When we adopted my son Nick, he was four and a half years old. He came out of a supremely difficult situation. His mother, my sister, went down the meth hole. She had been using the drug (and others) for years, decades, before she got pregnant. She also drank compulsively,…
8 CommentsAuthor: 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 season’s been warm. A few cold snaps smacked the city. But other than a few days of really cold weather, the kind winter usually brings us, winter has hardly left a mark. Unfortunately, the warmth and sunshine didn’t prevent illness. Virginia caught a severe cold a few weeks ago.…
Leave a CommentThe worst drunk dreams usually come in the middle of the night. They creep into my sleep, giving no warning. Nothing during the previous day or any dreams or waking that night presage the horror. Without cause, they pester my me, get into my deepest sensibilities. They are so real…
Leave a CommentAmaan runs the gas station and convenience store on 12th Street. Every day, working people in trucks from the surrounding industrial area use Amaan’s pumps to fill their tanks. Diesel, regular, premium. When I was working for an ornamental and structural construction firm in the bottoms, we pulled the trucks…
Leave a CommentRichard Brautigan took his typewriter with him in 1962 when he went camping in Idaho with his wife. The dark and rain fell across the long folds of the mountains that lie like an Indian blanket, eternally quiet and laden with ghosts. It’s was a good place to take a…
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