Editor’s note: This is the Jim Bartko obituary that appeared in The Register-Guard March 19, 2020. Jim Bartko, a former University of...

Daughter-in-law Deena, here with our son, Jason, and their three boys. When a foul ball flies toward you, a spectator, there’s not much...

An Israeli couple — trail-named Bugs and Bunny — hiking with speakers atop their backpacks, listening to rock music? Check. Yours truly,...

This isn’t how our trip was supposed to end. But a fire near he Oregon-California border has once again curtailed a Pacific Crest Trail...

Nothing puts life into context like death. And so it was that while at Edwin Coleman’s memorial service last Tuesday, I was reminded why,...

But having just ­finished another section — 217 miles from just north of the Columbia River to ­Snoqualmie Pass east of Seattle — to...

SALEM — An hour before I’m to present a three-hour writers workshop at the maximum security facility of the Oregon State Penitentiary,...

Appeared in Register-Guard newspaper, June 5, 2016 I was high on a ladder, doing something I’d vowed I’d never do again, when a neighbor...

From the April 3, 2016 Register-Guard By Bob Welch It was March Madness season. She Who Was Leaving Me had packed her bags and was ready...

BODEGA BAY, Calif. — The schoolteacher in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie “The Birds” is talking with the newcomer in town. “Did you drive up...

It happens every time. OK, nearly every time. I unwrap the book-size package and am soon holding the dream-come-true from one of our...

A FEW YEARS AGO, Dave Frohnmayer and I were speaking at Northwest Christian University on the subject of leadership when he shared an...

We were going around the room, introducing ourselves at a recent writers workshop I was leading, when one of the attendees got negative...

EDITOR’S NOTE: When Cade Welch, our first grandson, was born in 2005, I began a ritual of writing a once-a-year letter to him in The...

I’ve been marketing books of mine now for more than 20 years but only recently realized a big mistake I was making: Thinking it was only...

They say if you want to make money in the writing business you find a niche and go to that place again and again. In other words, if the...

Mother of Rain, about hardscrabble life in the hills of Tennessee in the 1930s and ’40s, is the most intriguing read I’ve experienced in...

SENECA FALLS, N.Y. — Tonight, in a snow-swept town south of Syracuse, I stepped foot in Bedford Falls for the first time. Sort of....

A colleague once told me that column writing is a little like running in front of a combine in a farmer’s field: exhilarating, exhausting...

When She Who Endures Me is away at the coast or on a quilt retreat, it’s the go-to movie I watch alone: A River Runs Through It, Robert...