Photo Credit Mary Hays

Robert Hays was born in the wooded hill country of southern Illinois and has spent most of his life in Illinois and South Carolina.  He served in the U.S. Army and holds three degrees, including an interdisciplinary Ph.D., from Southern Illinois University. 

At age 73, he still teaches journalism at the University of Illinois, where his student evaluations consistently rank him and his classes in the top ten percent among all faculty members on campus.  He also has taught in Texas and Missouri. 

The pleasure he gains from teaching is surpassed only by the pleasure he finds in writing.  He is the author of four non-fiction books, two of which have been published in paperback editions, and edited an anthology of short stories by other writers. 

When he’s not teaching or writing, he likely will be found doing yard work (too simple to be called gardening), listening to music or reading. 

His favorite vacation is time spent on any beach in South Carolina, the native state of his wife Mary.  Robert and Mary live in Champaign, Illinois.  They have two grown sons and a grandson and share (long story!) a cat, Eddie, with the couple next door. 

CONTACT AUTHOR ROBERT HAYS

When young Jimmie Broder witnesses the death of a friend's father in a brutal domestic quarrel, he's left with a sense of helplessness and an unwitting habit of taking the easy way out that follow him into adulthood.  Unable to face their painful circumstances, he runs away and seeks refuge as an Army paratrooper at the very time Colletta, the woman he loves, needs him most.  This is the backdrop of Circles in the Water, which picks up Broder's story after a training accident leaves him seriously injured, brings Colletta back into his life, and forces him to face not only a jumpless future but also his troubled past.  His ordered military existence and the exquisite thrill of the jump no longer insulate him from memories of life in small-town South Carolina, surrounded by poverty, racism, alcohol and drug addiction and, finally, rape and its terrible consequences. 

Just when Broder least needs the added complication, he gets caught up in a mysterious and dangerous conflict between two superiors that places him in a vulnerable position that feels all too familiar.  No longer the "good soldier" who follows orders without question, ready and eager for service in Iraq, he comes to renounce war and knows that he can never again follow orders blindly.  And worst of all, Colletta disappears as suddenly as she had come back into his world.  He wants to reconcile with Colletta and learn to love her child, to settle into a peaceful life.  But are his earlier failures too much to overcome?

Whatever else this story may be, it is primarily one of young love—of childhood sweethearts in a setting both charming and ugly, and the young man and woman they become.  It interweaves their contemporary lives with the chronicle of their early years as part of an inseparable foursome of troubled youth and the tragedies that befall their comrades, DJ and Ray-Gene.