Robert Flanagan has been a columnist for The Hampshire Review of Romney, West Virginia since 1999, the author of the editorial page column “Bits & Pieces.” He has contributed guest columns to other regional newspapers, including primarily the Winchester Star.
Bob Flanagan spent some 38 years, living and traveling in exotic (and not so exotic) ports of call around the world. After a military career in two services (US Marines and US Army), including service during both the Korean War and Viet Nam War, he worked for a number of years for high -tech corporations in Northern Virginia before settling in Hampshire County in 1986. Throughout a varied earlier life, he taught college English/Lit/Writing, was a policeman, an insurance investigator, a salesman, a steel-mill roustabout and many less interesting stints. Moving to Yellow Spring in the eastern part of the county, he built a cabin near his home and settled in to do serious writing.
In addition to the long service on The Hampshire Review (for which he has won several W.Va. state newspaper competition awards), he has written featured pieces for Wonderful West Virginia magazine and numerous articles, short stories and poems for other publications. In 2001 he published Bits & Pieces, the book, (Connemara Press, 2001) a collection of his early columns for the Review and Star; in 2003, Mountain State Press published his collection of short fiction, Peripheral Visions; in 2009, Connemara Press/AuthorHouse published Involuntary Tour, book I of “The A.S.A. Trilogy,” his threesome of novels about a zany collection of Army miscreants in the Viet Nam War and Cold War; in February 2011, book II of the trilogy, Dragon Bait appeared (same publishers); and book III, Falloff, same publishers, appeared in November 2011, completing the long and long-aborning work. September 2012 found Mountain State Press again in the picture, publishing Lesser Bits, Greater Pieces, the long-awaited sequal to his first book. Bob is now at work on another novel, this one of the Korean War, set over 1947-1956.
He lives in Yellow Spring with Julia—his wife of 55 years, a noted, active fiber artist—and a 20-pound cat of intemperate disposition named Cecil.
Bob’s books can be found at his website, ConnemaraPress.org
