In this combination memoir and craft book, award-winning author Jerry Apps shares the next phase in his life story begun in Limping through Life and Once a Professor. Beginning with a boyhood surrounded by storytellers, Jerry takes readers along on his path to becoming one of the Midwest’s best-known and most revered writers. In characteristic no-nonsense style, he shares the joys, disappointments, and frustrations of the writing life and describes the genesis and creation of many of his best-known books. In recounting his nearly six-decade writing career, Jerry provides an insider’s view into the creative process, delving into sources for ideas, research strategies, and guidelines and essential tools for writing. Along the way he recalls his relationships with publishers, editors, TV producers, librarians, booksellers, and others and shares a scrapbook’s worth of stories—some funny, some heartwarming, a few of them harrowing—from the road. A book for book lovers!
 

Jerry Apps was born and raised on a central Wisconsin farm. Today he works as a rural historian, full-time writer, and creative writing instructor and is the author of more than fifty fiction, nonfiction, and children’s books. He is a former county extension agent and professor emeritus for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He and his wife, Ruth, divide their time between their home in Madison and their farm, Roshara, in Waushara County.