The Bad Pipsisewah

About the Book

About the Memoir

The matter at hand is The Bad Pipsisewah and how it comes to be a menace to the life and trials of a rather plain person in whom I admit to a somewhat partisan interest. OK, maybe a bit more than “somewhat.” The original Bad Pipsisewah (pip-‘sis-ə-wä) first appeared as the seminal villain in my childhood Uncle Wiggily Game, and turns up thirty years later in nearly perfect form to haunt and threaten my plain person with ruin and humiliation. The rest of this little love story is in small part real and otherwise sprinkled with a lot of outrageous lies. Same with all of the characters and events.

Please enjoy the thrilling journey to Dr. Possum’s office, and forgive the absence of any mention of Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy, Muskrat Lady Housekeeper. It might seem unseemly to notice the relationship publicly.

In the Book:
Author Photo: Crissy Walford
Design: Laurel Marx
Cover Illustration: Paul C. Gioni

About the Author

About the Author My name is RONALD NEIL CAMPBELL and, as you may be about to discover, I am not by trade a writer, although for most of my adult life I’ve been surrounded by the real thing. I have been invited to produce a few articles (Graphs, Sports Illustrated, etc.) because of my ordained craft, which has been as Art Director and designer of variant materials for print – mostly magazine construction and a few annual reports for such people as Time Incorporated and Merrill Lynch. The most prominent elements of my magazine design career include thirty years at Fortune (nine as Art Director including more than two hundred covers, two complete redesigns and five-and-a-half Managing Editors), Harvard Magazine(total redesign and ten years on the masthead), and Harvard Business Review (total redesign, oversight of first two issues and a successful search for a permanent Art Director). My education, after two-and-a-half years in the WWII Navy, consists mainly in a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and thirty years of swimming in the same river with a steady flow of fascinating minds. The urge to write things down came upon me mostly unheralded, and more than a little out of boredom, with frequent late nights at Fortune waiting for the bloody skirmish among writers, researchers, editors and copy police to settle down to an inevitable truce, which transferred responsibility to Art and Production for final closing. It was these exhausting blank periods that got me to conspiring with my trusty Olympia, clacking out little vignettes and conceits that were eventually to morph into my first attempt at fiction. This is my third and, considering my advanced years, probably my last. However, should Olympia begin to feel neglected, who knows? AUTHOR PHOTO Crissy Walford DESIGN Laurel Marx COVER ILLUSTRATION Paul C. Gioni