juggling act

Department of Journalism Chair William McKeen is a professor, writer and father of seven. Besides arranging class schedules and meeting with students and faculty, he teaches two courses in the spring and three in the fall, an overload considering administrators usually teach one a semester.

McKeen is constantly writing. He’s written five books, edited three and reviews books for the St. Petersburg Times, the Orlando Sentinel and the Gainesville alternative weekly Satellite. He recently traveled to Memphis to write about barbecue for Gourmet magazine.

He’s working on three new books: He’s writing a new biography of Hunter S. Thompson and a coffee-table book on rock concerts. He’s also compiling an anthology of stories about growing up in Florida by such authors as Carl Hiaasen, JM 1974, and Michael Connelly, JM 1980.

Somehow, he finds time to read The Gainesville Sun every morning before taking his recently adopted 9-year-old daughter, Savannah, to school and arriving at work at 8 a.m.

“He has to read the paper,” says his wife, Nicole Cisneros McKeen, JM 2005. “Even if he and Savannah are running late, he says, ‘I can’t start the day without reading the paper.’ ”

Besides Savannah, he’s father to Sarah, 26; Graham, 23; Mary, 18; Jack, 3; Travis, 2; and Charley, who turned 1 on May 10.

How does he keep track of everything? Gadgets help – quirky ones, such as soundbites on his computer that alert him when e-mails arrive.

McKeen ignores the arrival of an e-mail as he poses a question to Assistant Prof. Cory Armstrong: “How would you feel about some teaching assistance?” Before she can answer, Austin Powers’ voice interjects, “Yeah, baby!” It’s another e-mail. It happens about every three minutes.

When she leaves, McKeen rushes to read his e-mails – he’s received another one by now. He quickly replies on one of his computer monitors as he starts preparing lectures on the other.

His office door is almost always open. He frequently stops to talk to visitors. He leaves between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., unless a class keeps him later.

“That’s when the real work begins,” McKeen says. “When I get home, it’s really exciting.”

He grabs a Coors Light from the refrigerator in the garage before going into the house to check his e-mail. Jack and Travis are wound up – they’ve just woken from a nap. He usually takes them outside so they can play in the yard while he works in the yard. Sometimes, he watches them while he cleans the house. 

“Bill is a clean freak,” Nicole says. “He has to clean everything; he has to have everything just so.”

Nicole cooks dinner, so McKeen does the dishes. They eat as a family, always saying grace. After the kids go to bed at 7 p.m., he and Nicole talk for an hour or so – sometimes about theology, sometimes about American Idol.

McKeen often wakes up in the middle of the night to write. It’s the only time he’s not distracted. He hasn’t gotten more than five hours of sleep a night, he says, since he worked as a reporter and a copy editor for the Bloomington, Ind., Courier-Tribune in the early 1970s. He usually wakes up at 5:30 a.m. – without an alarm. He can’t understand why he slept today until 7:30 a.m.

In his office, he bounces on his two monitors between something he’s writing on Thompson and a PowerPoint slideshow for an honors course he teaches, Rock ’n’ Roll and American Society. Today’s lecture is on Motown. Unhappy with the presentation, he decides to show a video about the Funk Brothers instead.

McKeen’s office is as busy and as colorful as he is. The walls are covered with posters, like a teenager’s bedroom – Thompson, the Rolling Stones, Tom Wolfe, Bob Dylan and Elvis. Above his desk is a framed St. Petersburg Times story, “Doc Rock,” about his class. The bookshelves, which take up every inch of the back wall, contain copies of his latest book, Highway 61, recounting a trip he and Graham, then 19, took from the Canadian border to New Orleans.

There’s not enough counter space in his office to set down a cup of coffee, yet it looks well organized; everything is placed just so. On the window ledge are ungraded exams, a daily calendar with the correct date on top and a harmonica, which he can’t play except for a standard blues riff – dun duh-du, du-duh. Atop a row of two filing cabinets and a mini refrigerator sit 22 framed photographs of his family.

He hangs up the phone after speaking with Nicole about Thompson and reaches in the ‘fridge to grab his second Diet Dr. Pepper of the morning. Caffeine is a tool of his trade. He drinks five diet soft drinks a day plus three cups of coffee with a little bit of cream and sugar substitute. He begins frantically typing, touching the keys with only his two index fingers. He’s compulsive about finishing things. Before he can rest, everything has to be in order. He’s neurotic that way, Nicole says.

“You’d think I’d be fit as a rail,” he says, “but I guess it doesn’t affect my metabolism.”

The busiest he had been was when he wrote Highway 61. He maintained a full work schedule, went to sleep at 11 p.m., woke up at 2 a.m. and wrote until 6 a.m. every day.

“It destroyed this hand,” he says, opening and closing his right hand, describing how he overworked it to the point of near-paralysis. “It was also the hardest thing I’ve ever done because I was writing about my family.”

Family is the most important thing to him. For 15 years after he and his first wife divorced, he drove once a month to Indiana from Gainesville to visit his children. He ranks parenthood as his greatest accomplishment, above the books he’s authored and the recognition he’s received, even above being named to Thompson’s honor roll alongside Dylan and Jack Nicholson.

His family is second only to Dylan, quips Assistant Dean Jon Roosenraad, who, as journalism department chair, hired McKeen in 1986.

McKeen’s never too busy for students. He’s proud that there have been more journalism majors during the past two years than ever – 782 in fall 2004 and 817 in fall 2005. He’s disappointed when they can’t get the courses they want.

In class, he lectures like he’s telling stories to a friend.

“He has a great way of presenting himself,” says Mike Gimignani, who took McKeen’s Literary Journalism in spring 2005.

“He’s really inspired me to read stuff I never would have picked up,” says Gimignani’s classmate Dwayne Robinson.

One of these days he may have to slow down.

“I’m busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest,” he says. “If I had to list my occupation on a job form right now, I’d put down ‘juggler.’ ”

—Curt Harris