A Distant Mirror Anthology: Essays From Rise Grand Island, the Grand Island Senior High Alumni Newsletter: Essays From Rise Grand Island, the Grand Island Senior High Alumni Newsletter

Growing up in the small town of Grand Island, Nebraska, left Michael Monk with no shortage of stories to tell-stories he was more than happy to share when a friend approached him about writing a column for his high school's alumni newsletter. Collected here in A Distant Mirror Anthology, Monk's essays encompass a lifetime of memories, observations, experiences, and wisdom gained. Through reminiscences about the first day of school, a teacher who kindled a lifelong love of reading, and classic childhood hijinks, Monk captures the nostalgia of growing up in the Midwest in the 1960s. His later endeavors through life as a lawyer in Los Angeles and as a husband, parent, and grandparent have left him with plenty of witty observations, humorous anecdotes, and touching memories to share-not to mention good books to recommend. (Other literary treasures include an homage to Shakespeare and a rhyming ode to the class of 1967 that names every graduate.) Originally published between 2015 and 2022, these thirty-eight essays preserve a slice of time for anyone from Grand Island and beyond who wishes to take a look into A Distant Mirror.

Michael W. Monk was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, and is a 1967 graduate of Grand Island Senior High School, the school to which he returned in 2015, metaphorically speaking, to contribute a bimonthly column for the alumni newsletter, collected here in A Distant Mirror Anthology. In 1971 Monk received his BA from Harvard College with a degree in English literature with honors. After graduating in 1974 from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, he practiced labor and employment law in Los Angeles for more than forty-six years. From 1990 to 1994, Monk was a minority owner of the San Diego Padres baseball team. In 2014, Monk's play, The Tragedy of Orenthal, Prince of Brentwood, published by Small Batch Books, was named as a finalist in fiction for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and won an Outstanding Book of the Year award by the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Now mostly retired, Monk and his wife, Janet Bogle, reside a majority of the year at Lake Okoboji, Iowa.