Biography of Robin Traywick Williams

My earliest memory is of finding a marble under a table in the living room. In the time-honored investigative method of a three-year-old, I put it in my mouth. It went down my windpipe, effectively blocking it. Fortunately, before too many nanoseconds passed, my survival instincts kicked in and I coughed the marble up.

Hmm, I thought, swallowing marbles is not a good thing.

I’ve been taking risks and learning from my experiences ever since.

I was reared in Lynchburg, Virginia and left in 1968 to attend Hollins University (nee, Hollins College) where I met, for the first time, a Yankee. She had never met a Southerner. We both survived, unscathed. After many interesting experiences as a conservative during the height of the Sixties, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, the civil rights movement, the feminist liberation, Earth Day, flower power and other psychedelic scenes, I learned that I did not want to be anywhere near college or college students. So I dropped out and got married. Another learning experience.

Shortly thereafter I got divorced.

Over the ensuing years, I learned how to transfer from college to college without losing any credits, so that finally, seven years and five colleges after leaving Lynchburg, I got a degree. Two, in fact.

While transferring among colleges, I broke horses for the racetrack Virginia did not yet have and commuted from Virginia to Hawaii to attend some really great parties with friends in the U. S. Navy. While experiencing many wine coolers on the beach at Fort deRussey, I began writing The Great American Novel. After learning that writing a novel is not as easy as it looks, I returned to the mainland – and yet another college, with yet another major.

My all-time favorite “Doonesbury” cartoon comes from the early period, before the strip became a political diatribe, back when it was humorous. Zonker Harris is reminiscing about college and he says something like, “Ah, I remember being a sophomore. Three of the best years of my life.” My thoughts exactly.

The University of Virginia was taking girls by then and I went there long enough to revert to my old love – classical languages. I applied to UVA and UNC for graduate school in Latin and Greek, and you would not now be reading this but for a timely rescue by author Sylvia Wilkinson.

Sylvia was the writer-in-residence at Hollins in the spring of 1975, as I was closing in on a degree. We were at a party with the students in the graduate program in creative writing, and she asked if I were planning to attend the program the next year.

The conversation was more than a learning experience. It was a thunderbolt. Oh yeah, the reason I’m laboring through college is because I want to write.

Not teach Greek.

Thank you, Sylvia.

Following a wonderful year in graduate school under the incomparable Richard Dillard, I moved to Richmond with the expectation of getting a real job. At least, that was my parents’ expectation, since I was 26 years old. Plus, I now had this horse to support, the offspring of the mare in foal that I had left on Daddy’s doorstep during one of my longer commutes to Hawaii. The real job thing didn’t pan out immediately, so I spent my late 20s as a Poor Starving Artist, typing – on a real typewriter – The Great American Novel while doing freelance writing and working at the Virginia General Assembly to support the horse.

This experience led me to the inescapable conclusion that I needed a real job or a successful husband. At the ripe old age of 30, I got both.

Cricket Williams rescued me from my artist’s garret (and many other scrapes over the years).

Legendary editor Alf Goodykoontz got tired of my nagging him for a job at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and hired me as a feature writer. Thus began a +4-year period of many interesting experiences, among them a dispute with the judicial system about the meaning of “confidential sources”.

After leaving the Times-Dispatch in 1984, I did a bunch of political stuff and some stuff with horses, but not nearly enough writing. There was a stint around 1989 when I wrote a weekly column for “The Goochland Free Press”. And there was another stint about 1991 or –2 when I edited another weekly paper, “The Goochland Gazette”.

Then about 1999, my mother nagged me into publishing a collection of my columns and other freelance work. The result was “Chivalry, Thy Name Is Bubba”.

“That Bubba book” has been amazingly popular simply through word of mouth. It is especially popular as a holiday or birthday gift because the humor appeals to a wide audience. One of the articles appears as an excerpt in “Chicken Soup for the Horse Lover’s Soul”.

The publisher of the Chicken Soup books is Peter Vegso, and we got to be friends through horse racing. Eventually, a racetrack was built in Virginia, and I had the fascinating job of being on the Virginia Racing Commission, the regulatory agency that supervised the licensing, construction and operation of the track. Colonial Downs has the largest turf track in the country and hosts the Virginia Derby. Peter Vegso horses have won the Virginia Derby three times.

Ten years on the racing commission – six as chairman – gave me a terrific look at the most exciting sport in the world. Writers have always been fascinated by the racetrack, and I am not the first to try to capture the beauty, the pathos, the thrill and the intoxication of racing. I have been working on a racetrack novel for some time, and it is the most fun project I’ve ever written. I love my characters and part of me dreads the day the book will be done – but another part of me is eager to share them with my readers.

In 2004, I resigned or retired from my political and racing activities in order to focus on writing. I am now working on two non-fiction book projects in addition to the racetrack novel. In the summer of 2005, I began writing a column for “The Goochland Courier”, thus completing a hat trick by writing for three different weeklies in the same county. My current column is called “Bush Hogs and Other Swine”, soon to be collected in a book of the same name.

In 2007, a racing-related project that I become involved in came to fruition: the establishment of a program at a nearby prison to provide rehabilitation and training in horse management to inmates, using rescued ex-racehorses. That has been an amazing learning experience in many ways. Although it has cut into my writing time, it has been one of the most personally rewarding experiences of my life. “Greener Pastures” is up and running and I am still helping out but finding time to resume my writing.

Copyright © 2007 Robin Traywick Williams