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About Joy Marsella
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Joy Marsella, Professor Emerita (University of Hawaii), is passionate about promoting civility, which she defines as a commitment to human dignity and the greater good. She is the founder of Civility Dynamics™, which offers workshops, presentations, and learning groups that promote civility. Joy's preferred pronouns are she, hers and her.

Joy holds a M.A. in English from The Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Hawaii, where she taught in the Department of English for 30 years. During her tenure, she helped build departmental, university-wide, and K-16, public-private collaborations; administered programs; taught twenty different courses from first-year to graduate; and was awarded the Regents Medal for Outstanding Teaching. She is the author of one scholarly book and co-authored another. Now living in the Akron area, she is researching another book with a working title of The Civility Galaxy. Her research and thinking is influenced by a mother who won citizenship awards, world travel, life’s travails, and having resided 35 years in Hawaii — a healthy, beautiful, multi-cultural environment.
Life Lessons in Civility
Originally given as a speech for Toastmasters, Akron AM, 5/27/15

I learned civility from a loving mother who won good citizenship awards in school. I negotiated my way as the eldest of my six siblings, a status I claimed by being born ten minutes before my identical twin. In helping care for new lives that came along — Janette, Margaret, and Scott, I learned from mother how to love and nurture them, celebrating their first words and steps, and their amazing growth. In retrospect, I understand I was learning to nurture, good practice for my own two daughters.

Life on the farm brought us close to nature. We tended gardens, and did the chores — feeding the dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and cattle. We lived in Richland County, and indeed its rich soil yielded lush gardens and bountiful harvests of corn, wheat, and oats.

Life on the farm also taught us the demanding realities of a life close to nature. For none of the above was maintained without huge amounts of relentless physical labor. I milked cows with brother Jim every night during high school, even on homecoming evening when an hour or so after milking the cows I was riding on the back of a convertible as a member of the Homecoming Court. We fed ourselves from the bounty of the farm, planting gardens and grain, cultivating and harvesting them, putting up the vegetables and fruit, storing the hay and straw.

I learned to work hard. I learned what it means to commit myself to a project and see it through. It was expected that family would pitch in. I know what it means to “put up” the corn that filled the bed of our grimy dented truck, brothers and sisters having pulled ears from the cornstalk and carried basketsful to the truck; then, on return from the field, husking the ears, silking them, blanching them, cutting the corn off the cob, boxing it for the freezer, and cleaning up the mess from the process — all the while doing this in one day and in good faith and (relative) good humor. We were working together in common cause for our family’s greater good.

It is only in retrospect that I understand the peace that Dad felt with his demanding schedule and many responsibilities, remembering a moment during the harvest when he smiled lovingly across at me. As he managed the heavy steel brackets that guided the wire around the bale of hay, I sat across from him with my taped and gloved hands, bending and wrapping the wires in order to secure the bales. The tractor was driven by brother Dave (9 years of age), and the bales were stacked on the flat-bed wagon by brother Jim (13) as they spewed intact from the baler. The four of us were working together in common cause for our family’s good. I understood my connection to this through his radiant smile. In retrospect, I understand that making a connection with another takes no more than a perceptive look and a radiant smile.

I came to believe in the possibilities of making something happen if I committed myself to it. I watched my father and mother do this, with the help of us all, sometimes including grandparents and uncles, cousins, and the occasional hired hand.

This in addition to keeping us clean, fed, clothed, and schooled, in the Methodist religion, and in music both sacred and secular. Saturday trips to choir practice or after-school ones to piano lessons ended with a precious fifteen minutes at the library to select four books, the number that the sign-out sheet allowed.

I dwell on the fullness of my youth because the essential experiences shaped my attitude and life philosophy as I went through college, married, taught three years in high schools in three different states, lived in Manila for a year and at Six-Miles near Kuching for a month, traveled around the world, reared two daughters, earned graduate degrees, and gained tenure and taught for 30 years in beautiful Honolulu in the multicultural environment of the University of Hawaii.

In the process, I found satisfaction in helping develop and lead new programs both within the department and across the disciplines, as well as collaborations with k-12 schools. Retirement in Atlanta brought me a still another culture (and the opportunity to compare aloha with southern hospitality, both built on heinous legacies), new friends, grandbabies, piano, book clubs, beading, bunko, and gardening. Also new life lessons in the interface of place, public and political circumstances, and personal relationships.

Civility emerged during my retirement years as a topic worthy of reflection and discourse. I remembered a shining example in my mother; a commitment to working in relationship with others to build things and see them through; a long marriage to a husband devoted to cross-cultural psychology and social justice; a big-picture understanding of America through a doctorate in American Studies; knowledge of civility themes in great American writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost; working through personal and professional difficulties and challenges with a “I-can-get-through-this-if-I’m-just-civil” philosophy; a recognition of the hate, prejudice, poverty, partisanship, and general discord that characterizes our society; and a realization that my life had put in front of me some tools with which I could address the problem.

Undaunted by its scope, I am laying out suggestions. This work it difficult but doable. It is cognitively complex, emotionally draining, experientially demanding, and, at the same time, full of the joy of doing good work and interacting with humans trying to be the best they can be, doing unto others as we would have them do onto us. In undertaking study for the civil life, one commits to a philosophy of process that is resonant in our lives: the seasons passing; the life cycle itself of birth, development, maturation, and ending; the interactions of people in places; the exigencies of incidents, celebratory and disastrous; and a staying force, a center of gravity through it all in the possibilities of civility.