Vincent P. (Bud) Bynack – 50th Reunion Essay

Vincent P. (Bud) Bynack

69 Bronxville Road

Apt. 4G

Bronxville, New York 10708

budbynack@verizon.net

914-961-3521

Spouse(s): Helen Tartar (1992-2014)

Education: BA Yale, 1969; M.Phil. Yale, 1974; PhD. Yale 1978

Career: Assistant professor, University of Iowa, Union College, UC-Berkeley, Portland State University; Developmental Editor

Avocations: Fly fishing, food and wine

College: Silliman

After an interesting academic career in the more interesting sense of “interesting,” I was a househusband for about 20 years. Today, as a freelance developmental editor, I heal sick scholarly books with a laying on of hands (as gently as possible), something that I was doing during that time, as well. I suspect this is not the usual career narrative in these accounts, and I should explain.

I stayed at Yale and got a PhD. in American Studies, teaching the yearlong AS91 junior seminar for three years as a grad student. As was then often the case, I wandered in the wilderness before landing a tenure-track job, first working as a sabbatical replacement for a year at the University of Iowa and then for two years at Union College before of being hired at, of all places, the Rhetoric Department at the University of California at Berkeley. Eight years later, with a tenure book still a draft away from tenure, I spent three years teaching American literature and literary theory on “soft money” at Portland State University in Oregon. Then a recession dried up the soft money.

Helen Tartar (MA English, 1974; MA East Asian Studies, 1978) and I had been a couple since 1973, and while I was at Berkeley, she was hired in-house at Stanford University Press, eventually being tasked with developing their list in the humanities, which she did so successfully that by the time I was done at Portland State in the early 1990s, she had an international reputation as an acquisitions editor. So rather than look for another academic job, I in effect joined the family business, working on manuscripts that get away from their authors and on translations of French and German theory that have problems. And after only 19 years together, Helen and I actually got married.

Stanford has been in the forefront of the corporatization of the university and became an increasingly toxic place to work. In 2003, after they had fired Helen for doing her job too well, we moved to New York, where she began building a major reputation for the humanities list at Fordham University Press. In 2014, while attending an academic conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Helen was killed when the car in which she was riding was T-boned by a 19-year old driver who fell asleep at the wheel.

I had planned to attend the 45th reunion that year, but it was just too soon. Insurance settlements following the accident mean I don’t have to work these days, but I’ve been thinking about how texts function my entire life, and you can’t retire from thinking. In addition to editing academic books, I publish the Catskill Fly Tyers Guild Gazette newsletter and Gordon’s Quill, the newsletter of Theodore Gordon Flyfishers, a New York conservation organization. I started fly fishing in Oregon, and if they don’t find me facedown at my keyboard, it’ll be facedown in a trout stream.