Poet and teacher Chris Forhan grew up in Seattle before his career took him into the deep South. Now, with a new job teaching poetry at Butler University this fall, Forhan is happy to be up north in a city that reminds him of home.

"When I first visited, I kept flashing back on Seattle," said Forhan who last taught at Auburn University in Alabama. "Both have tranquil, laid-back qualities but aren't dull. Part of what makes Indianapolis attractive to me is its focus on the arts. Like Seattle, there are interesting people here and interesting things to do."

Forhan will be offering one more cultural thing to do to the city as he begins leading a community poetry workshop at Butler starting in September.

"It's a good way to reach out into the community and offer a course that's comparable to what somebody might take on the graduate level," Forhan said of the noncredit workshop.

He's also excited to benefit from his new school's Visiting Writers Series. "I'm looking forward to incorporating the poets who are coming into my courses," he said. "It's great to have the energy from the series to bring into the classroom."

Enthusiasm for teaching

While Forhan's creative passion is poetry, he's found teaching more than a necessary way to make a living.

"I love teaching. I love seeing students grow before my eyes as writers," he said. "A poet can't make a living at poetry. I happen to be one of the lucky people who really enjoys teaching."

But Forhan arrived at teaching through poetry. And he arrived at poetry through music.

As a teen growing up in Seattle, he wrote songs and tried accompanying them on the guitar. "I came to the understanding that I'm not much of a musician, and the music fell away," he said. "What started as song lyrics took me several years to say 'I guess I'm writing poems.' "

A communications major in college, Forhan went to work in television journalism for a station in Montana after graduating. He continued writing poems at night while chasing ambulances by day.

"When I started hoping for deaths on the highway so I could get an exclusive interview with the widow, I knew being a TV journalist was robbing me of my soul," he said. "There was a real disconnect between what I was doing for a living and what fed my soul."

So he quit TV and went back to school, studying with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic in New Hampshire. After finishing that degree and a third at the University of Virginia, he began teaching at a community college in South Carolina before publishing his first of two collections of poems and landing at Auburn, where he taught for four years.

"I followed the jobs south," said Forhan, who just enjoyed a summer focused on writing, thanks to a National Endowment for the Arts grant. "I'm not a Southerner, and I never really had any desire to live there. It was kind of an accident."

But he had plenty of desire to come to Butler and to Indianapolis. "I couldn't be happier to be here," he said.