Barbara McDonald

Slipsliding by the Bay

A zany glimpse of a small college at a crossroads that will transport the reader back to the seventies in the Bay Area, a time of upheaval and societal change.

Perched on the edge of San Francisco, Lakeside College is experiencing an identity crisis. John Gudewill is recruited as president to save the college from possible closure—but he is flummoxed at every turn. The faculty, led by secretive English professor Eliot Blanc, is determined to unionize. The alumni want Lakeside to return to its former status as a women-only college. Meanwhile, Sister Magdalena, the college’s infamous artist, is waging war against corporate America through her art, and the students are engaging in their own warfare through sit-ins and protests. With the college besieged on all sides, what is its new president to do? A hilarious spoof of academic intrigue, Slipsliding by the Bay mirrors the societal turmoil and follies of the seventies.

Barbara McDonald has had poetry published in anthologies and magazines and spent several summers at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, where she worked on Slipsliding by the Bay. She held various positions at Lone Mountain College in San Francisco before it closed: adjunct faculty, director of institutional service, editor and writer, and alumni director. After being a stringer for local papers and managing editor of a magazine, she worked at Dominican University as director of facilities. North American Review commissioned her to write an article on Lone Mountain, its progression and demise.