Bøker av Roger Welsch

Beloved Nebraska folklorist Roger Welsch explores our passion and love for dogs.

A collection of country whoppers from the frontier of Nebraska, Oklahoma and Iowa. It includes tall tales, lies, and descriptions from the Plains states. It collects many bits and pieces that, taken as a whole, presents a vivid picture of life on the American prairie.

Roger and Linda Welsch match references from Willa Cather's writing with recipes they collected from Cather family recipe files, from other period cookbooks, and from old-time ethnic cooks still living in the Bohemian tradition. Cather's Kitchens comes as close as possible to the precise recipes Cather had in mind and memory as she wrote.

Describes the wisdom that the author's new-found teachers share with him. From everyday country people, the author learns the fine arts of relaxing, using his noggin, trusting his instincts, and laughing a lot more. He offers 28 tales of the Great Plains that convey in familiar Welschian style the importance, beauty, and value of the typical.

The Turtle Creek band of the fictional Nehawka Indians wages a battle for the return of their sacred Sky Bundle, a medicine pouch containing artifacts. Seven interlinked stories, beginning with a court battle in the year 2001 and going far back in time to the origin of the Bundle and the first Nehawka village on the Great Plains, reveal the richness and depth of Indian cultural heritage.

One day Roger Welsch ventured to ask his father a delicate personal question: "Why am I an only child?" His father's answer is one of many examples of the delightful and laughter-inducing ribald tales Welsch has compiled from a lifetime of listening to and sharing the folklore of the Plains.

When he was out playing Indian, enacting Hollywood-inspired scenarios, it never occurred to the child Roger Welsch that the little girl sitting next to him in school was Indian. A lifetime of learning later, Welsch's enthusiasm is undimmed, if somewhat more enlightened. In Embracing Fry Bread Welsch tells the story of his lifelong relationship with Native American culture.

Roger Welsch is a fierce fan of Nebraska - not just the football team, or the state's famous beef, or its endless sky, or its ferocious and ferociously unpredictable weather, but the whole thing. And what he has to say about it makes interesting reading not just for natives but also for outsiders.

Were our forefathers liars? "You bet they were," says Roger Welsch, "and damned fine ones at that." The proof is in Catfish at the Pump, a collection of the kind of humour that softened the hardships of pioneering on the Great Plains.