About

Journey Home. Isn’t that where we are always heading?

Welcome new visitors! I have been writing a version of this blog since 2007, although older posts were taken off line in 2013.

This blog is where I write about Iowa, gardening, writing, politics, and whatever crosses my mind while walking on the state park trail.

• Growing food is one of life’s pleasures, and I’ve been doing it since the summer after my spouse and I married. Some of my posts will be about that.
• I write about writing. Some of my most popular posts are when I take a current writing challenge and work my way through it.
• Thousands of paper and digital photographs remain in shoe boxes and in the cloud. I started an archival process and write about them. I also take new photos and post them from time to time.
• I review things — books and events I attend, mostly. I also have an informal series called “We’re Going Home” in which I reflect on generational change caused by the death of people I know or who have had a profound effect on me.
• I walk on the state park trail almost daily, usually at sunrise. Those walks give me time to observe nature and think about things. Some of this makes it back to this blog.

I’ll be 75 in December and I’m determined to make 2026 a productive year. An early influence was the university class on Chaucer I took with Stavros Deligiorgis, a polyglot professor of comparative literature. He started me on my literary journey.

On Aug. 21, 2024 I received my Library of Congress Control Number and ISBN for An Iowa Life: A Memoir, the first volume of my autobiography. I finished the second volume, A Working Life, which is out with early readers.

I began writing in public with an August 1974 letter to the editor of the Times-Democrat newspaper in my home town. The majority of my public writing has been such letters, opinion pieces, and since 2007, thousands of posts on several blogs.

When I was younger, I had notions of becoming a novelist, yet found it difficult to break from the exigencies of a life to produce fiction. What I write now is grounded in some form of reality, not exactly nonfiction, but not fiction either. Journey Home is a place for my public writing.

Read my most popular post Autobiography in 1,000 Words to learn more about me.

If you got this far, please consider liking or following this blog.

For now, I enabled comments. I read them all and post about half of them. A friendly suggestion: If your comment is longer than my original post or wanders into a different topic, you maybe ready to start your own blog.

Thanks for reading my work.