Mud City Press

BLAKE COLLEGE

A Novel by Dan Armstrong

It's Eugene, Oregon 1970. Anti-war demonstrations and violence at the University of Oregon share the headlines with the Oregon track team, led by their fabled coach Bill Bowerman and star runner Steve Prefontaine. At the same time, Eugene is becoming a magnet for a generation of young people headed west, seeking a new American dream in the blossoming counterculture of long hair, free love, and psycho-activating drugs.

Home

A small group of young visionaries decide to start an experimental college in an old Victorian house in north Eugene. William Blake College, school without walls, is dedicated to giving its students tools for living in the new world–meditation, yoga, organic gardening, and communal living. Two women, Rain Adams and Adrienne Stephens, provide the inspiration to get the school up and running, but before the completion of its first year, one of the students is accused of bombing two buildings at the U of O.

When the FBI and the Eugene police descend upon the school, the Eugene street community, certain that the Blake student is innocent, launches its own investigation into the bombing. The death of one of the school's faculty deepens the drama; the New Age funeral that the school orchestrates inadvertently taps access to unexpected psychological forces, adding chaos and opportunity to the already unreal circumstances.

Read review of BLAKE COLLEGE in December 12, 2019 edition of Eugene Weekly.

Read review by writer Mallory M. O'Connor.

Listen to interview of Dan Armstrong about BLAKE COLLEGE on KBOO radio's Between the Covers.

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