For this issue of Highway 64, Glenda Beall, Program Coordinator for NCWN-West, interviews William Everett: a writer, woodworker, and liturgist based in Waynesville.
For years, I have followed Bill Everett’s writing on his blog and read his poetry. The late NC Poet Laurette, Kathryn Byer, highly praised Bill’s writing. I delved into his past life to find he is a learned man, an ethical man with a degree in theology, but is not ordained. He creates work with his hands to bring calm and hope to others. His hand carved communion tables are widely popular.
A Conversation with William (Bill) Everett
Glenda Council Beall: Thank you, Bill, for taking time to answer my questions. You have led an active and interesting life. I will start at the very beginning.
Where did you grow up, Bill? Tell us about your family and what your life was like growing up.
Bill Everett: I was born in Washington, DC, in 1940 as a fourth-generation Washingtonian. My family was deeply embedded in a local department store, and my mother was a soprano soloist. It was a childhood that took for granted the monumental buildings all around me and the people from all over the world that inhabited our lives. As one example, I used the Library of Congress to do research for my high school senior year paper about The Daily Worker.
Along with my two sisters, I spent all my summers and many a Saturday at a dairy farm in northern Virginia started by my grandfather and great uncle. So, I grew up with a deep appreciation for farming as well as for the work of government and the challenges of public life. My education was fed by the public schools of Montgomery County, MD, and my high school years at St. Albans School at the Washington National Cathedral.
GCB: You live in western NC now. What brought you here?
BE: My closest friend from graduate school, Jim Fowler, was my colleague at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology. Jim spent his adolescent years in Waynesville and had many roots in western North Carolina. When he built his retirement home here, he invited us to build on the lot next to him. We fell in love with the region and have had a home here since 1993. Sadly, Jim died of Alzheimer’s before we could sit on the deck together to continue our long conversation. Since we moved here, one of my sisters, two of my children, and some other relatives have moved to the area.
GCB: Where did you attend college and are you an ordained minister?
BE: I went to Wesleyan University, in Connecticut, and from there to Yale Divinity School for my theological degree before going on to Harvard University for my doctoral work. At Yale I decided that I was a teacher rather than a pastor. For me, ordination is for the specific work of church leadership, so I did not seek ordination. However, I have been very active in church life and done a great deal of worship leadership and planning as well as organizational action.
GCB: What in your early life led you to teaching ethics?
BE: In some sense, growing up in Washington explains some of it. My parents came out of religious backgrounds with strong ethical norms and passed them on to me. In college I was mentored by a Christian ethicist, Kenneth Underwood, who modelled the work of an ethicist for me. In my junior year I met his Yale colleague James Gustafson, who encouraged me to come to Yale to study ethics. He remained a life-long mentor and friend until his death last year at 95.
GCB: You taught over thirty years in theological seminaries and graduate schools. This took you to foreign countries. What did you learn about yourself and others in your travels to South Africa, India and Germany?
BE: Living and working in other countries helped me, as it does many others, to understand what it is to be an American but also what it is to be a global citizen, an earthling, if you will. In some sense, of course, this multi-country life was an extension of the polyglot culture of the Washington of my youth. By working, writing, and teaching in German, I learned more deeply how intricate human language and communication is, which helps me be more careful about words and appreciative of the challenge of bringing sense to voice in my mother tongue. It also led me into valuable friendships that persist through the many means of communication that bind us together today.
GCB: I find it interesting that you create beautiful furniture for worship settings and focus on the round communion tables that symbolize circle dynamics of reconciliation. Will you explain more about this idea?
BE: I have done a great deal of work as an ethicist on restorative justice and reconciliation. This is, for me, the heart of God’s work. I see the Eucharist (or communion), not in the model of sacrifice on an altar but as a gathering of disciples around a table for conversation inspired by the Spirit of forgiveness and love. The round table is one part of replacing the pyramid of sacrifice with the table of nurture and conversation among people made equal through baptism. That’s the theological nub of it. You can find a more complete explanation of it in my recent book, Circling the Table: The Spirit and Practice of Roundtable Worship.
GCB: After seven books and some fifty articles on ethical issues in religion and society you turned to writing fiction and poetry. Tell us about your first novel in 2008. Did you want to find a new and different way to express your thoughts and ideas? Was that a satisfying experience?
BE: I retired “early” from my academic work because I wanted to work with wood and in other modes of writing. My only work of fiction (an ethics friend once said that I always was writing fiction) is an eco-historical saga entitled Red Clay, Blood River. Earth is the narrator of a skein of stories that draws into connection several strands of my wife’s family history around the year 1838. This is not only the time of the Cherokee Trail of Tears but of the Battle of Blood River in South Africa, which was a turning point in their history of settler conquest and in the construction of the mythos legitimating the system of apartheid. Having to write from Earth’s point of view was an enormous discipline that stretched me and anchored my ecological work in ethics even more deeply. I am still moved when I go back to read sections of it today. I learned, as most of us do, that the marketing side of writing buries many a work, as it seems to have done this one. The crannied wall bears forth many a flower.
GCB: When did you begin writing poetry and publishing poetry? Were you influenced by any poets living or dead?
BE: I really began writing poetry as a primary way to give voice to and understand what I was going through in a mid-life transition that included both a divorce and my marriage to Sylvia over forty years ago. Those experiences not only transformed many areas of my life but also of the way I approach language and communication. The poetry collection I put together in 2013 was entitled Turnings: Poems of Transformation, which reflects the crucial role of poetry in helping me and many others live through important changes in our lives, something I also see in your writings.
While it may sound overly pious, the language of the Bible has deeply shaped the cadence and imagery of my work. E. E. Cummings and Gerard Manley Hopkins melted down my schooled rigidities with words and syntax. Since then, Wendell Berry, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, and many others have entered my bloodstream. I also want to add that, though our words are very different, our dear friend Kay Byer was a signal inspiration to encourage me to go into print with my poems, of which, she said, “Nobody writes like that anymore.” Whether it is antique or classic, I have kept on turning to this mode of expression, whether in poetry or poetic liturgy.
GCB: Tell us about the book, Mining Memories on Cyprus 1923-25. Is this a novel or is it nonfiction?
BE: In 2012 Sylvia suggested that we go to Cyprus as an anniversary present to find the mine where my maternal grandfather worked in the 1920s. He was called there as a mining engineer to help re-open what is probably the oldest copper mine in the world (Cyprus is derived from the Latin word for copper). It provided the copper for the bronze shields used by Agamemnon in the Trojan War (The Iliad, Book 11).
My grandmother, mother (nine at the time), and uncle accompanied him there. My sister Lois dug out pictures my grandmother had made while they were there and off we went on our exploration. The people we met, including the current director of the mine, were agog at the pictures, which filled in a whole piece of Cypriot mining history. I discovered stories in my grandfather’s daily log, which she also found, that told of mine accidents, deaths, struggles, and other events that I had never been told about in my youth. We went back in 2015 to finish up research for this book, which is part memoir, part documentary, part history.
It’s only available in a Kindle edition, so people can see the roughly 130 photos for a small purchase price. In some sense I wrote it as a gift to the people of Cyprus to help fill in a small part of their own lengthy and troubled history. It certainly opened up a new appreciation for my own inheritance and the strands that formed me.
GCB: I enjoy your thought-provoking blog, and I know you are a very busy man who continues work with your church and community. What drives you? Do you feel compelled to try to make this world better?
BE: “Making the world a better place than we found it” was the guiding principle in my father’s life, so you nailed it there. By temperament and life formation I am a craftsman who wants to construct things that are both beautiful and useful, so I think that’s part of it, too. And I feel grateful for what I have received in life and want to pass that on to others.
GCB: What else have you recently sent into the literary world?
BE: My “expository memoir,” Making My Way in Ethics, Worship, and Wood, came out in 2019. It provides an overview of the development of my thought in the context of my life experience. I accompanied it with a collection of nineteen of my most significant essays entitled A Covenantal Imagination. That’s what I call “legacy work.” My interest in writing a more poetic liturgy found expression recently in a collection of liturgical elements accompanying the book on roundtable worship, entitled Words at Table: Liturgies for Roundtable Worship.
GCB: Tell us a little about your talented wife, Sylvia. How does her creativity work with yours?
BE: Sylvia opened the whole aesthetic side of my sensibilities, which had been suffocating under the ethical prose of my professional life. We met in the 1970s while planning educational programs in a church, something we kept doing in one way or another right up to an Interfaith Peace Conference in 2019. She works in many media to explore symbolic themes associated with women in our religious traditions. She also taught me what I know about mosaics, which I have worked into some of my tables. She’s my design coach as I work up furniture pieces. For the past 18 years we have led a monthly “roundtable worship” event at our church that includes visual arts as part of our meditation and reflection. You can see her work along with some of my woodworking on our joint website, www.WisdomsTable.net.
GCB: How can our readers learn more about your woodworking and your writing?
BE: In 2015 my old woodworking friend and academic colleague in South Africa, John de Gruchy, and I brought out a book on spirituality and woodworking entitled Sawdust and Soul. That delves into the Why as well as some of the How of our woodworking. In addition to the gallery website I have a site, www.WilliamEverett.com where my regular journal entries appear as well as information about my writing and professional work.
GCB: Thank you again, Bill, for telling your unique story. I will share it and I am sure many will visit your sites online.