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Author: Patrick Dobson

Dr. Patrick Dobson is a work in progress until his termination. In the meantime, He is a writer, scholar, postman, and college professor living in Kansas City, MO.

The University of Nebraska Press published his travel memoirs, Canoeing the Great Plains: A Missouri River Summer in 2015 and Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains in 2009. Canoeing the Great Plains won the 2016 High Plains Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. His essays and poems have been published in New Letters, daCunha, Kansas City Star, Garo, Wood Coin, and JONAHmagazine, and others.

Dobson earned a doctorate in American History and Literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City in 2013. He has edited books, taught journalism, and been a union ironworker. He now teaches American History, Modern Latin American History, and Western Civilization at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, KS.

He looks forward to hearing from you soon.

Stand by our principles

Dear May, Yeah, the parties seem to leave a lot of people out. But that doesn’t mean the Tea Party Automatons aren’t butts. Party politics is what it is. If we’re going to have universal suffrage, then the need to appeal to the broadest possible audience of voters necessitates or…

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Gay today, hetero by any other name…

Rev. Dave, I’ve always been solidly heterosexual, sort of. I mean, I really, really like women, particularly older ones, and very particularly, my wife. But I find myself most at home in the borderland between men and women–where, like with any human behavior or morality, there exists a range of…

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The end of Catholicism

Dear Justin, Our shared Catholic blood and bones make your recent thinking about your upbringing very similar in type and depth to something I’d been thinking about for a long time. At what point, exactly, did I end my relationship with the Catholic church. That is, when did I stop…

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Abuse not needed

Dear Steve, I know about parents. The reason is that I’ve had such a rugged time with mine. Not just them, but also the siblings mired so deeply in the family diseases. God bless them. I’m glad I don’t have to walk in those shoes. As I look back now,…

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Living in stone

Genevieve, Sorry I didn’t get with you earlier. I had to have my foot worked on yesterday, and my eyes are still twirling around in my head. Recovering from surgery is never as easy as they say. It’s certainly much harder than I thought. Those painkillers are enticing. Like morphine—sleepy…

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