December2021
It’s the final session of this fall’s advanced songwriting class in OLLI at SOU, a learning community for adults of all ages but that’s geared to those aged 50-plus. Eight class members are putting it all out there in a recital of their songs—their lyrics, their voices and their own musical accompaniment. The class is gathered on Zoom, with their instructor Denny Caraher serving as the emcee. The singer-songwriters are listening along with interested OLLI members to the culminating work the students have created for this class.
To an outsider like me, the musical creations of these students are exciting, beautiful, poignant, sometimes funny. They’re good. After each student’s performance, classmates offer praise and support. It’s a little community, not a competition, but there is a high standard in this recital.
The performances include a song Caraher wrote for the class, “We Are Holy.” He has composed and recorded several albums of songs over the years, and he has offered songwriting classes for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Southern Oregon University since moving to Ashland a few years ago.
When the former lawyer and computer programmer arrived in Oregon from Massachusetts, Caraher says, he realized, “I wanted to be part of the community and I thought: ‘What skills do I have?’ … I’m a good songwriter.”
Not that he has a set formula. “I really don’t know how to teach songwriting,” Caraher says. But he provides the environment, support and prompts (such as “write a road song”) that help students develop and navigate their songwriting process. And there is one rule in the class, Caraher says: “You cannot say you’re sorry. If you say ‘I’m sorry,’ you also have to say ‘I’m really sexy.’”
Caraher draws on models, such as the 1967 hit song “Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry. The tale of Billie Joe McAllister, who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, is “almost a perfect song,” he says, in which dinner-table comments like “Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please,” draw listeners into its story of a mysterious suicide.
Caraher has also taught OLLI classes about songwriters. This fall he led a class on the songs of Leonard Cohen, and last winter he and Paul Seymour offered “The Songs and Politics of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.” He is taking the coming winter term off from teaching for OLLI, but close to 80 winter classes for lifelong learners will be offered in the term that begins in January, all of them via Zoom. Open enrollment begins Dec. 13.
Instructors, all volunteers, are expert in their fields. Karen Grove, a professor emerita in earth and climate sciences at San Francisco State University, will teach a new course, “Earth’s Climate: Past Present and Future.” Another new course is titled “Fifty Years of Email,” a look at a 1971 invention by a contractor working the U.S. Defense Department, taught by Tom Anderson. Irv Lubliner, known for his entertaining math classes at OLLI, will be teaching “Probability: You Can Bet on It!” He also will offer a course based on the experiences of his mother, Felicia Bornstein Lubliner, a Polish survivor of the Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen Nazi concentration camps, in a class titled “The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Survivor.”
Three new classes are devoted to music. Robert Adams will teach “I Got Rhythm: George and Ira Gershwin.” David Stone will offer “An Appreciation of Jazz: The Big Bands.” And Peggy Evans, a professor emerita of music at SOU, will teach “Great Hymns of the Christian Faith.”
Linguist Tony Davis offers two classes. One looks at how human language might have evolved and how it might influence human thought. The other examines ancient and modern writing systems, including how Egyptian hieroglyphics, Linear B and Mayan writing have been deciphered.
Shannon Rio teaches about birds of the area. Dick Ashford will teach a course devoted to hawks. Rio is president and Ashford is a former president of the board of the Klamath Bird Observatory. A Dungeness crab class, taught by marine biologist Bernie Hartman, offers an optional field trip to the University of Oregon’s Institute of Marine Biology that will include catching and eating crab.
Those who want to work on their own writing can take courses in creative writing, journaling, crafting personal narratives, nonfiction writing, and a seminar focused on fiction craft. Literature courses range from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
There are classes on growing lavender, gardening for biodiversity, and plant pollination. Retired forester John Schuyler teaches a class on the Pacific Crest Trail. Dermatologist and former field biologist Jeri Mendelson takes on ticks, spiders, snakes, sun and skin in her class, “Medical Hazards in the Wilderness.”
OLLI at SOU is always on the lookout for new classes and new instructors. Denny Caraher, who takes OLLI classes as well as teaching them, says that as an instructor, “I get to feel really good. No matter how much work it is, I get a kick out of seeing people learn.” And as a student? “I get a chance to take a deep dive into something I’m really interested in and continue to learn how little I know.”
Caraher included his enjoyment of the OLLI teaching and learning experience in an autobiographical song he wrote, which can be found at this link: tinyurl.com/8s7d5tsz.
For more details about joining and teaching at OLLI, visit inside.sou.edu/olli.
