I banished my daughter to homelessness. I didn’t feel bad about it. In fact, I felt quite adult. Sydney lived for years between two houses. She stayed with her mother most of the time and then with me every Tuesday and every other weekend. When she lived with me, we first…
3 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.
Some days I don’t have the gumption or the inspiration to write. Such times make me feel useless, ineffective at doing what I love to do. Today was such a day until just a minute ago. I left home early today to come out to the college. I always feel…
Leave a CommentSome books have provided me priceless revelations. W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge turned on something fundamental in me. Larry Darrell’s traveler/loner appealed to me and let me understand that the things he was seeking—humility and egalitarian democracy in his own life—I was looking for myself. In Catch-22, Joseph Heller…
Leave a CommentThe first day in the classroom went well, as far as I can see. I didn’t have much planned. Like all other things in life, I planned to fly it as it came. I didn’t have a lecture prepared. I didn’t have a class plan. Only the syllabus, which is…
Leave a CommentSome days I’d like to strangle Bill the Flying Cat. Bill came to us in winter four years ago. He was a kitten who wound up on our porch when the temperature hovered around 3. His small stature and aloof personality attracted me. He had one eye that didn’t open…
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