A Memoir in Progress

 

I'm working on a memoir about my son-of-Kansas-settlers father and our relationship. My dad was born in 1897, just yards from where I grew up. By the time he was ten, he was driving cattle on horseback. When he was 22, his parents died within hours of each other. He took over his father’s cattle and farming operations, was elected Kansas’ youngest mayor and became a banker—the same banker who once grabbed a .35 Remington rifle, piled into his 1915 Cadillac and chased the heavily armed thugs who had just robbed him.

 

This is the story of my struggle to bridge the chasm between my father and me. It is my journey into the four decades our lives overlapped and the half-century he lived before me. It is my ode to the Southern Plains—the wind and dust and open sky of a vanished way of life, a time and culture far removed from 21st-century America.

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Published memoir excerpts:

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Cold War Prairie, Michigan Quarterly Review

 

Of Roller Skates, Hogs and My Father, South Dakota Review

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Uncle John, HeartWood Literary Magazine 

 

Showman's Pasture, DASH Journal

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