American from Texas married in 1989.

“My first teaching gig was teaching Sunday school when, I guess, I was in high school,” she said, but her first full-time teaching job was at the University of North Texas in Denton.

The couple took jobs at the University of Kansas, where they stayed for 17 years and immersed themselves in the community.

In Kansas, she and Tsutsui bought an 1870s-era home and not only renovated it, they got it listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

“I had this huge veggie garden,” she said.

It also was the last home owned by James Naismith, who invented basketball.

“He died in our bathtub,” she said. “We would have people come knock on our door. They wanted to come in and touch the banister of the stairwell because Naismith must have touched it.

“Basketball is religion in Lawrence, Kansas,” she said.

They next made the move to SMU in Dallas, prior to coming to Conway.

While they lived in Texas, the couple took two trips to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, “and just fell in love with it,” Swann said. “It’s such a marvelous place, and walking on the grounds and the trails.”

They were at their home when Tsutsui got a call from a headhunter about a job at a “funky little liberal arts school in Arkansas,” which was Hendrix College.

Swann mimics the way her husband held his hand over the receiver to shout to her that a job was available in Arkansas, and what did she think?

“I immediately made the equation Arkansas equals Crystal Bridges — ‘Yeah,’” she said.

“I now realize there are different regions to Arkansas,” she said. Still, Swann said, she loves “the natural beauty, real warmth and friendliness” of Conway and Arkansas.

“As far as being surrounded by trees and water in Arkansas, I feel like I’m coming home,” she said.

Swann said one of her favorite things to do is walk the couple’s dog in the nature reserve at The Village at Hendrix.

“I walk Kiba in the reserve in The Village, and I have seen so many creatures — muskrats, green herons, egrets. I’ve seen flying squirrels, gray foxes. It’s amazing; it’s absolutely amazing. One night Bill and I were walking the dog, and we saw a flying squirrel. The Arkansas Shakespeare production of Two Gentlemen of Verona was going on. If I had a good arm, I could have thrown a baseball and hit the Shakespeare Theatre and turned around and hit the flying squirrel. The fact that Shakespeare and a flying squirrel were both going on in this cheek-by-jowl location, I thought was just magical.”

Although the couple live in the Hendrix president’s home, across the street from the college, they plan to build in The Village. They are paying for it, she said. It is a custom-built home and is designed with an open floor plan and a patio for entertaining, with Hendrix social events in mind, she said.

It includes a custom-designed art storage room to house their large collection of Kansas artwork and their growing collection of Arkansas artwork.

“Mission creep has begun,” she said, jokingly.

Her husband’s monster-sized Godzilla collection is not welcome, however; it’s relegated to his office.

Talking once again about her career, Swann said she is teaching Introduction to Poetry this year.

She said she believes research is important “to keep the brain cells firing,” but it’s not what drives her.

“To me, the really important thing is I’m a teacher. I live and die by the quality of my teaching,” she said. “It’s a vocation, not a job.”

Swann has been impressed with Hendrix students.

“Hendrix students are much more academically serious than at SMU,” she said. That’s the first difference, and the second is, “our football team is better.”

“The first home game here at night — it was wonderful. It was packed to the gills. The Conway High School Pep Band was superb. It really was a totally Mayberry experience. It was Mayberry,” she said.

Swann has more student conferences this particular afternoon. The door to her office is partially closed.

Her voice floats through the crack in the door. She says the words “antecedent” a few times and “double check,” but there is laughter from both her and the student.

The student emerges, and the ashtray-turned-candy bowl needs refilling.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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