Beatty: prison worker to poet

She takes long, confident strides down the cement sidewalk of South Craig Street. While on… She takes long, confident strides down the cement sidewalk of South Craig Street. While on foot, she stops only briefly to peer into the window of a small store, then continues on her path.

Once she’s in sight, one will see her clothes – men’s clothes – well pressed, with boots, blue-shaded glasses and a tough leather jacket. Her cropped, blond hair completes her self-labeled “modified punk contemporary” style.

“People say that the first impression they get is, ‘Jan Beatty, rock star-poet,'” says Joseph Wilk, a senior and English writing major who met Beatty during his tenure at the Pitt’s Writing Center, where Beatty is a writing instructor.

Jan Beatty, at age 51, is an instructor of poetry writing at Pitt whose resume reaches beyond college campuses.

She has worked at a maximum-security prison and as an abortion clinic counselor. She worked as a waitress for 15 years in three different states, and she has taught writing workshops across the country.

Possessing a self-proclaimed obsession with landscape and the barren, “glacier nothingness” of the Antarctic, she says traveling is a necessary experience for any writer. For her, she says, there is no nine-to-five, no routine – only open space for her mind to wander.

Beatty also hosts a public radio show on National Public Radio, in addition to her teaching. She has published three books, most recently “Boneshaker,” which possesses a raw, upfront style that studies the limitations of cultural and social mores in poetic language.

Beatty said she gathers her inspiration from the “bizarro” people who exist on the “planet earth.” But she also draws upon the “courage and guts” of other women writers, she says.

“Speaking is truly a revolutionary act as a woman today,” Beatty says. By finding solace in female poets, according to Beatty, she has not gone along with the cultural idea of success.

Beatty came from what she refers to as a “working-class” steel-town family and grew up in Whitehall, a suburb of Pittsburgh. When describing her childhood, Beatty says that she always felt different, somehow separate.

“I felt like a visitor,” she says. “How am I going to do this thing called life?”

Beatty says she was a “passionate” reader and writer as a youngster, and once she was able to, she left her hometown.

“It was an escape, a survival. It felt necessary,” she says.

Her journey took her to West Virginia University, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1975 with a degree in Social Work. Nearly 15 years later, Beatty returned to Pittsburgh to attend Pitt. She earned an M.F.A. in poetry and aggressively pursued her writing and teaching career.

“She is very nurturing, yet still a straight talker. She brings a real honesty to which students can learn from example,” says Wilk.

According to Wilk, one characteristic of Beatty’s teaching is that she “takes a vested interest in the personal development of her students.”

Wilk recalls that in one of her night classes, Beatty once passed around a handful of rocks and minerals – with lights turned off.

“Many didn’t understand what was happening,” Wilk says.

Beatty continued to talk about the metaphysics of rocks.

“The whole point of it was to put people’s guards down, because it just came, it just happened,” Wilk explains.

Suddenly, with lights turned off and rocks in palms, there was a “large thunder clap and a torrent of snow outside the window,” Wilk adds. And then, Beatty said:

“Now, write the poem that you were never going to write.”