"I looked at the world we live in" Fiction Author Brent Olson S4 EPS39

Nugget of Hope: Each generation has more in common than we realize. As time passes, each generation within a family often brings life full circle. Brent Olson has lived on a small farm in Big Stone County, on the edge of the prairie in western Minnesota, for 64 of his 66 years. As a working journalist, Brent has filed articles from 20 countries on six continents. This has led him to want to change the world he lives in through his work as a county commissioner and create a new world in his two recent novels, "Angr" and "Between the Helpless and the Darkness." In this time of news and information tailored so everyone can hear only what they want to hear, he presents information that will leave everyone just a little unsettled. Working with a warm heart and a cold eye, he dissects what works from what doesn’t in our individual lives, institutions, and country. He has served on dozens of boards and committees—as varied as the Big Stone County Pork Producers, and the Minnesota United Methodist Board of Ordained Ministry. As a short-order cook at his very own Inadvertent Café, he has learned to make fluffy scrambled eggs and the best omelets on Main Street in Clinton, Minnesota (Population 453). Olson is a Big Stone County Commissioner and a 2012 Bush Foundation Fellow. === Who I am When someone offers me help, my instinctive response is to say, “No, thanks; I can do anything.” This has gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years. I still say it. I once shot myself in the hand with a rifle while preparing for a Norwegian-Philippine-French Independence Day Celebration. One of my books was in Pete Seeger’s bathroom. I once took a group of other people’s children to stay in the ghetto of a developing nation where our bodyguard was a thirteen-year-old girl named Lauri. I don’t own a wristwatch, but I’m always on time. I know all of “Silver Tongued Devil” by Kris Kristofferson. Of the ten most dangerous jobs in America I’ve dabbled in six. I once harvested 235 acres of soybeans in 17 1/2 hours. It snowed that night, and the next morning, before I put on my shoes, I had three cups of coffee. I know what Henry the V probably really said at Agincourt was, “Let’s get ‘em boys,” but Shakespeare’s version always makes me cry. I can castrate 30-pound pigs by myself, 40 seconds per pig. I have an email on file from a person who drove three hundred miles to have coffee with me and said that meeting me had been on his bucket list. I have a letter in my file cabinet that reads, in part, “I’ve completely lost all respect for you as an elected official and as a human being.” I once drank all the whiskey with a world-famous poet and told a story that my wife hates me to tell because she doesn’t like people to know what I’m capable of. When I was done, the poet laughed and said, “That’s a poem.” I’ve buried four dogs. I love my family. I can cope. Substack: https://brentolson.substack.com/ Amazon: https://amzn.to/47kngjF Find out more about your host, Kim Lengling www.kimlenglingauthor.com