Ohio Today, the alumni news site for Ohio University, featured a first-person alumni essay headlined “Always home at OHIO” by William Virgil Davis AB ’62, M.A. ’65, Ph,D, ’67, who earned three degrees in English from the College of Arts & Sciences.
Davis, who served as Professor of English and writer-in-residence at Baylor University, is an award-winning poet and critic, and the Ohio Today piece includes a poem called “A Walk around the Block,” from his Dismantlements of Silence: Poems Selected and New (Texas Review Press, 2015).
The narrow, twisting two-lane roads between Canton, Ohio, where I was born and raised, and Athens, Ohio, where I lived for nine years, became an important lifeline for me between ages 18 and 27. Long before there were any major highways between the two places, I travelled back and forth between them, through small towns such as Zoar and New Philadelphia, Newcomerstown and Cambridge, and Zanesville and Glouster and Chauncey. I knew these winding roads by heart. I could drive them in my sleep, and sometimes thought I had.
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