Feature Stories and Articles
While working as a feature writer for the Sioux City (IA) based arts and entertainment newsweekly Weekender, I routinely interviewed other authors for our "In Print" section. The author interviews are not "book reviews" per se, but rather what I call "conversations with authors" about how his or her particular book came about and how the work defines them as a writer.
My Weekender articles also included other feature stories, and while they're no longer available in the Weekender's website archives, I've included some of them here and (as time permits) am hoping to get many of my favorites scanned from the newsprint copy and added here as well. I also hope to eventually scan and include some of my features written for the Sioux City Journal during the years I worked for them as a correspondent.
Links to currently listed articles and features may be found by clicking on
the category buttons below. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you
enjoy the interviews and stories as much as I enjoyed conducting and
writing them.
... and just a few I'll never forget
As a small, frail girl from the South, Barbara Robinette Moss was determined
to change her fate and achieve a life defined by beauty.
Born in 1956 in rural Alabama, her family was so poor her mother ate dirt and poison-covered seeds to save food for her eight (of nine) children. Often starving and chronically malnourished, Barbara's facial bone structure, teeth and complexion failed to develop normally, leaving her with what she called a "twisted mummy face."
Young Barbara prayed nightly to be changed into Zeus's daughter Aphrodite — the goddess of beauty — and after a lifetime of fiery resolution, so she became transformed.
Moss Pens Haunting Memoir of Resilience, Redemption
Leif Enger's debut novel is of uncommon wisdom – equal parts tragedy, love
story, faith and meditation – unfolding like a revelation in the midst
of miracles and magic.
Set against the Minnesota countryside and North Dakota Badlands in the early 1960s, Peace Like a River is a story about a family whose lives are upended when Davy, the oldest son, kills two marauders who have come to harm his family.
Most people knew him as “The Man in Black.” Many called him an icon, a true
American treasure. Some called him by his given birth name – J.R.
– but to those who loved and laughed with and knew Johnny Cash
best, he was simply known as “John.”
“We receive many gifts during the course of our lives, not just on birthdays or at Christmas, and not all are wrapped,” Hugh Waddell states in his tribute book to his longtime family friend, John Cash.
In addition to Hugh, Weekender writer Jody Ewing also talks to "Cowboy" Jack Clement, W.S. Holland, and others who worked with and were closest to the late Cash.
Friends and Family Remember Johnny Cash
The first in my Sioux City, IA, cold case series — the 1974 triple slaying of two young men and a pregnant woman shot execution
style in the home they shared — was published by the Weekender in May 2004 and set the stage for the Iowa Cold Cases website I launched the following year.
The site now includes information on hundreds of unsolved homicides and missing persons cases all across Iowa. In an unexpected twist of fate, my stepfather, Earl Thelander, was killed in 2007; his case also remains unsolved.
Horror of triple murder lingers 30 years later — the case that kindled a commitment
" ... I saw a faint outline of a person standing next to one of the smaller buildings,
and, my hands on the trigger, yelled something like "Freeze!" but he disappeared with only a sidestep. I heard him call for the dog, and
when a pickup passed by, the headlights showed a young boy -- who
couldn't have been more than 10 -- holding that dog ...
.. I'd almost blasted a young boy the very first night of the war."
Forty Days and Forty Nights: Navy Corpsman scribes details of Iraqi War
