Hal Holoun on Oil Painting presents an intimate look into a professional artist's life as he faces the challenges of capturing moments in time with a brush and canvas. A reclusive artist and yet a generous teacher, Holoun shares with Linda Welsch his approach to art, his emphasis on the fundamentals of fine art, technical information, and creative insights through his own words. In his conversational style of sharing personal stories and experiences, readers will feel Hal is personally speaking to them as well. A unique and rare glimpse of a successful artist and his student, this is a book about two friends as they share ideas about creating art and living an artist's life.

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 humor that softened the hardships of pioneering on the Great Plains. From yellowed newspapers, magazines, and forgotten Nebraska Federal Writers' Project files, the well-known folklorist and humorist Roger Welsch has produced a book to be treasured. Here are jokes, anecdotes, legends, tall tales, and lugubriously funny poems about the things that preoccupied the pioneer plainsman: weather extremes; soil quality; food and whiskey; an arkload of animals, including grasshoppers, bed bugs, hoop snakes, the ubiquitous mule, and some mighty big fish; and even sickness and the poverty that would inspire black laughter again in the Great Depression.

"Catfish at the Pump" proves abundantly that the art of story telling was practiced diligently by our plains ancestors. Roger Welsch, who brought out "Shingling the Fog and Other Plains Lies" in 1972 (reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press in 1980), now issues this "book about lies and liars," knowing full well that "underlying the pioneer sense of humor is a profound respect for truth."

Roger and Linda Welsch matched 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. Roger L. Welsch is a television personality and is the author of nearly thirty books, including It's Not the End of the Earth, but You Can See It from Here and Touching the Fire: Buffalo Dancers, the Sky Bundle, and Other Tales, both available in Bison Books editions. Linda K. Welsch is an acclaimed Nebraska artist. Susan J. Rosowski (1942-2004) is the author of Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature (Nebraska 1999).