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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.

Redemption, a plane ride away

I lived in the basement of a bare-bulb Midtown Kansas City apartment building. My place qualified as one of those dim dwellings landlords build into the bowels of their buildings to squeeze the last dimes out their real estate. It had two rooms, a front room with a kitchenette and…

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Furious Gazelle publishes the story of my suicide and mental hospital stay

True story: One Saturday in spring 2011, I was in the basement tying a knot in a rope to hang myself. Son Nick called to me from the living room, changing everything. He literally saved my neck. Furious Gazelle, a sprightly literary magazine, has published the account of my suicide.…

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The value of space: The crowded and unhappy life of Henry Fontaine Jackson

Henry Fontaine Jackson wanted to see the world in black and white. No furniture. No Audrey Hepburn.   He dreamed of emptiness.   If that vision was Spartan, it was by design. Lack of foresight complicated everything. Even if he looked lived like a twenty-year-old dope smoker with a job…

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End of semester conundrum

The end of the semester always portends disaster. Like everyone, teachers and students, about mid-semester, things just seem to slow down. Mired in intellectual and psychic syrup, we slog through, hoping that just around the corner, there will be a light, however dim. It will show us the way. The…

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