Richard Dillard’s incredible 59-year tenure at Hollins saw the coming and going of 11 presidents of the United States and nine presidents of Hollins. He began his time under Tinker Mountain barely a year after the death of Robert Frost, the year the Warren Report determined Oswald acted alone in the assassination of JFK, the year the Civil Rights Act was signed into law, and Martin Luther King Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize.

His impact on generations of students and writers was noted time and again at the memorial service held for him at Hollins last May. Perhaps The Hollins Critic is as powerful and tactile a symbol of Dillard’s literary influence and presence as any. Begun in his first year at Hollins, it has been published in print five times a year since. A special section in the June 2023 edition of the Critic was dedicated to Dillard, and we are including much of what was in that issue here, with permission from Managing Editor Amanda Cockrell ’69, M.A. ’88, and with our gratitude.

In Memoriam: Richard Dillard

R. H. W. Dillard, longtime editor of The Hollins Critic, died April 4, 2023, in Roanoke, Virginia.

A short, declarative sentence that those of us who worked with him, and were taught and mentored by him, find it hard to believe still.

I first met him as a freshman creative writing student in his first years at Hollins. Richard made us all feel as if we were individually special to him, and I do believe we were. He gave each of his students our own voice and taught us how to shape it, teaching us to write like ourselves and not like anyone else.

Later he hired me to run the Hollins children’s literature program and as managing editor of The Hollins Critic. He was endlessly kind, endlessly encouraging, funny as hell, and I was never afraid to ask him anything or to confess when I screwed up. I still keep thinking, “I need to ask Richard about that.”

He used to talk about one’s encyclopedia, the personal reference library in our head that we draw from for recognition when we read. His office always seemed to me like that idea made solid—only apparently in disarray but always searchable by its owner. Whatever peculiar and esoteric bit of knowledge you had just discovered, or were looking for, Richard generally had it.

He began his teaching career at Hollins in 1964, the year the Critic was founded. He stayed for 59 years, sending generations of writers and teachers out into the literary world. For 33 years he was chair of the department of English and creative writing and became the senior editor of the Critic in 1996. He taught creative writing, British and American literature, and film, and founded Hollins’ graduate program in children’s literature in 1992.

In 1987 he was named Virginia’s Professor of the Year and in 2007 he was given the George Garrett Award of the Association of Writing Programs for his contribution to other writers. He received both the O.B. Hardison and Hanes poetry prizes and was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2011. The Virginia Writers Club honored him with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.

He was a prolific writer and scholar. His works include volumes of poetry, fiction, and criticism.

In 2016 he founded Groundhog Poetry Press, named for the creatures who populated his backyard and seemed to him among the most lovable of the animal kingdom.

We don’t know where the Critic will go without him. His imprint was indelible.

— Amanda Cockrell, managing editor

In Memory of Richard Dillard

From contributors to the Critic

Is there deeply zany seriousness? Or deeply serious zaniness? Are they the same or different? They are different, and both express and confer the kinds of wisdom that Richard Dillard made available with seeming effortlessness. We met when I was an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and he was finishing his Ph.D. there. Because he joined the Hollins faculty in 1964, I came there for my M.A. in 1965. For the rest of his life we shared advice, stories, poems, essays, and adventures. I never knew his equal in imagination and what to do with it. He helped me become a grownup, and helped me remain one. Years ago I began to reread his wonderful books with loving attention, and I’ll be at it as long as I can read.

— Henry Taylor M.A. ’66

Though it was 43 years ago(!), I clearly remember Richard warmly welcoming [my] incoming class of M.A. students. He told us that by the end of the year we would all wish the program were longer, and though I doubted it at the time, he was right. He made me, and everyone, feel as if we were already successful writers, despite our all being in our early 20s. And that, as Frost wrote, has made all the difference.

— Wyn Cooper M.A. ’81

I was introduced to Richard Dillard in 2001 by George Garrett and Irving Malin with a thought that I might contribute to The Hollins Critic. At that time, he did not know me at all and, aside from a few academic articles, I had not published very much. Moreover, I was proposing to write about Octavia Butler, a writer at that point mainly known within the science fiction world and nowhere near her wide popularity today. Richard, to my great surprise, was warmly receptive to my idea, and published not just this article but several more I wrote over the years. Given his wide range of sympathy, I knew he would be enthusiastic about most writers under the sun, especially if they were quirky, undervalued, or explored from a different angle than the critical norm. Writing for Richard, you felt he had the quiet confidence in you to let you do your own thing as a writer, and that kind of tacit editing is perhaps the most empowering of all, especially when you knew Richard was so widely read and had such a fine-grained sense of critical discernment.

Richard had a taste in fiction that was very transgressively “experimental.” His interests crossed genres, from horror to the Gothic to science fiction, which was very rare in Richard’s own cohort. He was always on the cutting edge in terms of new ways to write and to think about writing, and indeed he could be said to have made the cutting edge his own.

Himself a writer of great originality and achievement, he was endlessly generous in appreciating the work of other writers, creative or critical, no matter what was the writer’s identity and background, and no matter how the literary world tried to classify the writer’s work. As with Malin and Garrett, Richard’s posture toward a literary world often intensely guarded and competitive was one of enthusiasm and gratitude. Richard Dillard made the literary world better not by fitting into a prefabricated mold but by being exuberantly and outstandingly himself, and, even though we will always feel his loss, he has shown us a way to read, write, teach, and think that will continue to inspire.

— Nicholas Bims

After Dillard

The poet [he loved this] is the enemy
      within the gates; the poem, a prayer
or manifest. Richard loved the monster:
      lurching, stitched, combinatory. Its face
of death. Loved baseball, crosswords. The spinning stars,
      Albania, Zembla, the Magic City. Sad clattering
Tristram, gentleman. Hermes Thrice-Greatest.
      Labyrinthine groundhog burrows, gorilla
language, semaphores, Poe’s cryptogram.
      Genius babies, beanstalks, tough guy noir. Slant
truth / slant rhyme. Links, bobolinks, the Library
      of Borges. Synchronicity. The crazy.
All those directors. All those films. Dana
      Scully. Comic books, & strips. Loved twins.
Loved Monk, Ornette, Dawn Upshaw, Sheryl Crow.
      Fireworks. The Great War, the Green Drawing Room
mirrors, black holes, Ovid in exile, fook
      the begroodgers, Augusto capering while the White
Clown frowns. Lit Fest. John / Paul / George / Ringo / Iggy
      Pop. Eclipses. Plumbing. Whim. The poetical
works of Sean Siobhan. An equinoctial
      egg. Migraine auras, solar wind. Treasure
Island’s map. Holmes. Eyes that do see. Norse
      longships that bore burning the body forth
in honour… Each delighted him. Each is a sign
      for the gifts & grace of art, the artist’s turns & twists.

— Jeanne Larsen M.A. ’72

I don’t know what I did to deserve a 50-year friendship with Richard Dillard. After I left Hollins, with an M.A. in hand, hoping it would get me a teaching job, which it did, I saw Richard in person only a couple of times. But we kept in touch, and his support for my writing was generous, to say the least.

One thing that our friendship was based on was our shared eccentric passion/admiration/affection for the old horror movies. My application to Hollins contained, in the samples of my work, a poem called “In Memory of King Kong.” Looking back, I’ve wondered whether it might have been that poem that got me accepted.

Many years later I sent him a poem called “Frankenstein,” which dealt with both the 1931 original and the 1935 sequel The Bride of Frankenstein, which some people think belongs on an all-time top 10 list along with Citizen Kane and The Godfather. Richard’s response was succinct, as his critical comments usually were. He said that I had “nailed it.” That was a great moment for me. I don’t mean to compare myself to Eudora Welty, but just to say, I think what I felt having Richard say that about my Frankenstein poem must have been similar to what she felt when William Faulkner wrote to her, “You’re doing all right.”

There’s a memorable scene in The Bride where the monster (as we call him) has found refuge with a blind hermit in the forest, and as they share bread, wine, and cigars together, Boris Karloff gets just the right intonation when he says, “Friend, good.” My long-time, massively intelligent, funny, generous friend has passed. I am more grateful to him than I can easily express, so—“Friend, good.”

— Howard Nelson M.A. ’70