Noyes Academy: Coda
- Alisa Kline
- Apr 4
- 3 min read
They say that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Must be true, because I hated William Wallace and his stupid, disorganized book with the hectoring narration complaining about who did and didn't keep records to his exacting specifications. He was so bitchy about it that I started to write down his endless complaints and laments. Cantankerous doesn't hope to cover it. And on top of that endless complaining, he had produced a volume that was essentially unreadable.
So I started hate reading. I didn't fall in love on my first pass. But I did get a sniff that Wallace might have been up to something more interesting than his endless complaining. On my third go round, I managed to hear Wallace's voice clearly, the snark, the lamentations. For nearly two years, Wallace saw me through a vexing depression. His was the only voice I wanted. He began writing when he was nearly my age (70). This is an age of reflection. I mean, you're basically done, but you do have an urge to sum it all up. I needed a project so I made Wallace's project my project.
In the process of excavating Wallace's ouvre, I realized that his telling of Noyes Academy, the 1835 integrated school that failed spectacularly, was not what I had expected and pulling on those threads led to this blog.
Now that the project is finished, I will be moving the entire thing to NoyesAcademy.com. It isn't up and running yet, but that link will work in a few weeks. In addition to the story told by Wallace, that site will gather together all the artwork Gary Hamel was kind enough to let me use in this series. I know there are more than a few people who tuned in each week just to see Gary's art. At the new site, you won't have to wade through all my words to enjoy it.
In the meanwhile, here are links to all the posts in this project from beginning to end. I like to imagine that they build one upon the next, but each is supposed to work, more or less, as a stand alone.
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