“I ACTUALLY LIKE Ohio,” writes D'Arcy Fallon, “but it is so different  from other places where we've lived.” It’s true. The former Examiner reporter (and SF State journalism grad) left her newspaper job in Colorado Springs to teach at the University of Colorado's campus in Colorado Springs. She was named an Outstanding Instructor the same year she published her memoir on life in a religious commune, "So Late, So Soon" (Hawthorne, 2004).  Then she joined the faculty at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.
    It’s a long way from San Francisco.
    “I'm very grateful for my life, with all its twists and turns. I didn't expect to be working at a university that looks like a backdrop to a Frank Capra movie, getting to teach journalism and creative nonfiction and, sigh, OK, English composition too.” 
    Other notes: (1) Husband Rudy Bahr is the boss of an outfit that finds homes for stray animals. (2) Little Joel – not so little any more – is at St. Louis University. (3) Snow and freezing rain caused her car to spin out and hit a buckeye.
    “The fact is, I am enjoying the third act of my life. Act 1: Jesus Freak in commune.   Act II: Journalist.   Act III: Teaching at a small liberal arts college. Who knows how this will end?”
    Answer: It almost did.
                                                  ><
   Here is a scene from Act III, which could be entitled “The Torch Bearer.”

   I heard informally that my case for tenure looked good in April, and bragged to my mom on the phone that short of getting caught having sex with a student or smoking a bowl of crack, I had definite job security. Well.  That was a few days before the April fool's edition of the Wittenberg Torch came out. (I'm the paper's faculty adviser.)  And then the other shoe dropped.
             Front page headline:

                       Wittenberg's president says he is
                        father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby

    There was a Photoshop picture of Witt's president getting hugged by the glandularly gifted Smith, who was wearing a dress reminiscent of the one Marilyn Monroe wore when she crooned “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to JFK in the '60's.  Inside was a story about new course offerings at Wittenberg, including one for pole-dancing.
    I was in deep, deep, er, snow. Everybody affiliated with the Torch was. The faculty senate threatened to pull the plug on the Torch. The local paper got wind of the story, and the student Feminist Union lodged a complaint.
    In the end, the paper was censured, everybody had to undergo sexual harassment training, including yours truly, and we all spent time in a re-education camp, where we learned what was – and wasn't – funny.

     And yes, she did get tenure as an associate professor on English, specializing in "creative nonfiction."   Send her an e-mail:
     dfallon@wittenberg.edu