Fred Pfeil, requiescat in pace ...

[Dave Monroe]

Writer-Teacher Fred Pfeil's Short Life In Pursuit Of
Peace

By ANNE M. HAMILTON
Special to The Courant

December 18 2005

Fred Pfeil, 56, of Hartford died Nov. 29.

Fred Pfeil was a writer, a teacher and a political
activist committed to social change through nonviolent
means. He also practiced Buddhism and taught
meditation and conflict resolution to prisoners and to
students in Hartford schools.

He grew up in Port Allegany, Pa., a small town where
his father owned the pharmacy and most people worked
in the glass plants. The dignity and hard work of the
town's residents, and his father's example of service
to others as a pharmacist, were indelibly connected to
his writings and human rights work, friends said.

Pfeil learned to read before entering school, and he
excelled in every subject, graduating as valedictorian
at his high school. He entered Amherst College in
Amherst, Mass., as a National Merit Scholar after
reading about the college in Reader's Digest and
graduated in 1971. It was a big change for someone
from a small, conservative town. "It was the height of
the Vietnam protests," said his sister, Dawn Keiper.
"Amherst really transformed him."

Pfeil went to Stanford University in California on a
Woodrow Wilson fellowship to study creative writing.
He opposition to the war led to his interest in
politics. (Asthma made him ineligible for the draft.)
After receiving a master's degree, he was hired by the
U.S. Navy to teach English literature to sailors on a
destroyer in the Pacific. There he witnessed abusive
treatment of Filipinos by American servicemen, and
"the drugs and sex shook Fred to the roots," said John
McClure, a friend at Stanford. "He came back more of a
pacifist and anti-militarist."

He taught at Stanford, but it was a stint teaching
writing at Oregon State University that deepened his
commitment to progressive politics, McClure said.
There, Pfeil was part of a group of professors who
gave teach-ins against the first Iraq war in local
schools.

"His political commitment went way beyond the
occasional protest," said McClure, a professor at
Rutgers, "to steady, hard work with people he
identified as under-represented. He was a really
committed practical reformer."

In 1985, he applied to Trinity College in Hartford for
a position teaching creative writing. His political
activities made some people nervous about his
suitability. Nevertheless, "he wowed everyone," said
Milla Riggio, who was on the search committee.

"He had a mind that was brilliantly analytical, and he
convinced students that what they were studying was
really important," said Sheila Fisher, chairwoman of
the English Department. "He was funky, original,
unpretentious and down to earth."

While at Trinity, he organized a film-studies program,
taught American studies and English and directed the
creative-writing program. One semester-long seminar he
often taught concerned only one book, Thomas Pynchon's
"Gravity's Rainbow." He was faculty adviser to VOID,
Voices Organized in Democracy, a progressive student
group, and he helped organize support for college
food-service workers.

"He was deeply interested and concerned with social
justice and really standing up for those people who
had trouble standing," said Michael Niemann, a
professor of international studies at Trinity. Pfeil,
along with Niemann and others, brought a Quaker
program titled "Alternatives to Violence" to the
Enfield Correctional Institution. The program used
role-playing to encourage inmates to listen to others
and develop empathy. Pfeil used a similar program,
called "Help Increase the Peace," at Quirk Middle
School in Hartford and helped start workshops in
meditation and nonviolence at the women's prison in
Niantic.

Raised an Episcopalian, he adopted Quakerism. Then, in
the mid-1990s, he began to be interested in Buddhist
principles and teachings. He started having
discussions with Elli Findly, a Trinity professor of
Buddhism, and after each of them were divorced, they
became better friends.

"We became a couple on Human Rights Day [Dec. 10]
1998," Findly said. "We were married on Human Rights
Day in 2002." The wedding took place on the steps of
the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, with
a justice of the peace officiating.

The ceremony came during a brief hiatus from a
demonstration against President Bush's plan to invade
Iraq at the Gold Building across Main Street. Pfeil's
placard read "No Blood for Oil." Findly's said "Not in
Our Name."

Buddhist practices and teachings had an increasingly
large influence on Pfeil. He organized weekly "sits,"
or meditations, at his house, and he taught a class in
meditation. At each of the solstices, Pfeil would
organize a daylong retreat of silent meditation
interspersed with sitting and walking.

As an advocate of nonviolent protest, Pfeil took part
in anti-war and anti-globalization demonstrations in
Hartford, Washington and Quebec. He demonstrated
against the death penalty. "Fred wasn't worried about
getting arrested," said Niemann - and he sometimes
was.

After the scandal about American treatment of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib was revealed, Pfeil organized
a street-theater demonstration in which he wore a
black cape and hood, with dangling wires similar to
the ones a prisoner wore in widely distributed
photographs. He, a friend dressed as a soldier and
another as President Bush stood at a busy intersection
in Hartford at lunch hour.

Despite his weighty interests, Pfeil wasn't all
seriousness. He loved eating. He loved jazz,
especially Bill Frisell and Charlie Parker, and worked
hard to give up smoking. He walked or biked whenever
he could, hiked across England in silence and was
reluctant to drive if there were alternate means of
transportation. "He was known as the `reading walker,'
said Tim Black, his neighbor. "He always had his nose
in a book."

Pfeil's professional writings include two books of
essays and a short-story collection titled "What They
Tell You To Forget: A Novella and Stories," all
available at Amazon.com. Two of Pfeil's stories won
prestigious Pushcart Awards, in 1994 and 1996. He also
wrote a futuristic novel, "Goodman 2020," currently
out of print.

Pfeil was diagnosed with melanoma in February, and the
cancer quickly spread to his brain. He had no
children.

"He felt more the suffering of the people of the
world, so his politics were about trying to alleviate
that suffering, either by changing policies or by
bearing witness to the fact that injustices were being
done," his wife said.

http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-exlife1218.artdec18,0,3031046.story?coll=hc-headlines-life

See, e.g., ...

Pfeil, Fred.  Another Tale to Tell: Politics and
Narrative
   in Postmodern Culture.  London and New York: Verso, 1990.

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