Robert's Personal Page

I was born and raised in Keansburg, New Jersey, a small town on the Raritan Bay, not far from Sandy Hook. As a boy, I spent a great deal of time walking the beaches and riding my bicycle along the boardwalk of this amusement-park town. On clear days, the Manhattan skyline rose from the distant edge of the bay, its buildings protruding like fat spikes against the sky. It was a touch of metropolitan life that I rarely experienced as a kid. My father, a descendant of Austrian-Irish parents, worked in lower Manhattan, just at the edge of Greenwich Village, and he had moved to Keansburg to escape what he believed was the squalor of his own boyhood growing up on the Lower East Side. My mother, a descendant of an Irish immigrant father and an Irish mother, worked as a secretary for an insurance company in town. I don't believe it's nostalgia that leads me to remember that in the 1940's and '50's, my hometown resembled a scene out of Norman Rockwell.

Like many boys in those years, I played basketball, football, and baseball. Unlike most boys, between the ages of twelve and sixteen, I competed as a speed skater, a sport I took to, probably because I loved it as much as it seemed to love me. Speed skating lured me outside my small town. I competed in New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. In those years, I raced against the fastest roller skaters in the world, young men I admired and who influenced me profoundly with their discipline and skill.

When I finished Middletown High School, in Middletown, New Jersey, I didn't have the slightest notion of what I wanted to do with my life. On a whim--it was 1961--I tried to join the Marine Corps, an idea that my father quickly put an end to because he refused to sign papers for me. (I was seventeen, not eligible to enter the service on my own.) By this point, the glamour of my Norman Rockwell home had turned into the suffocating sameness of small-town life. Bored and restless living in a summer resort that was ghostly silent in the off-season, I applied to college because I had nothing better to do and no more imaginative way of leaving home. In the following September, I attended Fairmont State College, in West Virginia, without the slightest notion about what I wanted to do there--or even if I had the intelligence to make it through the first semester. To my astonishment, I discovered that I enjoyed the library on campus as much as I had reveled in gymnasiums, swimming pools, and skating rinks as a boy.

I didn't just read books. I devoured them. In doing so, I discovered a world that I believe most young men of my generation were locked out of, particularly those of us who had grown up carrying all the baggage of what a man was supposed to think and do, not what he actually thought and wanted to do. Through literature, I found an outlet for the profound, frightening, and often destructive emotions I was experiencing--and repressing. In the great writers, I discovered worlds as fresh and rich as recently tilled gardens--and as dark and despair-ridden as the later 1960's turned into with the Vietnam War raging in the background.

It was a war I didn't fight in. Beginning in 1966, the year I was graduated from Fairmont State, I took up my grandfather's profession (my mother's father, who had been graduated from Trinity College, in Dublin) as a teacher. When I joined the faculty at Lakewood High School, in New Jersey, I received a deferment from the draft. At Lakewood, the students were wonderful, a provocative blend of African-Americans and children of Jewish immigrants, but the bureaucracy of high school life was suffocating. I decided that if I wanted to teach effectively, I had to escape the banalities of classes being interrupted by intercom messages, of annoying disciplinary problems, and of such delightful assignments as hall duty and monitoring study halls. After that first year, I resigned.

In 1967, I enrolled in a Master of Art's program in English at West Virginia University. Without more than two nickels to rub together in my pocket, I became a graduate assistant--a euphemism for an indentured servant--and for eighteen months taught English to college freshmen. It didn't take me long to discover that I wanted to spend my professional life as a teacher on a college campus. With my Master's degree in hand, I returned briefly to Fairmont State College for my first full-time teaching position as a college instructor. Afterward came five years of doctoral work at the University of Maryland, where I also taught composition, creative writing, and American Literature--and where I studied under the provocative writer of fiction J. R. Salamanca, author of Lilith, one of the most beautiful and disturbing novels I have ever read.

From Maryland, I returned to West Virginia and experienced teaching for the first time at a community college. For three years, I taught at West Virginia Northern Community College, at the New Martinsville, Wheeling, and Weirton campuses. Then in September of 1978, I joined the faculty at the Alexandria Campus of Northern Virginia Community College.

In the twenty-two years I have spent at this campus, I have taught courses in Freshman Composition, Creative Writing, World Literature, Children's Literature, and American Literature. Along with Bob Capps from the Visual Arts Department, I helped to found Writer's Work, the student literary magazine. In addition, I have served on the editorial board of the Northern Virginia Review and have published both fiction and non-fiction in the Cimarron Review, the New England Review, and the Northern Virginia Review. In the spring of 1998, students in the alumni association chose me faculty member of the year at the Alexandria Campus. I also have an interest in music, having sung with the NOVA chorus and played classical guitar. I am currently taking flute lessons.

In January of 1999, I became the coordinator of the Honors Program at the Alexandria Campus.

I am married and have one daughter.

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