A Life in Brief

  

Where I Come From

 

Geographically, my past is an amalgam of Virginia, West Virginia, Illinois and Maryland.

 

My father (Roscoe Aubrey Champ) was born in his father’s house in southern West Virginia in 1921, my mother (Mary Blanche Champ [née Robbins]) in Narrows, Virginia, in 1926.  In that part of the country there are a great many people of Scotch-Irish and Welsh origins, and ethnically I am mostly of the latter stock. To give it an authentic American tinge, the family tree also includes, happily, an American Indian paternal great grandmother, about whom I have written in my book Blue Denim Days.

 

At the end of World War II, my father was discharged from the Air Force, having reached the rank of staff sergeant.  By this time he was married to my mother, who in those Rosy-the-Riveter days had been working in a munitions plant in Radford, Virginia. By the time I was born (1947) my father was carrying chairs and couches up hillsides for a furniture company, having quit business college after my mother discovered she was pregnant.  Later, and for many years thereafter, he worked more profitably in wholesale electronics.  As far as I know, Dad has never held the abrupt end of his education against me.

 

La Famille

 

I have two brothers and three sisters.  Samantha, the next child after me, is a housewife in Bolingbroke, Illinois.  David, the next child, lives at the base of Thumb Butte in Prescott, Arizona, where he has a health food business and from which he sometimes has extraordinary views. Brother Greg is in heating and air-conditioning. Sister Barbara is a commercial photographer. Sister Dianna stays at home, taking care of my father and her son, Shaun.  Our dad is long retired and often spends his weekends playing music in local folk clubs.  Our mother died in 2003.  Mom was a warm, loving person, protective of her children and attending to all our needs both great and small. As my brother David said at her funeral, we were lucky to have had her.

 

Education

 

My high school years were spent in Bel Air, Maryland. After  a short stint at a community college, I enrolled at Loyola University of Chicago.  Among my many good teachers there were Dr. Joseph Wolff, Ms.  Rita Clarkson, Dr. John Nabholtz, and Dr. Patrick Casey. I also had a great friend in Rachel Stine, a young New Yorker from a Hasidic family (though she was secular herself), who lived on the 93^rd floor of the Hancock Building, which, she assured me, swayed in violent storms. Later I went on to work for a doctorate at the University of Maryland in College Park. My dissertation director at Maryland was Dr. Lewis Lawson, who saw me through a four-hundred page manuscript on Mark Twain, for the writing of which I had won a fellowship that relieved me of teaching assistant duties.  I also became friends with George Panichas, the editor of the conservative journal Modern Age, and he generously accepted some of my poems and reviews for publication there.  I also met my sweet friend Cathi Chitwood (later Mapes), about whom I have written elsewhere on this site. (See Writing on the main menu.). I graduated in 1992.

 

Work

 

Over the years, I  have held many jobs—maintenance man, farmhand, ticket seller, store clerk, proofreader, freelance editor, researcher.  I started teaching in 1993 at the University of Maryland University College, at first in face-to-face classes but now exclusively on the Internet.  It is the most satisfying work I have done yet. Besides teaching I am always, and continually, at work on poems and stories.

 

Travels

 

I have been hither and yon with the best of them, but I would like to dwell here on two trips that particularly made a mark on me. 

 

The first trip was to the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968.  A friend (Howard “Chip” Dorsey) and I hitchhiked to Chicago from Baltimore, which is the kind of thing young people did without a second thought in those days.  We had little money but a good deal of enthusiasm—not for the Democrats but for all the people we knew, or at least hoped, would be gathered there: the famous rock singers and folksingers, the poets and writers of the time.  We weren’t really prepared for the riots that occurred, or the violence of some of our fellow protestors, but found ourselves awash in the melee anyway.  Most of the rock bands and folksingers never showed—a notable exception being Country Joe and the Fish—but our adventures were many, and by the time the convention ended and the time to go home had arrived, Chip and I were exhausted.

 

Many of our adventures at the Convention form the “plots” of poems in my book Blue Denim Days.

 

A far different experience awaited me in 1988, when I stepped aboard a Pan-Am jet bound for England—my first foray abroad.    At the time I was considering writing my dissertation on Lord Byron, so I was interested in seeing places associated with his life, not the least of which was his ancestral home, Newstead Abbey. Afterwards I visited the Coleridge Cottage in the little village of Nether Stowey,  the Keats House in Hampstead, Clevedon Court where Thackeray wrote most of Vanity Fair.  I found my way, too, to Bristol and the Llandoger Trow, the tavern where Daniel Defoe encountered the sailor Alexander Selkirk, the model for his Robinson Crusoe, and from from which Jim Hawkins sailed on the Hispanola. Another wonderful site in Bristol is the world’s first steamship, built by the famous engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 

 

High on my visitor’s list too, were Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s home town; Bath with all its Jane Austen associations; Oxford where I delighted especially in Magdalen College; Glastonbury with its tor and its cathedral, near which one finds the supposed resting place of King Arthur.  All of these places and my imaginings of them in other times kept my head in such a spin that I could hardly sleep at night.

 

These are only notes but they give you an idea of some of the things I have done and places I have been. Later writings at the site will undoubtedly cover more.