Fifty years ago, Carol Fisher Saller stepped foot on the University of Illinois campus for the first time as an incoming freshman—and the first woman in her family to attend a university.
“I remember walking around campus thinking, ‘I’m at college,” said Saller. “It was pretty dorky.”
It was a path she made the most of, graduating in just three years with a bachelor’s degree in Latin language and literature from the Department of Classics. She went on to have a varied career, working as an editor at the University of Chicago Press, serving as a contributing editor to “The Chicago Manual of Style,” and writing books.
For adults, she wrote the book and blog “The Subversive Copy Editor,” but her current passion lies in writing children’s books. Over the last 30 years, Saller has written several, including “Maddie’s Ghost,” “Eddie’s War,” “The Bridge Dancers,” and most recently, “The Time-Jinx Twins.”
It was the launch for that most recent novel—held at The Literary in Champaign this spring—that led Saller back to Champaign-Urbana 50 years later.
“The Time-Jinx Twins” depicts long-separated identical twins Ellie and Kat, who are brought together when they accidentally activate their physicist mom’s half-finished time machine and launch themselves into the past.
They end up in 1970 Chicago and Champaign-Urbana and seek help from a University of Illinois physicist to find their way back home. The physicist who helps them is based on the real-life Lorella M. Jones, the first woman to receive tenure in the Grainger College of Engineering.
“In many indirect and direct ways, the book celebrates physics, invention, logical thinking, information science, and women in science,” said Saller.
For Saller, the decision to use the Illinois campus as a setting was part nostalgic, part practical.
“I’m always glad to have a geographical setting that I already know,” said Saller. “I was writing this during the pandemic, so I had to do my research online. I found things like a map of campus in 1970, and it was fun to match my memories up with what I researched online.”
Saller said she couldn’t leave Champaign-Urbana without a visit to campus herself. The only word she could use to describe the moment was “surreal.”
“The next morning walking around campus was literally surreal, to think about the 50 years that have passed and how they're reflected in the book and to see how little the Main Quad has changed,” said Saller. “I didn’t have the clearest mental picture of it in 1970 anymore, but to me, everything looked better. I was startled at just how beautiful it was.”
Editor's note: This story first appeared in the SLCL Fall 2025 print newsletter.