Professor Elizabeth Blair is retiring next month, but that’s not to say that she doesn’t have dreams after she leaves SMSU.

“In retirement, I plan to forage for wild mushrooms, photograph orchids and bogs, take classes in painting and drawing, do environmental volunteer work, and work on a number of writing projects that have been on the back burner due to teaching full-time,” Blair said.

As a young child, Blair’s father announced to her family that she was going to be an English teacher because of how rapidly she was building her vocabulary and of how clearly she spoke. As a result, Blair promised herself that she would never be an English teacher, and for years she kept her promise as she was a social worker, an editor for a national trade periodical, and several other professions.

“Then, one day while I was living in Chicago in the 80s and finishing up my M.A. degree in literature at the University of Minnesota, a friend who had taken a job teaching English at Columbia College begged me to take over her class because she found she hated teaching,” Blair said. “From the first day, I loved it.”

After finishing her long-distance M.A. degree, Blair went back to school at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing in 1995. In the English Department, her areas of interest have included contemporary world literature, environmental literature, and poetry.

“As I look back over the earlier jobs I’ve had, I see that art and writing have been a part of many of them,” Blair said. “I spent a lot of my early years reading books and drawing. Then, in college, I majored in literature and minored in art. Somewhere along the way, I decided that I didn’t have enough talent to be an artist, so I put aside that dream. But dreams tend to resurface when we least expect it.”

In 2008, Blair audited Jim Swartz’s digital art photography class at SMSU to learn how to photograph wild orchids.

“While taking that class, I fell in love with photography as an art form, due to Swartz’s rigorous and creative approach and he’s been a valuable mentor to me ever since,” Blair said. “Just a few months after the class, I won a national fellowship in photography, and began entering my photographs in juried shows.”

Last year, Blair won a State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant in Photography for her Bog Tapestry body of work. The grant provided her with the funds to mount her first two solo exhibitions and a group show at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

“SMSU has been a very supportive place to be both an artist and a writer,” Blair said. “I owe a debt of gratitude to the art department, which has included me in its annual Fine Arts Faculty Show for the past five or six years. I also owe a debt of gratitude to those who have attended readings of my wild orchid essays for the past seven or eight years and also to SMSU for my two sabbaticals, one of which I spent in Oslo, Norway, where I was learning Norwegian, and for our generous contractual travel funds that allow faculty to, among other things, attend conferences and conduct research.”

Blair also feels privileged to have had “the opportunity to work with interesting and stimulating colleagues and with talented and dedicated students here at SMSU.”