The poor kid asked me outside the classroom shortly before class started. He shifted on his feet and plunged his hands into his pockets and back out. He himmed and hawed, cough nervously and called me “sir.” “I’m going to drop the class after we get done today,” he said.…
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.
The trek from Rawlins, Wyoming, to Lander took through an eerie, rolling landscape of sand hills and sagebrush. Coming down into Lander and Popo Agie River Valley, the scene turned green with irrigated hay and alfalfa fields and cottonwoods and willow on the snaking river bank. Somewhere in Lander we…
Leave a CommentOver the last 25 years, Laramie has grown around its edges. Where before, it was a three-mile drive down Grand Avenue off of I-80 before you ran into anything—a bar, restaurant, the university. About the furthest thing from town was a Walmart that I never used, though, Lord knows, I…
Leave a CommentI am just back from Yellowstone with the kids. Even as I look back on what we did, the things we saw, all I can think of now is the drive and what it means to me. A discussion of the family dynamic during the vacation will have to wait.…
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The summer semester draws to a close and thank god for that. It’s been a long and grueling semester for my students. Since we have half the time to cover a 16-week’s semester’s worth of material, I ask a lot of them. I don’t dumb down or dilute the intellectual…
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