Rob Kaiser of the Appleton Post-Crescent

At this level of teaching, most of us are authors. We author books and textbooks. We publish articles in our areas of scholarly endeavors and obviously have written a thesis or two. Very few of us, though, are writers.

True writers are artists. The blank page is their canvas and their words are brushstrokes that paint indelible images as vivid to the eye as if Renoir or Monet stood at the easel.

It is not often that I’ve come across a newspaper columnist who is, by my definition, a writer. The late Mike Royko, Bob Greene and humorist Dave Barry come to mind while Stew Rieckman, doesn’t. But to the list of the former I add Rob Kaiser from the Appleton Post-Crescent.

Read his Sunday front page column, http://www.postcrescent.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007711180559
and try not to be moved. You can’t. His words paint an indelible picture. Those painted words draw you in. We smell, we see, and we feel the story. He is a writer and a very good one at that. I look forward to reading more of his work.