Fred Pollard:
CLASS OF 1970
Bremerhaven American High SchoolClass of 1970
Bremerhaven,
Fred's Story
Warm greetings to my former classmates
Google my name: Manfred Pollard, this will give you the tip of the iceberg on me without the details. I write perpetually in my head and a lot in notebooks according to my current state of enlightenment or condition of intense feelings. I compose three things well: words, pictures and musical ideas mostly on left-handed guitar.
I've taught for nearly 20 years in the talented in visual arts program in the New Orleans Public Schools after being a medic/ambulance driver in the army for 4 years, with over three degrees including a masters in counseling. I stopped taking MFA course work in creative writing 15 years ago. I have been offered visual arts shows, individually and with groups for years.
Recently I became the artist in residence at the Creole Gardens Guest House/Bed and Breakfast at 1415 Prytania St., New Orleans, LA, 70130. My friends Karen and Steve operate this marvelous establishment, a wonderful place for my pictures, poetry and music. Prints will be shown on their website hopefully someday soon (or a link to a website of mine will be included). Prints are available for sale. I highly recommend interested visitors to the city to seek shelter at the Creole Gardens. In a few years when I've finished earning a pension I plan on helping the Creole Gardens become a desired multi-media art venue.
In the past two and a half years since the hurricane,
I've been reemployed in the public schools gifted/talented program, have had a third finalist poem selected in the Faulkner/Wisdom nationwide literary competition (with a fourth in the can awaiting results), two major individual shows including over 50 images in each and an offer for a show at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts in the future. This will
probably take up most of my time after school and when not working on my house in the coming months
and perhaps next few years. On a lighter side, or perhaps moribund, depending on your tolerance for ambiguity, such is the state of art I enjoy and seem to relish as a major quality in my expression, where hopefull...Expand for more
y wit and thoughtfulness can be mined ...slight manfesto there folks, like Obama, I cherish hope and want to do something with and about it...
so, like billions unsold, I too have videos on "McYouTube" ...you can go to YouTube and type in
Dieterman for some rough examples of self-penned song. The first which is a perhaps too sober version of ascending cheekiness in one of my own decrepit rooms. What follows this is a string of one-off shoots at soprano-less tunefulness one drunken night in the decommissioned convent belonging to my teacher friend across the side street from my house on Magazine St. while caring for his cats for several days.
It has been about a year since I added clips to Youtube. Now I have a lot more material to add when I can get around to it ...soon I hope ...I'm very busy in about a dozen areas and not very digitally
savvy but getting there.
My personal life continues to be enriched by some great friends. Susan Austell and I are still great friends, there's nothing I would not never do for her (no negative pun intended) and she loves me still ...from a friendly divorced distance in her lovely safe St. Charles condo with her adopted kitty Della. I was there to help her through the crisis of her father's death and will be there for her anytime at a moments notice. We rode out Katrina together at her new condo and continued our very touching story.
Susan continues to be a librarian at the Business and Science desk/Technology Center of the main branch at the New Orleans Public Library. Besides me, she put up two co-workers, a married couple,
during the Katrina evacuation at her Tennessee home
in Saltillo just across the Mississippi border with her parents in assisted living in Savannah, Tennessee.
We continue to be survivors who help each other when the dues are due ...often our story has been one of the human condition that reveals many complex angles and layers of character. I hope these artistic expressions can capture and amplify some of the universal highlights of life as a New Orleans artist and beyond.
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