CONTRIBUTORS
Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon, and the author most recently of Thirsty for the Joy: Australian & American Voices (One Day Hill). He is a prolific writer and possesses a unique voice, as you will note in this passage expressing his interest in appearing in the NDSU magazine: "Ever since he was a puppy he has been fascinated by Dakotaness for reasons having largely to do with the riveting words bison, pipit, curlew, and longspur, not to mention cranes, which sound like vast grumpy basso trucks floating overhead, don't they? Isn't that an incredible sound? Like a thunderstorm gargling, something like that?" A night in the infirmary p. 8-9.
Merrie Sue Holtan, communication studies instructor at Minnesota State University Moorhead, also teaches on-line media writing classes for North Dakota State University. She has a master's degree in communication from NDSU and a master's of fine arts in creative writing from MSUM. She grew up ice-skating on Rush Creek in southeastern Minnesota and always wanted to twirl her baton on ice. Two of her baton students now perform with the NDSU Gold Star Marching Band. The Nancy Burgraff story (p. 26-27)"called to her," and she is committed to telling stories that have "gone missing." She and her husband, Phil, live on Big Pine Lake near Perham, Minn., and they have three grown children.
Robert Dodge studied history at North Dakota State University, graduating with honors in 1967, and was awarded one of two National Collegiate Athletic Association post-graduate scholarships for scholar-athletes given to tennis players that year. He became a middle school teacher in West Fargo, while his wife taught elementary in Fargo. After 10 years he headed overseas, and spent four years in London. They moved to Singapore in 1983. Singapore has been home ever since, except when he got a scholarship and sabbatical to get a second master's degree at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
He left teaching after the 2006 school year. His reading preference is nonfiction after years of teaching history and says he hasn't lost all hope that we can make the world a better place. An excerpt from his latest book, Prairie urders, the True Story of Three Murders and the Loss of Innocence in A Small North Dakota Town, is on p. 40-47. He also wrote about a previous book, The Strategist, a biography of Thomas Schelling, the Nobel Prize winner in economics in 2005, in the spring 2007 issue of NDSU magazine.
