Gayle Ellen Whittier

Gayle was, after a fashion, my advisee at Cornell. I was all of four years older, and very quickly we became friends, the advisee and the advisor interchanging roles. When I married, she created a landscape on a pillow; it is still on exhibit in my house and reminds me of her daily. I remember how extraordinarily hard she worked to combine her loving care of Ellen with her academic work--somehow managing all this on a vanishingly small stipend. Eventually we fell out of touch, and this obituary beautifully brings me up to date.

I was a student of Prof. Whittier´s in 1992, when I took a poetry workshop. She was very helpful to me, and she was a great storyteller.