The is an intriguing essay on my personal history with this enigmatic and deadly substance. The piece gives a hint at why the stuff is so good, so bad, and so difficult to get rid of. It starts at a Boy Scout meeting in my childhood church basement and ends…
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.
My life has been an unending and conflicting struggle to find my place and, at the same time, to keep from getting stuck. For many years, I thought that my discomfort at one job or another, or in one relationship or another, came from a deep flaw, something seriously wrong.…
One CommentIn the fifth grade, I told Mrs. Worth to go to hell. It was the Christ the King fifth grade class picnic. I’d just smoked up a bunch of weed with Todd Aaron in the john at the Sunnyside Park swimming pool. It was the first time for me and…
Leave a CommentFinally, after a long winter’s tail end, spring has arrived. The redbuds and apples and lilacs have bloomed and the grapes are pushing so quickly you can watch them grow. Already the yard needs a good shave. As a gardener or keeper of lawn, I tend toward the squalor of…
Leave a CommentPluviophile. It’s a word of Latin origin meaning fondness for rain, where “pluvia” means rain and “phile” is a person who has fondness for a specific thing. There are lots of philes in this world, but none are as special to me as a fellow lover of rain. I function…
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