Remembering Denis Murphy, founding advisor to Trillium
by Professor Ed Shannon
Denis Murphy, Professor of Literature at Ramapo from 1972 to 1995 passed away earlier this year. Denis founded Trillium in 1973 and later revived it in 1987 after a brief hiatus. Despite low budgets, occasional apathy, and now even a pandemic, the magazine has been a staple at the college for decades. And we can thank Denis Murphy for much of that success.
Denis Murphy was hard to miss: ruddy red cheeks, flailing arms, tousled hair, and a burning cigarette. He’d punctuate his courses in American and Irish literature with spontaneous explosions of jokes, asides, and stories that probably had something to do with class. (His grandfather was an undocumented Irish immigrant who had jumped ship in New York harbor. The old man screamed in horror on seeing an Italian family order mussels at a New York restaurant: “Jaysus! That’s famine food! Don’t eat that shit!” True? Not true? It’s a true enough story about someone else’s long-gone grandfather that this writer remembers 40 years later).
Murphy was a passionate and inspirational teacher. You could just as easily call him a passionate and inspirational reader. At least once a week, no matter the course, he’d freeze mid-sentence and say about Faulkner, Lowell, Melville, or Joyce: “Jesus, I’d give my right arm to have written that!” The students most attuned to his unusual frequency have found themselves tripping over ghostly right arms ever since. If you squint, you can still spot one or two downstairs in A Wing.
As it happens, Denis was one of my first college professors. He bookended my Ramapo years by allowing me to sit in an on a class after I graduated, and it was there I first read Moby Dick. That was the experience that sent me to graduate school, making me one of many, many Denis Murphy expats: Ramapo students who for the first time could imagine a life for themselves they had never considered before. Leaving New Jersey and everything!
He mentored and inspired so many of us. In fact, the 1987 “rebirth” issue of Trillium was co-edited by a student named Kathleen O’Brien, who later became an adjunct Professor at Ramapo and even taught Magazine Workshop, the course that produces Trillium. Also, we have been married since 1988. So there’s that. It was Kathleen who was taking that Moby Dick course I sat in on.
Denis retired for health reasons in 1995. I was hired at Ramapo in 1997 where I have taught courses he once taught. Courses I had taken. There is more of Denis Murphy here at Ramapo than those phantom right arms. You’re holding a bit of his passion in your hands right now, as you read this magazine. Do him a favor: take your time, give it your attention. Then pass it—and a little passion—on to the next reader.