Time on St. John reaffirms Tom Payne's love for teaching

Author: Aylie Baker

"You can go to sleep in a place with no seasons for twenty years and just lose track of time," says Tom Payne, his voice faint in the receiver, muffled perhaps by the faulty connection, perhaps by the resounding truth in his statement. I sit in awe as he unleashes a colorful tale of newspaper-packed Subarus, sun-kissed children and budding journalists - three years of bliss framed by a backdrop of cherry-stained skies, rolling sand and glass-like waves - and wonder why he would possibly have chosen to return to Middlebury, Vt.

Yet over the course of an hour, listening to Payne speak with such passion about his experiences, I come to both understand and admire why a man, running a successful newspaper in what he deemed "an absurdly wonderful place," would choose to leave the Virgin Islands and return to teach at Middlebury.

After graduating from Columbia University, Payne became an adjunct professor at Middlebury in 1998, where for four years he taught a variety of courses in the Creative Writing curriculum. And while he insists he thoroughly enjoyed his time at Middlebury, in 2004, he and his wife Shirley Reid decided to jump ship and relocate, selling their home in Vermont to resettle far away from the Green Mountains in the Caribbean.

The decision to escape to the U.S. Virgin Islands was in no way random. Payne first met Reid on the island of St. John in the 1980s, when the 9 by 5 mile island was still a haven for expatriates - who Payne deemed "explorers, seekers, artists, hippies," and, with a laugh, "escapees."

After a brief stint living on a remote island just off of Grenada, Payne explains how he and his wife discovered that they missed belonging to a community and decided to abandon their private paradise and relocate to St.. John. But the island on which they had fallen in love was rapidly changing.

"St. John was, and still is, under assault from big money," explained Payne. Since the mid '90s, property prices have risen astronomically, pushing out locals of West Indian descent - many of whom had inhabited the island for hundreds of years.

Reid had started a paper back in the '80s, and with her background in art and Payne's in writing, an arts-based local paper seemed a perfect way to revive a struggling community.

"A small town paper can move a place progressively," said Payne. "When you don't have a paper that's mirroring the people around, I think it's very easy for forces from the outside to corrode the community." And so, their advances long gone, the two set to work from scratch.

In need of some talented journalists, Payne immediately thought of his former students.

"Middlebury students are the most can-do., down-to-earth, unshakable lot of kids I've ever met," explained Payne, his statement tinged with an air of parental swagger. When he called Teddy Flanagan '04 and casually asked if he would be willing to fly down on a day's notice to pursue a journalist streak he'd always exhibited but never explored, the jobless graduate jumped at the opportunity.

"The great thing about Teddy is he never batted an eye," laughed Payne. "'Okay Tom,' he said. 'I'm there.' Click." Two days later, "this absolutely pale Irish-American kid shows up at the end of the dock," and within a week "he's best-friends with the lady who owned the corner bar called Mooey's." Teddy was soon joined by Carolyn Kormann '05 and Anna Speigel '06 - also former students, also delighted by this auspicious opportunity.

"You have to have this intuitive delicacy to make your way," explained Payne of writing in a local community like St... John. Well, Flanagan, Kormann and Speigel certainly had it. And so the St. John Sun was born.

From its conception, the Sun was a community-based, arts paper. "We wanted to make the paper a stone soup," explained Payne, "a bouillabaisse of community effort." Focusing on features and spotlighting local art and culture, the Sun sought to capture the essence of the St. John community. "We weren't after hard news," stressed Payne, stories do not "have to rise to a particular event to be news with a capital N."

"We had a vision that if we could just get enough voices in the paper as possible that it would be stimulating," said Payne. "And the more different voices we could get, the more we could reflect the island as a whole."

Payne's only mandate was that the paper be positive.

"Not in a boosterish way," he interjected as if to validate his decision, "but it goes along with the saying that if you walk a mile in somebody's shoes you'll understand them."

And so Payne and his wife set out with a slew of journalists, local staff writers and graphic designers in tow to rove the island of St.. John for stories≠ - interesting stories, stories which were illuminating and personal and empowering.

"It got a little ridiculous," admitted Payne. So ridiculous in fact, that "they used to say that I walked around with a big sign painted on me," recalled Payne, laughing into the phone, "'Do you want to write about it?'" But who could blame him? The St.. John Sun had become a thriving business and every two weeks they had a forty-page paper to fill.

"The joy of being a writer is you get to live with your curiosity, and you're paid for it," gushed Payne when asked about the stories the Sun covered on the island. None of the Middlebury students he had hired had journalism experience. All three wound up working second jobs. Yet each of them found their niche on the island, slipping into the local community pen and pencil in hand, eager to discover.

"God yes, it was extraordinary," boomed Payne, a palpable sense of excitement radiating in his voice. "I got a huge 45-year-old kick out of how all three of them fell in love with journalism in their own ways." From environmental features highlighting the Sahara dust to coverage of the notorious local bar wars, opportunities to grow and explore were boundless.

"It was like a crucible of creativity," described Payne. "We just had this freedom because the thing was so solvent to let them do whatever they wished."

For Kormann, Flanagan and Speigel it was quite literally the opportunity of a lifetime. Kormann is now studying journalism and American Studies in graduate school at New York University on a full scholarship and recently won a fellowship in environmental writing. Flanagan is writing novels, working as a TV reporter and picking blueberries. Speigel is applying for graduate school in journalism while pursuing a career in restaurant reviews in the Washington, D.C. area. And what of Payne and Reid? Why did they leave paradise and a successful paper to return to rural Vermont?

"I never expected to be a businessman," confessed Payne. "I've been one now. I respect the people who want to be businessmen. But I'm no businessman." The money that was coming in did not thrill Payne as it might other entrepreneurs. Rather, the paper's success only reaffirmed his faith in the power of teaching, deepening a belief that was already there.

And while he loved producing the paper and seeing its effects in the community, ultimately it was kicking back in the office after a long day to chat with Kormann, Flanagan and Speigel about their writing which Payne truly savored.

"I hadn't really realized it until it was almost all over but I was doing what I had done at Middlebury, which was talking about how to use writing to make a difference," said Payne." I started thinking...maybe I should try to go back to teaching again."

Yet Payne was not the only one who yearned for the Vermont landscape, a change of seasons. Payne described how he and his wife had looked to his young daughter, "a barefoot girl who could swim 10 feet down and 20 feet out over the coral reef, who could tell you which bushes on the island were good for medicinal teas, who had sun-bleached hair and 20 little friend
s." And "even with that," explained Payne, "which you would think was the most exotic childhood for a little girl, when we asked her, she said she wanted to be back in Vermont."

Furthermore, while the newspaper had in many ways revived and sustained the community which Payne had long ago grown to love, the island was still irrevocably changing. Corrupted by money, St. John was no longer the artistic mecca which Payne and his wife had once thrived in. And so a variety of factors came together to lure the family northward, and northward they went.

It's getting late, and sounds of impending bedtime linger in the background of our conversation. I manage to squeeze in one more question. What's it like teaching again? Back on campus for the first time in several years, Payne described how he cannot help but feel changed. In many ways, browsing through unopened mail from 2004 and exchanging cordial greetings with former colleagues, it is as though he has never left. But at the same time he has simply been refreshed, the time he has spent away has only reaffirmed beliefs he has always had.

"It's so exciting when you're in a position when you can actually feel like you've changed something on a spiritual level, on a simple level, to change someone's life," says Payne, looking back upon his experiences with Flanagan, Kormann and Speigel. "I don't think that all graduates, perhaps very few, are lucky enough to feel that what they're doing after college is actually seen rather than being visible." Flanagan, Kormann and Speigel certainly do. But this is only the beginning. There are still more to come.