After Mark Statman’s longtime colleague, Robin Mookerjee, passed away this past May, he decided that this was the right time to refocus his life and dedicate more time to his writing.
When August rolled around Statman was happy because for the first time since he started working at Lang, in 1985, he didn’t have to sit down and write a new syllabus.
It wasn’t just the 31 years at Eugene Lang that led Statman to make his decision, “I could tell that I was getting to a point in my life where my writing was taking more center stage.” Currently he’s working on a translation collection of Uruguayan poet, Martín Barea Mattos. Statman and Mattos have been closely working together, the book will come out this upcoming spring.
He had dedicated so much of his life to teaching, a choice that he loved, but he knew that it was going to have to end if he wanted to do the kind of writing he wanted to do.
It’s very fortunate that Oaxaca has a very lively art and literary scene. It’s also a place where Statman is able to stretch out his Spanish, which he wasn’t able to do much of in the city, though he was reading and translating it.
“I’m thinking in Spanish and talking in Spanish and then I’ll start to think in English and the words will disappear…but it’s exciting to actually be someplace where I get to talk Spanish all the time, “ he said.
Now, the former professor of writing has moved with his wife, the painter and writer Katherine Koch. They have both become permanent residents of the country which has opened an exciting and scary chapter of his life.
Statman said that now that they’re residents people have asked them if they would be for Trump since it would make their lives more economical as the dollar gets better against the peso. He would immediately shoot those thoughts down,“it’s awful! Never. No, no, no.”
Statman said that artists make decisions with a lot of inspiration and care but when they start to be too careful sometimes it’s better to let go. “I’m gonna go that way where it’s a lot more fun, and so we decided to go where it’s more fun,” he said.
When Lang writing professor Robin Mookerjee died in May, it put things in perspective for Statman, and really motivated him to go along with the move. “Maybe now is a good time [to move] because you never know,” Statman said.
Oaxaca has a tropical climate, is a UNESCO designated city, has incredible ruins, an all-around national treasure in Statman’s eyes. “When I first came to Mexico in 1987, I found a kind of silence and a kind of beauty I had not really found anywhere else,” he said, paraphrasing William Burroughs’ line in “Naked Lunch,” “something falls off you when you cross the border into Mexico.”
While in Oaxaca this last January for the U.S. Poets in Mexico for their annual conference, he and his wife talked about how beautiful the town would be to live in.
Statman and his wife, Koch, had been talking about moving to Oaxaca since they last visited, by the end of July they had made their decision. That same month he emailed both Dean Stephanie Browner and Provost Tim Marshall to let them know about his decision.
By the beginning of September Statman and Koch were starting to settle into their new home.
Statman has only been gone from New York for a couple of weeks and hasn’t started to miss too much just yet, although he will now only be able to listen to the Mets play via radio instead of catching them at Citi Field. Statman said that he will also miss being able to walk out the door of the Brooklyn home he had lived in for 25 years and basking in the familiarity of what was going on around him and the people in his neighborhood.
“I might miss New York in the fall when the air starts to get a little crisper. And the first three days of snow,” Statman said.
He definitely doesn’t miss the subway, the New York summer heat, or feeling cold.
As for what he’ll miss about Lang, he references his students a lot and the people that he has worked with for most of his life. But Lang isn’t completely out of his life just yet.
“You live inside a college for long enough you meet people that you grow to love [and] you think, ‘I’m gonna know these people for the rest of my life,’’” Statman said.
The person that has been most helpful in his transition to Mexico has been a Lang graduate who also lives in Oaxaca. “We see her two or three times a week, so I’m still seeing Lang students,” he said. There is even a former Associate Dean of Lang who lives just 200 miles from Statman and gave him advice on moving to Oaxaca.
For Statman and Koch, living in Oaxaca is all about living in the moment. “When you’re in the last third of your life you think in the present tense a lot of the time,” Statman said.
Photo credit: Julia Himmel
Odalis is a senior studying Journalism + Design at Lang and the social media manager of The New School Free Press. She spends time watching all of the TV shows and likes to yell about them to her friends, and occasionally writes about it. She is originally from Puerto Rico but calls Miami home (#Miss305) and is very passionate about Cuban food, empanadas, and the salsa dancing emoji.
