Jim, I’ve found sometimes conversations like those you had with your relatives are hurtful, particularly when I want to like them or for them to like me. I see the contradictions, usually moral inconsistencies I recognize because I or some part of me indulged in that kind of contradiction before.…
Leave a CommentAuthor: 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.
UMKC appeals to and depends on funds from the local community. But now, as we expand our library, UMKC won’t reinvest in local citizens to do the work. The university has hired a company that employs out-of-state ironworkers while local union and nonunion ironworkers go wanting for work. I’ve been…
Leave a CommentMy house is an example of everything that’s wrong with real estate and residential construction. It cost about 150 large to build. Of that cost, at least 20 percent was site preparation. Then, there’s not one ounce of recycled material in this house. All new-sawn lumber, fresh drywall, newly mined…
Leave a CommentA recycled steel box (opened up so it doesn’t feel like a box), tiny bit of land, and, voila, a house for the houseless. Simple. Good. With the needs of individuals in mind, the container house has promise as the great confluence of mass production and individual personality. Shipping containers…
3 CommentsMy 18-year-old daughter reminds me of how hard it was to be 18. Loneliness. Listlessness. Depression. For days, I would sit by the phone wondering what the hell? The phone never rang. Days seemed endless. Between her and the students in my history classes at Johnson County Community College, I’m…
Leave a Comment