Fithian Press
Fun and Games in the Academic World
of Rock Springs CollegeRock Springs College is a fictional college campus set in a small town in the Midwest. It provides the perfect setting for William J. McGill, the author of The Rock Springs Chronicles, to spin his amusing and sharp-witted tales about academic life. A collection of stories with a common cast of characters, The Rock Springs Chronicles makes up a "broken novel." The insular quality of the small town and the small college gives the campus an atmosphere of a microcosm, and gives the stories or novel a chance for biting satire.
At the center of the cast are faculty members Billy Jim Dinwiddie and Sid Lanier, both of whom have roots in baseball. Baseball in fact plays an important supporting role in this novel, providing metaphor, atmosphere, and folksy wisdom in contrast to such academic pursuits as soil science, obscure aspects of Welsh culture, and the thorny issue of whether or not Edith Wharton ever had an affair with Frederick Jackson Turner, a motif that turns up repeatedly, like the wrong chord.
The academic life is further satirized by campus politics and departmental management (likened to herding cats). Sex plays its proper role in this caper with faculty wives Penelope Lanier (yes, the reference to Odysseus's wife is intentional) and Deirdre Dinwiddie, who at times shows more sense than her husband. Sex also shows up in the form of the thunderously repressed Horace Mann Wray and the exotic Hungarian transplant professor of English literature, Hroswitha Szilagi, who inspires Billy Jim's mind to wander into the wilds and whose libido wins her the presidential prize.
William J. McGill clearly enjoys philosophy, baseball, campus folly, and human folly, and The Rock Springs Chronicles celebrates and punctures all in equal measure.
About the Author.
William J. McGill earned degrees from Trinity College (B.A.) and Harvard University (M.A., Ph.D.). He taught history at Western Maryland College, Alma College, and Washington and Jefferson College, and was Senior Vice President and Dean of the Faculty at Lebanon Valley College. He is also an ordained Episcopal priest and the Poetry Editor of Spitball Magazine. He lives in Cornwall, Pennsylvania and Bay View Michigan.
The Rock Spring Chronicles
William J. McGillISBN 1-56474-299-7
200 pages, paperback, $12.95For ordering information, click here, or phone (800) 662-8351