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Something about R.T. Both

R.T. Both lives in Chicago. She currently works as a teacher at a downtown Chicago college of the arts
and as an office worker in the Loop.

She recently completed a novel, Rough Edges, set in the seventies in the waning days of the anti-war movement at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Rough Edges is about hipness as a tribal entity that persists to this day and may have roots that go as far back as the Druids. It's also about how the dynamic struggle for spirituality interrupts the sex and hedonism-blessed world of American university culture. But when people ask her what her novel is about, Both just says it's about "sex, death, and karma."

Rough Edges is the first of a planned series. During the eighties and early nineties, R.T. Both was a regional business journalist, interviewing the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and covering mergers and acquisitions and securities fraud. The eighties were not a fun time for ex-flower children and a lot of them ended up in programs. But Both feels that she learned a lot, and that we, as a nation, have weathered those days. She seems to sense, as the millennium approaches, a renaissance of that old hipster urge for higher consciousness and the hint of a possibly more sympatico era on the horizon.

RTB and some of her students.
Photograph by Casey Sachen

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R.T. Both is a novelist of note. Just completed - a work titled "Rough Edges".
Your humble editor has been with R.T. Both for a good part of this perilous journey.