Michael Hooper's Journey from Clarinda Native to Author

By Michael Hooper

Thank you for having me in this book talk tonight Monday May 9, 2022, in Clarinda, Iowa. In the past 12 months I published two books: a Painter in Paris and the Wonderment Years.

The story behind my books is a long and wandering Odyssey of trials and tribulations and lessons learned, sometimes the hard way but it’s also a story of dreaming, Studying and saving and investing and working daily toward a goal.

First let me say I am grateful to my family for supporting me especially my wife Heather and out children Hannah Dale and Reid and Hannah Marie Hooper, my brother Tom and my brother Richard. I also want to thank my cousins and aunts and uncles in the states, Ohio and in Puerto Rico!

As a freelance writer I get jokes all the time about my way of life. What do you do all day? Dream up thoughts. Well yes. Ideas can change the world. What do you call a writer with health insurance? Married. Why does a writer enjoy writing about fantasy fiction so much? Because it’s better than real life where the scribe's pay is miserable.

Strangely enough. Around 1978 when I was in 9th grade I was a librarian in Clarinda Junior High School, in this very site where we are now, I was hired to work as a Librarian during study halls. 

At that time I could relate to the books of SE Hinton,  the Outsiders, That was Then This is now, About the break up of a friendship. Something I experienced when I was young.

I was born in Maryville, Missouri, in 1963 and my family moved to Clarinda around 1966. I remember my family and I gathered around the TV in 1969 to watch Neil Armstrong step onto the moon as the first human to touch the surface of the moon. We were so in awe of this. My brothers and I built this huge 5 foot model of the rocket used to go to the moon. This rocket is a metaphor for our adventures. Our parents Jovita and Charles Hooper encouraged us to build these models airplanes. When we were little kids we saw the home of Kathy and Ken Hunter and saw Kenny Hunter built these model airplanes that flew in the sky and we thought that was cool and we wanted to do that too.

My grandfather Thomas Reid Hooper gave me a pocket knife and said don’t sell it or give it away or lose it and I still have it to this day. I think there was something in my grandfather wanting us to save everything, his house was full of collectibles of all kinds books art tools cartoons. When I was 10, he gave me a book about Klondike Mike who was Canadian who sought to make his fortune in the gold Klondike gold rush in Dawson Canada in the late 1890s. Mike was an entrepreneur and perhaps that story influenced who I am. Klondike Mike made a lost and made another fortune. As Phil Anschutz, the billionaire said, You will make mistakes but you can make up for them.

My grandfather Thomas Reid Hooper gave me my first diary book for Christmas 1981. I’ve been keeping a diary ever since so that is 40 years of diary keeping. I used the diaries to help write these two books.

I worked 20 years for newspapers in Nebraska and Kansas. I wanted to be the best reporter I could be, one who could be trusted with integrity and a desire to be fair, accurate and thorough. Credibility is everything in journalism. I cultivated sources who could keep me informed and often had exclusive front page news about the biggest story of the day. 

Some of my favorite stories were interviewing a true granddaughter of a Civil War veteran, covering Ronald Reagan in Hastings Nebraska for USA today, Touring with a rock band in Italy and writing about it for The Topeka Capital-Journal. I remain friends today with Civil War veteran Samuel Dinsmoor's granddaughter, Janet Stevens Holmquist Smith. Dinsmoor was a folk artist sculptor from Lucas, Kansas, whose sculptor garden is there today as a museum.

Before there was a Painter in Paris and the Wonderment Years I wrote three other unpublished books called Shattered on the Plains, with Arlen Lazaroff, Shattered on the Plains was about eccentric men in Nebraska and Kansas, including a Hermit named Bogie Savage who lived in a sod house in a ghost town.  I also wrote a biography of poet Arlen Lazaroff story and a third book called Bar Stories which were written as short vignettes.

In 2019, I watched a friend of mine Skyler Troughton write and self publish several books on Amazon. She advised me that I could do it but needed to download Microsoft Word. 

I had learned how to dictate into my phone in order to write on deadline. My shoulders and wrists suffered carpal tunnel syndrome from pounding the keyboards over my 20 years as a journalist on deadline. I was always looking for a new way to write and dictation was the answer. I was so thrilled to be able to quickly dictate an entire story into an email to myself, using my phone. This saved my arms from all this clickety-clack clickety-clack. So inspired by my friend Skyler, I started dictating my choicest diary entries into a word file. These choice diary entries began as a look back on memory lane, what are the real things that happened back there, is my memory of them accurate? My diary has information that would otherwise be irretrievable if not written down.

As a freelance writer, I have the entire day to set up like I choose, so I can be productive at my favorite times of the day, early morning, and midday. I prepare dinner for Heather and me. We love fresh fruits and vegetables, like avocados, tomatoes, onion and rice and beans. All this cauliflower and broccoli are great vegetarian meals, but sometimes I just want a fat double cheeseburger with a layer of bacon, mayonnaise and tomato.

The Wonderment Years opens at a very difficult time in my life when I was picked up as a runaway. When I left Clarinda, Iowa, at age 16, I never thought I would be coming back here to do this. If you read my Wonderment Years, you will see I was transported by a policeman to Council Bluffs, Iowa., where I stayed in a group home for a month before moving to the Omaha Home for Boys.

I had been getting in trouble with smoking marijuana and lying and stealing and even some vandalism. My parents moved me to the Omaha Home for Boys where I lived on a ranch with 12 boys, some of them very challenging and difficult people. I was lucky that I immersed myself in my studies at school and found out I was pretty good at literature and art and drafting. I connected with Charles Gould who gave me his own poems to read and introduced me to Henry David Thoreau. Mr. Wilke my drafting instructor showed me home that he built with his construction class. And then Mr. Johnson my art teacher encouraged me to draw and paint every day in watercolor. He said, "your work today is practice for something greater tomorrow."

After graduation from high school in 1981 at Benson High School I went to Hastings Nebraska where I enrolled in Central community college in their drafting program. While there I met a man named Keith Marsh who told me about Yellowstone park and encourage me to get a job there and live there and work there. You’re gonna love it. So I finished my studies for the spring semester and left for Yellowstone and had the most amazing time of my life ever it was so explosively awesome, seeing the Rocky Mountains for the very first time I think and in a bus all the way to Livingston Montana where I met all these philosophers playing frisbee waiting for our transfer into the park where we were given places to live in dorms and and I had all of this good backpacking equipment so I had my job taking care of dormitories cleaning them and then I moved up to resident assistant. 

I just thought this was the best time of my life, I work during the day and then go hang out with my friends at night we go hot putting in the Hot Springs or we go hiking somewhere or we listen to some music or maybe go to a Bible study or sing songs at the employee pub. And I loved it and I wrote about it every day in my diary and I thought this is awesome I wanna be a writer and told my Dad that I wanted to switch majors and he said well you can’t even spell and I said well I can learn how to spell a word  there’s dictionary Dad said finish your associate's degree and then go on to get your bachelor's so I finished my drafting degree and then went to the University Nebraska Lincoln finishing four years later in 1987. My first job out of college was at the Fremont Tribune in 1988. I worked there a year and a half and then went to the Grand Island independent  for nine years then I ran a staffing firm in Kearney for a year, I sold my share of the business and bought Coca-Cola stock with the profits. We moved to Topeka where I became business editor a the Topeka Capital-Journal for 10 years. I worked four years at a trust company and sold my shares in the business and went out on my own as a full-time freelancer writer investor.

Oh yeah there’s some trippy things That happened along the way like losing my virginity in a hayfield. While in high school. But in my early 20s I did not go to college to get a wife I went there for an education first and foremost. Period. I wanted to work a couple of years outside of college and save up some money and go on a trip to Europe.

I had received a postcard from Jeanne Bourne in Greece of an empty park bench on an empty beach and she said what is missing from this picture and I thought to myself me I should be there right now on the beach. She said don’t worry about saving up too much money just get here you’ll find a job.

In a years time I had saved $5000 and paid off $2000 in credit card debt and now was taking off for the adventure of a lifetime.

I traveled around Amsterdam Germany Austria and Switzerland with a friend from Nebraska Lauren Lazaroff and then went to Greece. In Athens at the train station, I met woman named Archie from Australia and Bassim this man from Cairo. They took me to their hotel. I really liked it. I liked the Bohemian travel crowd. I asked Archie how they got their jobs as working for this hotel. And Archie said well I can introduce you to the boss. I pulled out my résumé and showed the boss and he talked to me and asked me where I was from and he hired me and he said as soon as you’re done with your trip on the islands come look me up and I’ll find some work for you . So I went out to the islands for a month and hung out with these German girls on this island of Anti Paros and we also visited Irakli yeah it was just awesome I was like I can’t believe a human being can do this. I was jealous of this Englishman who had a beautiful campsite against a stone wall on the beach, he said, yeah I’m living here all summer.

My lifestyle in Greece on the island of Antiparos was pretty simple I would get up eat a little cereal and fruit and water and juice and maybe go out for a cup of coffee and sit in a café and write in my diary. I also wrote numerous letters in the morning and then in the afternoon I would go to the beach and swim and in the evening Read and perhaps hang out with some friends.

We used to hang out at a place called the Doors in Antiparos. This is where we would listen to songs like riders on the storm by the doors or satisfaction by the Rolling Stones and Don McLean‘s by by miss American pie. I thought this was the perfect life like why would I wanna leave this? I met one person who had enough money saved for two years and was taking the his time on his way to the trans Siberian railway across Russia. And he was interesting we were inside of bar that was blue and melancholy and there was another man and spent 20 years traveling around the world and he seem kind of lonely. These two people were fascinating but I’m not sure I wanted to be like them? Yeah there was for sure a wonder lust for me. 

I traveled through Italy France Spain on a backpack and ended up in Barcelona. I was walking a loss along Las Ramblas in Barcelona and this guy says hey hello and I said hello and he said are you British and I said now I am an American he said do you like to party and I said yeah and he said follow us. And so I did we ended up in the Square sitting around there were musicians in the Square and please and children playing and people drinking in the bars and we sat in the courtyard there on this beautiful day and drink beer and and enjoy the camaraderie among the patriots X patriots from England South Africa the United States Germany and we talked about human distraction of indigenous people all over the world including in the United States and Australia and the genocide of peoples was kind of sad but it linked us to our concern about humanity and at five minutes before midnight I said hey I’m gonna be 27 years old in five minutes and all these guys I said hey they they ordered more beers and rolled up some joints and and we drank and got hire and they sang happy birthday to me and  it was probably the most amazing birthday I’ve ever experienced and it was with strangers and it was so full of love.

I learned some really key things from Europe and one was maintain my youthful spirit and Wonderlust an adult and sense of adventure and most of all my sense of wonderment. This is why I call my book the Wonderment years because they’re full of all of this Out Loud, Wide awake hyper awareness of how intensely amazing this life is and I try to carry that sense back to the states with me. And I also learn to work efficiently you know as a writer I would write intensely all morning long and accomplish a lot mostly letters and journals and and short stories while I was in Europe but nonetheless I was constantly working working working and yet had all this time to see life  and go to the Prado in Madrid. 

I returned to the Grand Island independent to work As a regional reporter covering 14 counties in Nebraska. Total blast of a job. I covered the story of Cathy Beard of Ord Nebraska missing person who is a body was eventually found two years later in a lovers Lane. Jim Helm and I interviewed the killer in jail, Using psychological techniques like such as flattery saying that we’ve heard he said very well read and intelligent human being and that he have many thoughts and his friend going and would love to hear them and he talked to us for 2 1/2 hours on tape. He knew he was the killer because he said he wanted to have sex with her but she refused him and said now now now please John now I always thought those were her last words. A film called buried in my backyard was made of this killer John Oldson and Cathy Beard and it’s now on the oxygen network .

While in Grand Island , This new intern showed up with her mother. I saw her and I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. And my friend Christine Romano sitting next to me said she has the purest most blonde hair. I was supposed thunderstruck by this woman that I didn’t say anything to her all week and then on Friday she says hello and asked me what do you do around here on a Friday night and I said whatever you wanna do and we went to a park and she rollerbladed as I walked in we got on the swings and started swinging up and down in the flight in the sky and I told her about Europe and she said she wanted to go to Europe and I said we should go together  and we did two years later. After we got married. On our honeymoon we went to Paris, we climbed the Eiffel Tower, we swam in the south of France including Nice where we bicycled in this gorgeous city on the French Riviera. We stayed a night in orals the town where Vincent van Gogh painted and lived with for a time with him Paul Gauguin. You definitely can feel the hot sun that place at the time there was a woman who lived to be the oldest living woman in the world living in orals and her name was Jeanne Calmet who lived to be 122 years old dying in 1997 she knew van Gogh and called him a dirty smelly man. So she was alive while we were there. Heather and I went on to Prague where we sat on cafés near the Charles bridge and took a tour of a palace with an American ex-patriot named Mike Rainey who took us to restaurants where we ate well we bought a bunch of Crystal and  garnets in Prague and then went on to Sweden where we saw Heather‘s cousin Bengt Okie and dined with their families and then we lived in a little cabin in the woods and rode bicycles around the neighborhood it was awesome. Awesome is a really popular word in Topeka especially at church people say awesome man and awesome. 

When I started painting in oil three years ago I began dreaming of going back to Paris. My first thought I have to be ready to go there I need to know how to paint at least with the basic fundamentals so I hired teachers to teach me how to paint and after three years I felt somewhat ready to go. My wife couldn’t go but she encouraged me to go and I received encouragement from a friend of mine who lives in Paris. I figured I would keep a journal of everything I do in Paris as I paint every day with the goal of turning it into a book. So that was my mission is to make it an authentic book of my own creation of my own paintings but I met these wonderful artists along the way and I fell in love with their artwork and asked to produce their work with mine and now have multiple artists including Robert Lobet an artist from the south of France to I met in Paris Robert Lobet makes his own books by hand and I bought one of them and featured that artwork in my book.

To write your own book

Write an outline for your book with a beginning, middle and end. And write a little every day just one page and you will have 250 pages in 250 days. Even just write one paragraph a day.

I always prepared my material first and had it all in front of me and then I dictated the book into my phone as an email to myself and then I would copy and paste it into a word document and add photos as appropriate.

Once I was done writing and editing, I ship it over to Amazon, write out the copy for the necessary things such as name of the book subtitle of the book description of the book. Write a good description. There is a way to look at how your book would look. You can proof it in front of you on the computer before sending it and if you send it and you find a mistake later well collect that all your mistakes and then fix it and resubmit it and it’ll be submitted in the new way the corrections will be in place  so the nice thing about publishing with Amazon is that you can improve your book if you see a problem you can change it. And it’s still your own book.

Looking back, I am inclined to rewrite diary entries into a narrative. Told in a single voice with a theme that develops over the duration of the book.

Rather than lists of people or places, I would write about the philosophical implications of my observations, and more humor! The twisted messy side of relationships, how politics is driving a wedge between friends and family.

My wife wanted me to tell the story of my childhood when the some friends and I went underneath the city of Clarinda in the sewer when it was about 0° outside it’s kind of cold and the water was frozen and we took a sled and hiked it all the way through underground kind of crawled on the ice crazy we ended up downtown and crawled out of the sewer and probably smelled like it too.

Perhaps more than anything, I cherish the experience of literature, the gathering of poets on a blanket on a hill, or by the riverside around a fire. Heather and I took a bottle of wine, a blanket and some snacks, and sat on a hill at Illif Commons, sharing poems about the sky by Eileen Myles.