Professors Mary Cappello and Jean Walton together with Professor James Morrison of Claremont McKenna College (a fellow alumni of the State University of New York at Buffalo English Doctoral Program) have written a collection of creative non-fiction essays bound together by these mutual years in upstate New York: Buffalo Trace: A Threefold Vibration. 

Here is a taste of what the book presents: “Buffalo, New York – in the 1980s, this former boomtown had already left its illustrious past behind. The days of heavy production were over in America’s rust belt, with no harbinger of what pursuits would fill this void. Amid this microcosm of national decline, a very special institution continued to flourish. The State University’s famous English Department was past its own glory days of the `60s but remained a cauldron of intellectual life, incubating some of the freshest, strangest, most exciting ideas to emerge in that defining period of the U.S. academy. Into this heady environment come three young people longing to be initiated into the Life of the Mind. A suburban Michigan aesthete seeks the modernism that will distance him from his family’s immersion in mass culture; a Pennsylvanian poet gains entry to the halls of academia through the art of theft; a cautious Canadian abandons monogamy for triangles of sexual and philosophical desire. This unique book tells their unforgettable stories” (Excerpt taken from the book’s website). 

To read more click here. Find, also, an excerpt from the book here.