Robert Kjar

I consider myself more of a journalist than an author. I kept detailed personal journals most of my life, and learned how to write as I recorded and reflected on people, politics, world events, or pop culture. Later I was a college newspaper editor, and always a student, earning a degree in each decade except the present one, writing everything from Comp 101 papers and Literary Criticism to a dissertation at least an inch and a half thick! It's no way to live.

I'm a fan of my wife and three boys, and I have sampled overwhelming love and utter despair over the years, as anyone with a family knows. Dogs bring me happiness, except when they have to be muzzled because of their fecal food fetishes, like Zeus. Most dogs are really great.

Each of us has a voice, and I hope mine is more like a friend sitting on a porch swapping stories. If you are searching for that riveting adventure story of the anthropologist who hikes the southern Andes in search of the lost tribes of the Bintu Region, well, prepare to be disappointed. Sure, there are some adventures in these essay collections, but mostly they are about experiences anyone could have had - I just try to make them interesting and worthy of the reader's time. Failing that, I hope the book will become a worthy resting place for a brownie so that it doesn't fall through your wrought iron patio table. In that, I will still find a writer's solace.