I don’t eat meat for simple reasons. When I walked to Helena from Kansas City in the mid-1990s, I saw the devastation that American agricultural policy wrought on the land. From irrigated farms that drink up western water for the sake of profit to desertification of public lands, I began…
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.
Unless you’re in love with Midwestern landscapes, as I am, once you’ve taken the interstate from Kansas City to St. Louis, you never need drive it again. After the first time, the familiar rolling hills and deep river valleys come at predictable points. The little creeks flow under the highway…
Leave a CommentI love an empty hotel room. There’s nothing here to interfere with my thoughts. Nothing and no one to disturb me. I don’t stay in hotels rooms much, maybe, once or twice a year. The air conditioner/heater hums like a saintly presence. It fills my mind with the soothing thrum…
One CommentI’ve been busy–papers, presentations, writing–which explains the lack of posts recently. At the beginning of the year, I had two public presentations on my mind. I worried, wrung my hands, and lost sleep. Finally, I gave the papers and felt a great sense of relief. Johnson County Community College filmed…
Leave a CommentI recently sent away a manuscript that’s been swimming around my computer files for years. I never thought anyone would be interested in publishing a book that starts as a travel narrative and wanders into fiction in a Trout Fishing in America meets Blue Highways sort of way. I first…
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