When Heather Wishik was young, her father told her, “You don't have to do one thing your whole life.” After attending Falk in the 1950s, Heather took this advice to heart, moving across the world and back again while pursuing everything from teaching children and practicing law to poetry and art. 

In 2025, communications coordinator Caitlin Chang and manager of constituent relations Laurie Hess spoke with Heather to learn more about her incredible life.

CC: First of all, when were you at Falk?

HW: I started at Falk in kindergarten in 1955 and was there through third grade. Then my parents decided to experiment with public school, so I had fourth grade in public school, and I hated it. I went back to Falk for fifth, sixth, and seventh grade. I didn't graduate because I was going on to Winchester Thurston School, and their upper school started in eighth grade. 

The fifth, sixth, and seventh grade[s] all happened in two years because I skipped a grade. I think I was the first person they ever skipped. That following summer, one of my classmates from fifth grade also skipped, so he and I were in seventh grade the following year. 

LH: And what were, if you can recall, the biggest differences between your public education experience and what you experienced at Falk? 

Starting in kindergarten, Falk was a magical place as far as I was concerned.

HW: My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Hutchinson, had pet skunks, Rose and Violet. They had been de-scented. We got to play with skunks as if they were kittens. She had huge cardboard boxes, big enough for each of us to fit into, that we made a train out of. Each of us could fit inside one of the cars. She got our attention by playing the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth. “Bum, Bum, Bum, Bum” meant be quiet, stop, and listen. She was an amazing teacher, so my time at Falk started with this incredibly talented kindergarten teacher. We made butter. It was an adventure every day. 

Then in first grade, there was a creative writing newsletter, and I got to publish my first poem, “Callie, the Calico Cat.” It was an experience of having teachers who were confident we could do anything we put our minds to and were challenging us creatively every day.

I had the same teacher for second and third grade: Ms. Hawkins. She had us doing a lot of writing but writing in a research way. I remember we did a whole unit on birds. We got to pick which bird we wanted to do a report on, and I did the cardinal. We did research, we wrote a page of what we had found, and then we illustrated it, and they were all hung on the walls. That was what school was about.

It was just a constant, interesting, challenging, creative, wonderful life. 

I got to public school, and it was speed tests for multiplication tables and circles to learn how to do cursive. Everything was by rote, and everybody had to do the same thing, whereas, at Falk, you got to pursue your own interests. There was very little in the way of creativity other than an art class where the teacher told me I couldn't draw.

I don't remember any music [in public school]. Music at Falk was constantly important. Ms. Kirkel had us doing four-part rounds as 6-year-olds. We put on musicals and plays. She took us to the Stephen Foster Memorial at Pitt and let us listen to the organ. You know, it was such a contrast between public school and Falk. 

LH: I think that as you're describing your experience at Falk, it's amazing to me how similar it still feels, like all that could be said about what's happening within these walls today. 

HW: And that's certainly the impression I get from the newsletter and the magazine. It's still full of arts and music and creativity and students finding their interests. 

Well, then fifth and sixth grade—again, that was a combined year for me. Mr. Hobble, in sixth grade, taught us square dancing—we were all square dancing on our lunch hour. We did academics, but we also had all these other things that were enriching. 

I also remember in the beginning of fifth grade, which was 1960, I think, we had Mr. Nance for gym, and he started us on the Kennedy fitness regime. We were doing 50 sit-ups, and we were climbing a rope all the way up to the ceiling. As a little kid, the ceiling of the gym felt like it was in the sky. I mean, it felt so high. 

But you know, he was confident that we could do it. Some of us could do it at the beginning; some of us could get there eventually, and that confidence they had in us was really amazing. I think Falk gave me confidence and competence. It taught me a lot of different how to’s—both how to do things and how to learn. 

Then seventh grade with Mr. Buckley was magical, too, because he was so interested in having us learn about our surroundings. We did a whole unit about Heron Hill, which Falk sits on. We did geology there, we did anthropology, we did socio-cultural studies of who lived there and how it had changed—you know, using academics but grounding us in our surroundings. 

When I was back at Falk a number of years ago for an alumni gathering, I went into that classroom, and the rolled-up old maps were still up there. They're way out of date, I'm sure, but they were still on the wall. 

So, you know, there was something about how teachers found creative ways to do academics that was really quite wonderful. 

CC: And they're definitely still doing that today, which is awesome. What happened after your time at Falk and at Winchester?

HW: I went to Winchester in eighth grade, and then the following year, my family and I went to Pakistan. My parents were public health people, and my father got an offer to work with the Ministry of Health in Pakistan to start the family planning program for the country. My mother was a public health educator, and they hired her to work on this project also.  

We lived in Pakistan for a year and a half. Then I came back to Winchester, so I was in tenth and eleventh grade at Winchester. I skipped my senior year and went to Carnegie Mellon, which was Carnegie Tech at the time. I was a 16-year-old freshman, which was probably not a great idea, [laughs] but anyway. 

I went to Carnegie Mellon for one year. I transferred to Cornell for my sophomore year, and then I dropped out. At eighteen, I was really not ready to declare a major and decide what I was going to do with the rest of my life. 

It was 1968. I went to San Francisco and lived and worked in Haight Ashbury in a free school and was a hippie. From there I went into the Peace Corps. I was in a public health program for the country of Niger, and I went through the training program in St. Thomas on the Virgin Islands and then into the country for a six-week training program. While I was there, I got very ill, and they didn't know what was wrong with me. 

I decided to leave rather than go on and be a volunteer, so I got back to the States. They figured out it was dengue fever, which was, at that time, an East African disease, but I managed to get it in West Africa. I went back and talked with a Dean at Cornell, where I had been on a leave of absence, but I didn't re-enroll. I had worked in an experimental school in California, and I found out that there was going to be an experimental public school in Ithaca, New York. I interviewed and was hired as a “teacher’s aide,” although I actually was a classroom teacher. 

I worked there for several years. We had family groups—kindergarten, first, and second grade together in a group, for example. I loved that and used some of my memories from Falk to create experiences for the children. 

I then worked in a parent-run preschool, where I was the director teacher for another year. I decided that I really wanted to have my own kids at some point, and I didn't want to be with other people's children all day long because I didn't think I'd have energy for my own kids. I got married, and we moved to San Diego because my ex-husband was finishing his PhD at UC San Diego. 

I was also pregnant. I went back to college at Goddard College in their adult degree program, which was a low residency program—you spent two weeks there, then you wrote packets back and forth to your professor for six months, and then you spent another two weeks there. 

I had my son, Gabriel, and I finished at Goddard. Then I went to law school because I decided I could help parents, you know, with their need for their kids to get special education or get free health clinics started and so on. 

I attended the University of San Diego School of Law. Because I had an infant when I started, I went to the night program, so four years instead of three. I graduated first in my class of 286, and I gave the valedictorian speech, which caused quite a ruckus because I got up and took off my robe and, in my civilian clothes, I said, “We need to remember we're people and law is a service profession. Instead of counting success as how fast you get your first Mercedes, we should be asking, ‘Who are we helping?’” It was one of my political moments [laughs]. 

In college, at Cornell, I had been very active in the anti-war movement for Vietnam. I got beaten up by federal marshals at the Pentagon in 1967, sitting in on the portico. That famous picture that has Secretary of Defense McNamara looking out the window of the Pentagon down at all the protesters—I was down there. So, I had been very political and continued to be so. 

Anyway, I graduated, but I didn't have a job, even though I was first in my class, because the jobs I had interviewed for, I was honest and said, “I have a three and a half year old, and I don't want to work 80 hours a week, so what can you do for me?” All the law firms said, “Goodbye,” so I went back east to visit friends, and one of them got me an interview with the incoming US attorney. 

The US attorney hired me, so I moved with my son—I was a single parent at that point, divorced from my husband—to Concord, New Hampshire and worked there. That job ended up being 80, 90 hours a week, after all, which didn't work really well for a single parent, so I got myself a faculty position at Goddard in Vermont and moved us to Vermont a year later. 

I taught there in the Adult Degree Program where I had been a student. I became the Dean of the program eventually. When Goddard went through one of its many crises of financial craziness, I left to go teach at Vermont Law School. I taught for a number of years, then I worked in a law firm. 

Eventually, I was representing a woman who had been raped, had become pregnant, and had a daughter. She did not go to the police about this, so there wasn't a criminal case in the record. The man who had raped her decided he wanted custody of this girl. I was representing the mother in family court, and I lost, and he got custody. I quit law. I just decided, I can't do this anymore—there's no justice here. 

I was by then in a long-term relationship with the woman who is now my spouse. I took a year off. I wrote a novel, which isn't published, but it was a good thing to do for the year. I started consulting to organizations to try to prevent discrimination from happening before it lands on the desk of a lawyer. 

My parents were in public health and believed in preventive medicine; I figured I'd be in preventive law, so I went into organizations to try to teach them to stop discriminating.

I became an organizational consultant. I did that—in terms of organizational change, leadership, team building, diversity—for quite a number of years. During those years, my spouse and I moved to Boston and Cape Cod for a while. Then we moved to Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where she had a job. For five years, we were based there, and I was consulting around the world. We came back to the United States and, after some more time on the Cape and in Boston, ended up back in Vermont in 2011. There was a meander there [laughs]. 

All that time, I ran my own consulting practice, and then, in 2007, I went to work in-house for the first time with the TJX Companies, which is TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods. I worked for them as their first lead diversity person for three and a half years to get things set up and then went back into my own practice. 

And then in 2015, my major client, The Nature Conservancy, asked me to come in as their first Chief Diversity Officer, so I went in-house a second time, worked for them for about five years, and retired in 2020. 

That's kind of a fast ‘around-the-world' of what happened after Winchester and Falk [laughs]. 

LH: It seems like you should be like 300 years old to have packed all those different experiences in! I don't know how you made that possible. 

HW: My father’s advice that you don't have to do one thing your whole life—that psychological permission—was helpful. 

Anyway, through all of that, I wrote poetry. I never stopped writing from the time I was six years old at Falk. During the ’80s, I published poems in different literary magazines, and I was actually anthologized in Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time and New Lesbian Writing. Mostly, I was busy working, and the poems were sitting in a drawer. 

In my 40s, I started doing visual art as well. While I was a consultant, I took courses on printmaking at the Fine Arts Work Center. We were based on Cape Cod, for quite a number of years, and I was doing both visual art and poetry as avocation. I knew that when I retired, I really wanted to focus and put those things at the center of my life, so that's what I've been doing since 2020.  

LH: So you don't have any side hustles at this point. 

HW: No, happily [laughs]. My hustles are poetry and art, putting them together in poellages, and also doing them separately. 

LH: That's wonderful. 

During November and December 2024, Heather's poellages were on display at the Norman Williams Public Library in Woodstock, Vermont. The combined poems and collage are a memoir of her early years.

But I credit Falk, I really do. I credit Falk in just, you know, engaging me creatively, both visually and verbally, from the beginning, and in giving me the confidence to try things and to experiment and to not be afraid. 

CC: That was going to be my next question was if Falk had any impact on that journey, and you're not the first to tell us that Falk, kind of, laid the foundation for that creative confidence and the ability to go after whatever you felt passionate about.

HW: Yeah, definitely. My parents were intellectuals. They lived from the neck up, very heady. They appreciated art, but they didn't make art. My father took me to the Pittsburgh [Bicentennial] International [Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture] every time it came around. I can remember as a small child standing in front of a solid blue Barnett Newman canvas with one line in it and his saying, “I don't understand this, but some people do. If you like it, that's fine.” 

Also, Falk took us to young people's concerts with William Steinberg at the Pittsburgh Symphony. Then my parents took us to the ballet and plays. The exposure to music at Falk and my parents having enough affluence to be able to take us to see what was else available—because Pittsburgh was full of culture—that helped. 

So Pittsburgh was great. Falk began that. 

CC: If you had to recommend one poem or one piece of artwork, maybe the one that you would most want to share with people, do you have a choice on that? 

HW: I mean, in terms of other people's work, one of my very, very favorite artists is Willem DeKooning. He does semi-abstracted, sort of liquid, messy painted women. They're just very interesting to me. In terms of poets, Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood are two of my favorite poets. I have lots of favorites.

Herring Cove, 1999

In terms of my own work, I started with oil painting and did very large, abstracted landscapes for a while. Because we were living on Cape Cod and the light was so magical there, I did a series of landscapes where you can see the shoreline and the shore and the ocean, but then in the sky, there's a rectilinear area that has several colors in it. I called them “skybox paintings,” and what I was doing was putting the different colors that the sky went through in dawn and at sunset into one moment. I have a couple of those hanging in my house. They're large oils, and they're still some of my favorite paintings that I've ever done. 

Wellfleet Cliffs, 1998

There's a poem that was published a couple years ago. There's an eco-urban journal called Sprout, and they asked for poems about shade—the phenomenon of shade. I wrote a poem about Pittsburgh—who had shade and who didn't have shade in Pittsburgh.

CC: Is there anything else you feel like you would want fellow alumni or the community to know about you?

I guess I would want to say to alums that I hope their memories of Falk are as positive as mine, and that even if they aren't totally, there's probably something that they remember doing or learning that makes them smile. That's the special thing about Falk—the opportunities we each individually had to become who we are. 

HW: For the current community, I'm so thrilled that you're still doing this kind of education. My spouse asked me this morning, “Is Falk still like it was when you were there?” And I said, “I think so—from the newsletter, it looks like it." It looks like it's still that magical place, which is really wonderful to know because kids deserve that kind of education, and they don't get it very often.

The other thing I haven't said is that I'm still in touch with a number of my classmates. Our class was friends with each other, and many of us have stayed friends. A couple of us have died along the way, but most of us are still around. The ones who haven't disappeared for whatever reason—a lot of us are still in touch, and that feels really important. One of my classmates—the one who skipped also—and I are still very close, and we communicate quite regularly. There are several others that I communicate with periodically, and I think that's important that Falk encouraged us to be friends with each other. 

We got to do projects with each other, we were mixed and matched in different pairs and trios, and we built relationships that were pretty meaningful. I would say to the students now:

Don't take for granted the classmates around you because they may become your lifelong friends.