02/24/11

Story by Peggy Graham

Patrick Dobson - "Seldom Seen"

‘Seldom Seen’ author to speak at JCCC

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — Patrick Dobson, author of Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains, will discuss his book at 11 a.m. Thursday, March 24, in the Craig Community Auditorium of the General Education Building, Johnson County Community College. His lecture, sponsored by JCCC’s Kansas Studies Institute, is free and open to the public.

Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains (University of Nebraska Press, September 2009) recounts Dobson’s decision to leave home and a steady, if dead-end, job in May 1995, to walk from Kansas City, Mo., to Helena, Mont. Crossing the Great Plains with only a backpack for the next two-and-a-half months, he let chance encounters with people and places guide him to a deeper sense of who he was and where he was going.

He kept a notebook and filed biweekly columns in The Pitch during his trip. The journal is the basis for his book.

Dobson, adjunct assistant professor, history, teaches American History and Western Civilization at JCCC. A doctoral candidate in U.S. environmental history and American literature at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Dobson is a free-lance writer and working member of Ironworkers Local Union No. 10 in Kansas City, Mo.

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