photo by: Chansi Long

Author of "Posts of a Mid-Century Kid" Ann Anderson stands in front of the Kansas River at Burcham Park in Lawrence. Anderson writes about many local natural landscapes, such as the Kansas River, the Flint Hills and Clinton Lake.

Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s Ann Anderson would fill her Big Chief tablets with stories about cats, then share them with her mother, who would beam and praise, then hang them on the refrigerator.

That positive feeling that Anderson felt in sharing her writing became motivational. In 2008, she developed a Facebook habit, writing hundreds of posts that made friends and acquaintances beam and praise just as her mother had, but they also told her to put the posts into a book. In time, that’s what Anderson did.

Her book, “Posts of a Mid-Century Kid,” was published in October 2021 by Anamcara Press, of Lawrence.

“It’s a culmination of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of hours,” Anderson says.

“Posts of a Mid-Century Kid” is composed of nonfiction vignettes that mostly take place in Kansas. Anderson, who grew up in Topeka and attended the University of Kansas, lives in Lawrence, where she coaches tennis at the Jayhawk Tennis Center. She would like her book to encourage readers to appreciate nature in general and Kansas in particular.

“A lot of (Kansans) including myself grow up saying, ‘I’m out of here; it’s boring,'” says Anderson, who lived in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Diego after college. “When I came back to Kansas I saw the serene beauty of the state … We don’t have mountains or an ocean, but we have horizons. We can see the sunrise and the sunset and we are so blessed to live with wildlife.”

One of Anderson’s aims with the book was to capture the beauty she sees in nature. Robert Heintzen, a tennis student of Anderson’s, says the book is full of rich, evocative nature writing.

“Her book contains one of the best descriptions of someone walking out on the Kansas prairie and sitting with the wind and the birds,” Heintzen says. “She is one of the most descriptive and in-touch Kansans. She describes her respect for nature in this way: She says, ‘Nature you are my church.’ Because she loves to sit with it and calm herself. And she appreciates each day that nature brings us, not in a house, maybe in the backyard, maybe on the prairie, maybe at Clinton Lake. She’s a real inspiration.”

Ronda Miller, a local poet and state president of the Kansas Authors Club, says a strength of the book is that readers can open it to any page and read passages at random.

“You don’t have to read it in a linear fashion,” Miller says. “It’s like a book of short stories, sometimes shorter. It’s what I would call slice-of-life writing.”

Anderson writes about small, quiet moments — playing in the alley as a child, cradling a cup of hot cocoa on the porch, twirling in a dress made by her grandmother and singing “Up on the Housetop” in the Christmas musical. But she also writes about darker things, like when her father abandoned her family, then neglected to visit her as promised.

“My dad left us when I was 4, and that had a profound impact on me — for the better,” says Anderson, indicating that she provided an honest recollection even when she thought it might upset a relative.

“A trap you can get into (as a memoirist) is making it more generic so it appeals to everyone in your family,” she says. “I’m sure I’ve estranged myself from somebody by doing this.”

Anderson’s stepbrother, David Cogswell, grew up in the same home, yet remembers things differently.

“We … shared many experiences, and yet we lived in different worlds,” Cogswell says. “When I read her book it takes me to a wonderful world that I only experienced peripherally. It was a revelation to me … partly just to see how subjective our lives are, that we can be in such close proximity but live in different worlds. Tangential, but very different.”

While Anderson writes about the saddest times of her life, it’s the everyday moments that take center stage.

“I want people to know that an ordinary life can be lovely and interesting, and living in what some people think of as the fly-over state can be wonderful,” she says. “I was very committed to this book and had a vision of what it would be like and look like. It’s my version of Walden Pond.”