Bobcats

another post brought over from my soon-to-be-defunct These Remembered Hills blog:

Ohio University, in the city of Athens, plays a somewhat central role in ‘These Remembered Hills’ and will continue to do so in any sequels. Athens is some twenty miles down the road from Logan and should be about thirty miles from the Fry Farm. That would depend on the route one chose to drive, though most come to a fairly similar figure.

Jim Fry, who already has completed a couple years of college at Ohio State plus a four year hitch in the navy, chooses to enroll at Ohio University both because it is conveniently close and because of the reputation of its art program. Art is what he has decided to study after leaving the service. Also, an old friend of Jim — or of his late sister — is an instructor there.

The university is spread on relatively low land near the Hocking River and is — or was — known to flood with some regularity. This is alluded to in the novel but we have yet to experience it. That is a definite possibility in a future story.

The art building is at a bit of a remove from the rest of the campus and I have noted this in the novel. Much of the rest of the geography of the university and Athens in general I have fudged a bit — the businesses and such, in particular. It’s fiction, after all. I haven’t been strict about any of the other locales in the novel either, but in general it is all close enough. No blatant rearranging of the scenery!

I might mention that Ohio University has also popped up in other novels in another series, written under a different name. That would be the Women in the Sun books (‘One Summer in the Sun,’ ‘One Christmas in the Sun’) which appeared under the Sienna Santerre pen name. A young athlete, a friend of the protagonists, chooses to attend the college. The university itself, however, does not actually appear as a location in the stories.

So we can expect the university to appear in any sequel to ‘These Remembered Hills’. Maybe the Bobcats football team, too. Jim will definitely be driving to classes in Athens come Fall. He might even take his bike to ride around campus.