Timothy Joel Garver Craig

Shushan, NY- Timothy Joel Garver Craig, born July 22, 1940 in Wilkinsburg, PA, died in his own bed in Shushan, NY on Monday, August 19, 2024 where he was cared for in his final days by his family, with support from hospice. He leaves behind his twins, Hamilton and Fiona Craig, and his wife of 30 years (minus one day), Sarah Craig, as well as his dearest friends, Pansy, Chester, Owen, Phila, and Barbara. He was predeceased by many beloved friends, animal and human, as well his best friend of all, Virginia Brewster Coy.
 

These are things he loved: animals, plants, birds, photography, woodworking, gardening, Ezra Pound, Nelson Algren, William Shakespeare, London in the 1960s, Greenwich Village during the folk music era, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, fly tying, streams, bookshops, the Pre-Raphaelites, a certain photo of Alfred Jarry, Dada, making collages, and the sound of the English horn and lute.

These are things he hated: careless drivers who run over animals, the Vietnam War and all similar events subsequently conducted, glue traps, poems that lack poetry, neonicotinoids, the erosion of the English language, cruelty in any form, people who don’t laugh, and pulling up weeds in the garden, because he loved them, too.
 

He was granted a PhD from New York University and a Doctor of Literature from Trinity College, Cambridge. He wrote reviews for Studio International, published poetry widely in various magazines and journals, published scholarly articles in Notes & Queries, and wrote a novel called Sugar Blues. His favorite teaching job was at St. Louis University. He also enjoyed his years at The Mansell Collection in London, the Bryant Library in Roslyn, NY and serving as curator at Falaise in Sands Point, NY. A portrait of Tim by Barry Flanagan is in the permanent collection of The Tate Modern.
 

Tim moved upstate in the early 1980s to pursue a life of flyfishing, sobriety, and relative seclusion. It was there that he met his best friend, as well as her daughter, who became his wife in 1994. They bought an old farmhouse in Shushan because they found it at the foot of a rainbow, decided they would live there until they died (a pledge now fulfilled by Tim), brought twins into the world, referred to their land as Portugal for no clear reason, and also as Craig House, for much more obvious reasons, and made a world according to their own rules and ideas for thirty years. 

A service will be held privately.

Donations in Tim’s memory can be made to Salem’s Community Cats, PO Box 402, Salem, NY 12865.

To offer condolences to the family, please visit www.gariepyfuneralhomes.com

The McClellan-Gariepy Funeral Home, Inc. in Salem, NY are entrusted to the care of arrangements.

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