Dr. Bob Mayberry

Dr. Bob Mayberry Associate Professor of English Director, Composition Program Bell Tower - West Wing Phone: (805) 437-2786 Email: bob.mayberry@csuci.edu

MFA Theatre, U of Iowa , 1985
PhD English, U of Rhode Island , 1979
MA English, U of Utah , 1975
BA English, U of Nevada , Reno , 1971

Courses, CSUCI:

• ENGL 102-103 Stretch composition
• ENGL 105 Rhetoric and composition
• ENGL 333 Multicultural drama
• ENGL 449 Multicultural literature
• ENGL 463 Writing for stage & screen

Bob Mayberry's chubby little hands clutched a chisel at the age of 4 and carved his very first sentence in stone.

By 6 he had evolved to those Very Thick Pencils popular in public schools in the Fifties, the kind that were impossible to keep between the lines. (Bobby started thinking outside the lines at a very young age.)

Ballpoint pens were the all the rage in the Fifties, but they leaked--in your pocket and on your fingers. By the time he reached high school in the Sixties, Bobby was entrusted with his first pen. It speckled his white shirts with blue polka dots.

Bobby started college the same summer another Bobby--Kennedy--was assassinated. In the political gloom of the late Sixties, he cheered himself up by writing with pastel colored Flair pens. He signed his name (Bob, no longer Bobby anymore) with no capital letters and dotted his i's with bright circles. He would've made smiley faces : ) but that craze hadn't happened yet.

Bob experimented with typewriters in college. He got high on how easily letters filled the blank page. "Cool," he said, "groovy, man." He wrote dozens of bad poems and very unacademic term papers, but the University of Nevada gave him his BA anyway.

The first time Bob tried grad school, he flunked out. The second time he dropped out-to live on a communal farm. (It was the fashionable thing to do in the Seventies.) When his mother bought him one of the first electric typewriters and packed him off to grad school in Utah , he finally found his niche, earning a masters degree in Keyboard Arts.

From Utah , Bob journeyed to Rhode Island , where he became a Doctor of Typestry, and on to Oklahoma and Texas , his first teaching jobs. Wherever he went his portable was sure to follow.

Bob resigned his professorship in Texas to join the Playwright's Workshop in Iowa . Actors need words-to fill their mouths, to fill the stage, to fill the theatre night after night-more words than Bob's little electric could produce. Word processors, which came on the market in the early 80s, made rewriting much easier, so the Playwrights Workshop provided its writers with a room, a printer, and several first generation Apple Macintoshes.

After Iowa , Bob taught part-time in Southern California until he landed a full-time gig teaching writing in Las Vegas , where they paid him enough to buy his very own computer. Our Master of Keyboard Arts and Doctor of Typestry quickly became an Acolyte for Apple, a Minister for Macintosh.

Bob kept moving and Apple kept changing the look of their computers: he had a pizza box-shaped Mac when he taught on an island in Alaska , a bulky rectangular CPU when he taught in Michigan , and a tangerine-colored portable with a handle when he moved back to California to teach at CSUCI.

For a boy who began chiseling sentences when he was 4, Bob has come a long way. He composed this silly personal history on his new notebook-sized, snow white-colored iBook, a thoroughly twenty-first century writer.