Curb Spotlight: Barton Christmas
Curb Scholar Barton Christmas is a dynamic, compassionate and creative student who has taken full advantage of all the opportunities Vanderbilt has to offer. Christmas builds a community everywhere he goes and his fellow students agree after voting him as Vanderbilt’s Outstanding Senior. Writing Fellow Chris Ketchum caught up with Barton to talk about the projects he’s been working on, how he was named Outstanding Senior and his future plans.
Chris Ketchum: What are some of your interests and involvements at Vanderbilt, and how did you develop those interests?
Barton Christmas: My big involvements at Vanderbilt have been in the “classic” Vanderbilt activities. As a VUceptor, as a tour guide, as a member of student government, I’ve done a lot of the things that Vanderbilt tends to consider “respectable.” I think I pursued a lot of these involvements because they were the things that many of my mentors and role models were involved in, things that people seemed to do when they had their lives together (although I’ve since realized how good they were at faking it). That said, I’ve also gone off the beaten path several times, doing everything from stand-up comedy and interfaith religious programming to campus theatre and swim instructing. It’s good to surprise yourself!
CK: Congratulations on being selected as this year’s Outstanding Senior! What was that process like, and what happens now that you’ve been chosen?
BC: Outstanding Senior is an honor Vanderbilt developed a little over a decade ago in place of the standard homecoming court that most schools employ. Every student organization on campus is allowed to nominate one of their seniors for the award, and those nominees fill out applications and write essays on their Vandy career. From there, the last 40 or so get interviewed by a few faculty and staff, who select a final 20 that get voted on by the student body. Of those, ten are honored at a breakfast ceremony (usually the homecoming game, but hey COVID!), and I was selected as the Outstanding Senior out of those ten. It was a huge honor just to be nominated, let alone make it as far as I did, and I’ve thought a lot about the nature of the award and what my winning it says to the rest of the campus. If anything, I hope scholarship and financial aid students of future classes have a bit more confidence in themselves, to know that we belong here too, we can stand out too.
CK: I understand you’re an education major, and that you’re from Paducah, KY. How did growing up in Paducah influence your decision to go into education?
BC: Not a lot of folks from Paducah go to Vanderbilt. I think there have been four of us in the last decade or so. A lot of the reason for that is the lack of possibility we were shown throughout our schooling. If I hadn’t gone out of my way to hunt for a place like Vandy and an opportunity like Curb, I doubt it would have fallen in my lap. No one would’ve pointed at Nashville and said “You can go make a life there.” So my choice to study education stems back to something Chancellor Zeppos used to say, something that a lot of good educators say: Don’t pull the ladder up behind you. If I can get just one more kid to feel like they can surprise themselves, then this whole major will have been worth it.
CK: Tell us about the novel you’re working on. What’s the premise? What motivated you to write this particular story?
BC: The novel is something I’ve been tinkering with since the beginning of COVID. Boanerges (working title) is a fantasy novel that follows a hired killer named Carrick as he tries to hunt down a religious leader, but then starts believing in the religion. It’s far and away the strangest and most satisfying thing I’ve ever gotten to work on. Originally I was going to spend COVID adapting a play I wrote sophomore year into a sort of political satire novel. When the world became a political satire, I decided that what we needed instead was something hopeful, something escapist. That’s what Boanerges aspires to be, a story about how to apologize and how to forgive and how to escape whatever prison you find yourself in.
CK: What other projects are you working on that we haven’t discussed yet?
BC: Aside from Boanerges, my big goal is a sort of social media campaign called Project Closure. I think a lot of students in my class and the one above me have been disheartened by how much we missed from the senior experience we had been expecting. Project Closure is a forum for those seniors, a crowd-sourced therapy project where seniors can submit senior wills and one-minute commencement speeches and whatever kind of goodbye and good riddance they’d like to give to Vanderbilt. I’m hoping to launch it at the start of the new semester.
CK: Any non-academic interests that would help us better understand you?
BC: I was raised as a balloon artist, and I think there are few things that explain me better. Aside from my deep and abiding love for carnies and the performing arts community that I’ve developed through balloons, I also really enjoy running and hiking. Nothing brings me more peace than a few miles of walking and a good book.
CK: How has being a Curb Scholar shaped your experience at Vanderbilt?
BC: Curb has been like the X-Men of Vanderbilt for me, a community of weirdos who have consistently supported me through the hardest bits of college. I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence to go to an open mic or submit an op-ed or attempt a novel, if I didn’t have a family of creative geniuses also putting themselves out there in cool and exciting ways. Seriously, the projects these people engage in are just insane, and it’s thrilling to watch them make something cool and then get together after and talk about how it could’ve gone better, about what comes next.
CK: As a senior, what’s your plan for next year?
BC: That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it? Right now I’m very hopeful to get selected for Vanderbilt’s Keegan Fellowship, so that I could spend a year traveling and interviewing other creatives about their work and about what COVID has done to the artist’s profession. In lieu of that, or immediately after that, I’m hoping to teach for a few years and write a few more books. Down the line, maybe I’ll re-evaluate and realize it’s time for law school, or time to run for office, or time to get a master’s in education. Until then, I just want to enjoy the work I do and try to parse out all that Vanderbilt has meant.
Barton Christmas
Class of 2021
History and Secondary Education major
Hometown: Paducah, KY