James M. O'Brien Ph. D

You can retire a professor (of Communication Arts) but you can't make him shut up. In the last ten years, I've completed three memoirs, while simultaneously coordinating a couple of film classes for seniors, playing jazz clarinet and trying to get my desk cleared off. The reviewer of my latest (and earliest) memoir, Hang Your Wraps in the Cloak Room, stunned me by writing "I wish he had chosen a fictionalized writing style to present his story." Another challenge, I guess.

I think memoir writing is a kind of fiction anyway. As my classmates have repeatedly pointed out, "I didn't remember it that way," or words to that effect. Anyway, thus far, it's all true, more or less.

The three memoirs trace my early years through sixteen years of Catholic schooling, four years of theological study at St. Mary's in Baltimore, eight years of priesting in the Rockford diocese during the exciting 'Sixties, and leaving me on the doorstep of the University of Miami to begin a long a checkered career teaching Communication Arts and trying to figure out what that was.

Maybe I might have a shot at that fiction assignment to cover my years at UMiami, from l969-73. It seemed like fiction when I was living it. In the words of Paul Simon, "Faking it; not really making it."

Stay tuned!