Skip to content →

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.

The bow of the ship

In the sodden southern tail of Illinois, the Shawnee National Forest stands in shades of green and brown and gray. It was here that Kristi and I spent one weekend under a thunderous sky. It was very early on in a tumultuous relationship that would last three or more years, a relationship that changed me, and probably the both of us irrevocably.

Leave a Comment

No dog stories. Yet.

There are poems to be had on a letter carrier’s route. I have seen them and they are real, just ready to be plucked out of the air. My problem is that being a postman is incredibly difficult, physically and mentally. I have never had a job that forced me…

Leave a Comment

Let me tell you about my book

Skyhorse Publishing in New York will publish my new book, Ferment: A Memoir of Mental Illness, Redemption, and Winemaking on the Mosel. It’s a book I’ve been working on for five years and it’s a life’s work, at least to this point.

Leave a Comment

Snow, dogs, and hypothermia

Between making sure the mail that gets in the box is the right mail, dealing with parcels and small packages and rolls, reading the addresses on the envelopes and magazines, and a dozen other tasks, it’s not a job that allows a great deal of contemplation or lends itself to a great deal of creative thought.

Leave a Comment