ABOUT

My resume: 

What I’ve Done

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      American Agricultural Editors Association Awards

- Best Regular Column

-Best Humorous Article

-Best Editorial Comment

-Best Team Story

- Master Writer

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Books

The Lay of the Land

Letters from a Peasant

Still Whistling

Papa

The Inadvertent Cafe

Ice on Fire

Angr

Between the Helpless and the Darkness

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     Merit Award, Best Regional Book, Midwest Independent Publishers Association

     Bush Foundation Fellow, 2012

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     Keynote Speaker

                                                             National Association of Rural Mental Health Professionals                                                      College Theological Convocation

                 Saskatchewan Pork Producers

The Institute of Theological and Interdisciplinary Studies

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Public Life

    Big Stone County Commissioner for seventeen years

     Chair, Pioneerland Library System Board

Chair, Prime West Health

Chair, Countryside Public Health

First Board of Directors, New Life Primary School, Mizak, Haiti

     First Board of Directors, Big Stone Wind

     First Board of Directors, Northern Growers LLC

     First Board of Directors, Big Stone County Pork Producers

Owner, Manager, Executive Chef, Head Waiter at The Inadvertent Café 2012 - 2017

     Board of Ordained Ministry, ten years, United Methodist Church

     Leader of five international work teams, United Methodist Church

     Farmed in Big Stone County, 30 years

     Eleven years as youth director, Ortonville United Methodist Church

     Married for 47 years, three children with college educations, no student loans, and jobs

Who I Am

     When someone offers me help my instinctive response is to say, “No, thanks, I can do anything.”  It has gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years.

      I still say it.

      I once shot myself in the hand with a rifle while preparing for a Norwegian-Philippine-French Independence Day Celebration.

      One of my books was in Pete Seeger’s bathroom.

      I once took a group of other people’s children to stay in the ghetto of a developing nation where our body guard was a thirteen year old girl named Lauri.

      I don’t own a wristwatch but I’m always on time.

      I know all of “Silver Tongued Devil,” by Kris Kristofferson.

      Of the ten most dangerous jobs in America I’ve dabbled in six.

     I once harvested 235 acres of soybeans in 17 1/2 hours.  It snowed that night and I had three cups of coffee the next morning before I put on my shoes.

      I know what Henry the V probably really said at Agincourt was, “Let’s get ‘em boys,” but Shakespeare’s version always makes me cry.

      I can castrate 30 pound pigs by myself, 40 seconds per pig.

      I have an email on file from a person who drove three hundred miles to have coffee with me and said that meeting me had been on his bucket list.

      I have a letter in my file cabinet that reads, in part, “I’ve completely lost all respect for you as an elected official and as a human being.”

      I once drank all the whiskey with a world famous poet and told a story that my wife hates me to tell because she doesn’t like people to know what I’m capable of and when I was done the poet laughed and said, “That’s a poem.”

      I’ve buried four dogs.

      I love my family.

      I can cope.