Projecting Far-Gone Worlds: In Conversation With Professor John Hampsey

Late one February night, I found myself attempting to navigate the Liberal Arts faculty building in search of Professor John Hampsey’s office. Located up the hill from Campus Market on Cal Poly campus, the Liberal Arts offices are a sprawling mass of helical glass-plated stairways, cold concrete hallways, and the occasional directory that might as well be written in Sanskrit. 

Professor Hampsey’s office is somewhere on the third floor, and perhaps I can attribute this to personal error, but it is nowhere to be found. After endless wrong turns and retracing my steps, I come across a door plastered with photos of Irish dramatist and novelist Samuel Beckett. Bingo. 

Professor Hampsey will later tell me he was first exposed to Beckett in his modern drama class he took in 1974 while at Holy Cross. "I love Beckett. And I have for many decades," he says. 

"When I figured out that Beckett gave very few interviews, was a very private person, and limited the amount of photos that could be taken of him, I decided to try and collect all 26 known photographs of Becket. I don't have all of them, but I have about 80% of them" Hampsey says. 

Hampsey, who has been a professor at Cal Poly since 1989, teaches Romanticism, Existentialism, and Ancient Greek Literature. He is also the author of three books Paranoia and Contentment, Kaufman’s Hill and Soda Lake. He is currently working on his fourth book, Blood and Spirit. 

Hampsey’s teaching style is unique, engaging, and profound, which makes him the type of professor who has reached near iconic status here at Cal Poly. His existentialism class, which is slated to be taught spring quarter, has a waitlist almost as large as the number of seats in the class. If you have ever taken a class with Hampsey, you may understand why students clamor to be seated in one of his classrooms. 

He has an air about him, with his leather bag, quippy emails, and dry humor, that is equally as intimidating as it is inspiring. There is a sense, stepping into his class, whether it be a massive lecture hall or an intimate seminar, that something great is about to happen to you that you will not soon forget. 

Before my interview with Hampsey, I took a gander at his Poly Ratings, which is maybe one of the worst ways to get information on a professor, second to Reddit. However, Hampsey’s student-written reviews, spanning from the year 2000 to current day, seem to capture some of his allure…

"Hampsey is amazing. This guy slaps you around, tears you apart, tells you what you should do, and you come back asking for more," one anonymous reviewer said. Another attributed her love for British literature to a class she took from Hampsey at Cal Poly: "His passion for the British Romantics is contagious. I now teach British Lit to high school seniors.” Some are less exalting and more humorous, like, '"kinda weird guy, but he has a great sense of humor" and "Go pee before class, and do not worship any Abrahamic religion while taking his class." 

Go figure. Within the three month period that made up my first Hampsey class (ENGL 251–Introduction to Classical Literature) I ceased to be a Catholic. I still remember the day, Professor Hampsey at the head of the 100+ student lecture hall wielding a piece of chalk facing the chalkboard. In his scrawl that is reminiscent of what a doctor would scribble on an RX pad, he writes "Ashera" in fat letters. 

As I remember it, Hampsey told the class that Ashera was once God’s wife, who was worshiped by Israelites along with Yahweh–the ancient Hebrew name for God. When monotheistic patriarchal religion took center stage in the Judeo-Christian world, Ashera was gone. I tell Hampsey that after this class I walked back to my dorm sweating. 

At this moment I became something that Hampsey calls "a cultural Catholic." This loosely translates to a person who still has their First Holy Communion rosary in their nightstand and  may have cried at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. 

"Anytime movies are made, they always use the Catholic church. They don't use some evangelical church because the Catholic church is sexy. It's gorgeous. It's Baroque," Hampsey tells me. I tell Hampsey that all the evangelical churches in my hometown are located in business parks next to car repair shops. 

Hampsey didn’t initially have plans to study literature when he was in undergrad. At Holy Cross College, he enrolled as a philosophy and pre-med major. After struggling with organic chemistry, he dropped his pre-med major and decided to pursue literature. At Holy Cross, Hampsey would meet one of his biggest inspirations and mentors while taking a creative writing fiction class, Marilyn French. 

French, a famous feminist writer who wrote The Women's Room, taught Hampsey the importance of rhythm of language and vision. "She used to say, 'Hampsey, you're not going to be a writer until you have a vision. You have no vision.’ And I felt like saying, You know, Marilyn, I'm only 22, give me some time," he says. 

Hampsey continued his education through a Ph.D program at Boston college in 1977, by the fall of the next year he was teaching a Faulker seminar to college students nearly the same age as he was. It was at this moment that Hampsey was hooked.

"I was largely an introvert until that moment. I walked into class for the first time and this other personality came out of me I didn't know I had. It never went back in. I switched and became an extrovert just like that," he says. 

Hampsey’s journey into writing started when he was 22-years-old, in a room he rented for 26 francs a night on the sixth floor overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, France.

In the process of researching for his new book Blood and Spirit, which will include stories from his time in Paris, Hampsey realized he didn’t remember much from this time period. 

"I got to this Paris chapter and I was just stuck," Professor Hampsey tells me. In the process of attempting to conjure up memories from this time, he remembered he had kept journals while living in Paris. "I tore my garage apart about four or five days ago, and in the back of the garage in this box I found my journals from Paris in 1976." Professor Hampsey calls these journals “meticulous.” He describes reading these notes as an out-of-body experience, akin to sitting across from his 22-year-old self at a bar.

Within these journals, Hampsey’s passion for writing began to materialize and take shape. "In these notes over and over and over again, I'm trying to write poetry, a short story, a novel. Of course I don't know what I'm doing. It's sophomoric. It's idealistic," he says. 

However, Professor Hampsey is grateful to have these novels to look back on as he goes through the process of writing Blood and Spirit. "If you are going through something, you are somewhere, something is going on, keep a journal. Because you never know," he says. "This is gold. I mean, if somebody said, 'Here's $50,000, and here's your journals from Paris, it’s the journals." 

Professor Hampsey says he didn’t find his writing voice until the mid-80s, which is when he started writing meditative essays. "It took a long time for me to get to a position where I can publish anything I write. And at 22, I would have never known, it's going to be a 40-year process to get you there," he says. 

His first book, Paranoia and Contentment, was written in the meditative essay form. Published in 2004, this work of non-fiction prose is the "first book that sees paranoia in a positive light," Hampsey says. 

Professor Hampsey’s second book Kaufman's Hill, which was written throughout the early 2000s, is his "boyhood memoir." Centered around his childhood as an Irish Catholic in Pittsburgh, Hampsey says the novel is unique for the spin it puts on the typical coming of age story. In Kaufman's Hill, Hampsey captures the lost world of the 60s that informed his childhood experiences:

"Doors were unlocked, cars were unlocked… you're eight years old, you leave and no one knows where you are until you get back for dinner. Nobody asked anything. You didn't tell anybody anything. You didn't cry, you didn't complain. The early 60s was a time of great freedom. You could do whatever you wanted as a kid, but it was also a time of great repression," he says. 

 "My whole thing was projecting a world in Kaufman’s Hill that's gone forever, that everybody can understand and identify with," he says. "Everybody knows something about bullying, or sexual awakening, or rite of passage stuff or trouble with parents, moving beyond the neighborhood, doing something dangerous. That's something everybody can access." 

Unlike Kaufman’s Hill, which Hampsey knew would be of interest to publishers, he had reservations with how Soda Lake would fare in the publishing world. When Soda Lake, a work of postmodern fiction, was picked up by Rare Bird Press, Hampsey saw his confidence as a writer reach new heights:

"I'm still in shock, I think it changed my whole confidence now. Because I can write something really experimental and get that published. I would say at 70 years old, for the first time, I have a level of self-belief that I didn't have before," he says. "I feel like it was an imprimatur of very latent life, rite of passage. I really am a writer who can pull this off." 

Hampsey doesn’t define his life as a writer with strict scheduling or unrealistic expectations. While some writers have a stern plan to guide them through their work, Hampsey just tries to write a bit everyday, even if it’s just a practice in revision.

"I especially don't believe in ‘I need to write 500 words a day’ or something because what if that's gibberish? I mean, I think some days you have some good notes, some days you write one paragraph," he says. "I will say this: once you are committed, it becomes part of your life, and you can't imagine living without writing, it's like oxygen; you have to do it. It's part of your being."

Overall, Professor Hampsey embraces the philosophy that you have to love writing for the intrinsic act itself. "I think you have to love it for its own sake, not because I was in Paris in '76, and had all these dreams of being a famous writer like Hemingway and Faulkner. You got to work through that," he says.

As for the legacy he hopes to leave when he retires, Professor Hampsey tells me he is having a difficult time with that thought. "It's going to be really hard not to be Professor Hampsey anymore, especially in this town. Everywhere I go, I know so many people and so many students, and I'm a little bit caught up in that identity," he says. Being an active professor in the classroom will be the hardest thing to leave for Hampsey when he retires from teaching.

"I love teaching as much as ever. I don't look at it, oh, when can I retire, when can I be done? Retirement has no allure for me. I'm very fulfilled and feel fortunate with both my teaching and my writing."

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Grace Gillio is a writer on our Content Team. She conducted the interview, wrote the article, and photographed the cover. Olivia Stevens is a member of our art team. She made the cover.