The letters home of a Midwestern college girl and teacher would be of little interest to anyone but her family, except that she was an extraordinary person. Ellen Margaret Rowe (rhymes with Wow), 1935-2005, taught Spanish and English when I was a senior at East High School in Akron, Ohio, 1963-64. In 2000 Ellen unexpectedly asked if I wanted a paper bag full of her letters, hundreds of letters she had written to her parents beginning in 1953 when she was a freshman in college up through 1966. Ellen never married or had children and presumably didn't think any of her relatives might care to...

Carl Kriegbaum Sleeps with the Corn is a group of unrelated short stories and essays I wrote in the 1990s over the course of my travels from Kansas to Boston.