Lisa Slage Robinson returns to campus as featured author for Creative Writing Reading Series
By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
When Lisa Slage Robinson returns to Bowling Green State University this week, she won’t just be visiting a familiar campus. She’ll be revisiting a place that helped launch a journey she could not have imagined when she first arrived as an undergraduate in 1980.
A 1984 BGSU graduate, Robinson is returning as a published author, bringing with her a career that has taken her from international experiences to corporate law, motherhood and, currently, the world of literary fiction.
She will be on campus as part of the Creative Writing Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 5, in Prout Chapel. The public is welcome to listen to her read from her debut short-story collection, “Esquire Ball, Stories of the Great Black Swamp.”
The book, published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026, represents the culmination of a longtime ambition and the reflection of experiences, questions and observations she gathered along the way.
“I always wanted to either be a lawyer or a writer,” Robinson said. BGSU and Case Western Reserve University gave her the foundations to become a corporate lawyer
“So, when my youngest daughter started college, then I restarted college and got my MFA.”
That decision came when Robinson was in her early 50s. While some might have viewed returning to school at that stage of life as an unlikely undertaking, Robinson saw it as an opportunity to pursue the other career she had considered decades earlier.
It was hardly her first ambitious move.
A BGSU beginning
Growing up outside Akron, Ohio, Robinson knew she wanted to attend college in Ohio. She also knew she wanted to become a lawyer, although she hadn’t yet decided what to study.
When she began researching colleges, Bowling Green stood out.
“It seemed like it had every major I could possibly ever want,” she said. “Everything seemed so exciting.”
She enrolled in fall 1980, majoring in international studies through the political science department.
She earned honors in political science, participated in Model United Nations for several years and wrote her senior thesis about Russian property law. Though she was an international studies major and studied French and Spanish, she didn’t study abroad during her time at BGSU.
Beyond the classroom, she sang in a choir, was a sorority and Panhellenic Council member and worked as a campus tutor. She also continued her passion for running acquired through high school track and cross country.
Robinson described herself as a “keener,” a term her Canadian friends use for someone who is especially enthusiastic and dedicated.
“I just always have loved school,” she said. “I still love school.”
Her memories of BGSU include faculty members who helped spark her interest in international affairs and a campus that gave her opportunities to explore a variety of interests.
“I really felt like Bowling Green was just a great place to explore all the different things I wanted to do,” she said.
That foundation would prove important as her career took her beyond northwest Ohio.
A career that crossed borders
After graduating from BGSU in 1984, Robinson attended Case Western Reserve University School of Law, earning her law degree in 1987.
Her early legal experiences included a summer internship with the Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps in Germany and an exchange experience at the University of Western Ontario.
She eventually joined a Toledo law firm, where she practiced commercial litigation and products liability law.
But another international opportunity soon presented itself. After moving to Canada, Robinson faced the challenge of qualifying to practice law there. Rather than return to law school for a year, she opted to take four examinations covering constitutional law, civil procedure, criminal procedure and tax law.
She gave herself one month to prepare.
“One week per subject,” she recalled. “And on the fifth week I took the exam, and I passed.”
The accomplishment was characteristic of Robinson’s determination, although her career continued to take unexpected turns. She eventually returned to the United States, practiced in Ohio and later moved to Pittsburgh, where she had to take another bar examination.
After starting a family, she stepped away from full-time legal work to raise her two daughters.
for approximately 11 years, raising her two daughters and taking on occasional projects. She also worked on an early guide to using the internet, back when the technology was still new, and later worked for U.S. Steel.
Finding a new voice
With her youngest daughter heading off to college, Robinson faced a decision: return to full-time legal work or pursue writing.
She chose writing.
She enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, beginning a new academic chapter in her 50s.
Inspired by the young adult fiction her daughters and her friends were reading, she planned to write YA books. But feedback from her professors led her in another direction.
One professor told her that her young adult work wasn’t working. Another encouraged her to explore literary fiction.
Rather than give up, Robinson reconsidered her approach.
“It took me four years to get a two-year degree,” she said. “But it was the best, that negative response from a guy that I really admired who just said, ‘No, this is boring.'”
That criticism helped her find her voice.
She moved toward literary fiction, drawing on her experiences as a young attorney and the complicated professional and ethical questions she encountered.
Looking back, Robinson sees her legal career as an important part of her development as a writer.
She believes practicing law taught her to think critically, research thoroughly and read closely.
“I feel like I’m a better writer for having been a lawyer,” she said.
The world behind ‘Esquire Ball’
The short stories within “Esquire Ball” are fictional; however, Robinson admits that real experiences and people she worked with may have contributed to her storytelling in the book.
“None of these stories have happened to me explicitly, but I either borrowed from maybe a day in my life or the day in somebody else’s life to create the story,” she said.
The collection explores what Robinson describes as a professional coming-of-age experience. Its characters are often young people entering a new field, eager to succeed but not always equipped to understand the consequences of their decisions.
She was particularly interested in the gray areas of ethics — the small compromises and boundary-pushing decisions that can gradually shape someone’s professional life.
“It’s not a big legal thriller or anything,” she said. “There isn’t one big combustible event that happens in the stories.”
Instead, the stories examine the beginnings of questionable decisions, when people start doing things that might not be quite right.
That interest comes partly from Robinson’s own experiences as a young attorney. She remembers feeling uncertain about some of the work she was doing, particularly when representing large corporations against individuals who might not have the resources to fight back.
She wanted to explore those complicated feelings without turning the stories into straightforward political statements.
Her approach also incorporated elements of magical realism, which she adapted into what she calls “magical feminism.” Through fantastical elements, she explored the challenges women faced in professional environments during the 1980s — challenges that have not entirely disappeared, she said.
Looking beneath the visible landscape
Place is another important element of Robinson’s writing.
Her concept of the “invisible landscape” grew partly from her experiences in Toledo and the Bowling Green region, particularly her discovery of the Great Black Swamp.
When she arrived at the Toledo law practice, a colleague welcomed her to the Great Black Swamp. At first, she thought it might be a “lawyer joke, like ‘Come be with the smarmy people,’” she said.
Because she was stressed learning the new job and busy working long hours, Robinson didn’t think much about the reference to the Great Black Swamp, or at least not until she began writing.
She recalled lessons from her MFA studies at Chatham University where location and place were often considered characters in writing.
The Great Black Swamp came to mind, as a place that was no longer visible, but yet it seemed to still influence the people and the places built upon it.
The swamp had been drained, but its history remained embedded in the region.
“How do these things that are no longer visible or there, how are they influencing our lives?” she wondered.
That question became part of her larger literary exploration of how history, geography and memory shape people, even when the original landscape is no longer visible.
Her research often takes her down unexpected paths. Among the subjects that have captured her attention are the history of frogs in the Black Swamp region, Toledo’s longstanding all-male Tile Club and the remarkable story of Ruth Harkness, a Pennsylvania-born fashion designer who traveled to China in the 1930s and brought a live panda back to the United States.
For Robinson, those discoveries are part of the pleasure of writing.
She enjoys finding the unexpected details that can open an entirely new world of possibilities.
Coming home to Bowling Green
Robinson’s return to BGSU is the result of connections that developed through her graduate-school experience and the writing community.
One of her former professors at Chatham, Sheila Squillante, helped connect her with BGSU’s creative writing program through a colleague, program Director Amorak Huey. After Robinson announced her book, the connection eventually led to an invitation to visit campus.
For Robinson, the opportunity is especially meaningful because she has not been back since graduating in 1984.
She plans to spend time walking around campus, visiting Jerome Library and revisiting places that appear in her stories.
Her visit will include conversations with undergraduate students about writing and Esquire Ball. She also plans to meet with a graduate MFA class to discuss linked short-story collections and how a sense of place can shape fiction.
She is particularly interested in how a location can become more than a backdrop.
Place can give a story texture, provide characters with something to work with or against, and even become a springboard for creating an entirely imagined world.
She mentioned “The Circus in Winter” by Kathy Day, a collection set in a fictional Indiana town inspired by a real community with a history as a winter home for a traveling circus, as an example of how a place can inspire an interconnected world of characters and stories.
It is a subject that connects naturally to her own work and to the landscapes of northwest Ohio.
As she prepares to return, Robinson is looking forward to seeing how the campus has changed while reconnecting with the place that helped set her life in motion.
For a student who once balanced classes, campus activities, running and late-night laundry with an unwavering commitment to studying, BGSU remains an important part of her story.
And perhaps the most significant lesson she brings back is that a person’s path does not have to follow a straight line.
