"It's not as if grown-ups will let you be average if you're youngest. If you're not fat, they call you Skinny or Bones. If you're not skinny, they call you Hippo or Tubby." Henry and Gretchen are the youngest children in two Iowa farm families. Being youngest, they get left out, blamed, ignored, and picked on all the time. At least that's how, being youngest, they tend to see it. In a summer filled with change, Henry and Gretchen swap stories, become friends, fight with their older brothers and sister, and get to know the odd old couple down the road. Between the old fan's habit of plucking nails out of the ground and the old woman's weird "children" who are kept locked in a room upstairs, they are strange enough. But are they just strange, or could the old folks actually be dangerous? Jim Heynen's story of one farm summer has fun, humor, some scary moments, and many wonderful insights into what being youngest means. "Before Henry and Gretchen went their separate ways, they didn't compare the stories they were going to tell at home. They did agree they'd tell something--but not all. They both had learned to hide the best part. They knew that to keep a secret you had to hide it down a blind alley of stories that are only part of what happened. You didn't want to pretend that nothing happened. Too much silence was like honey to a hungry bear, and grown-ups were bound to start pawing around in it. It was best to throw them a few scraps of the truth to keep them away from the real honey of what you did."

In this truly modern teenage love story, spirituality and sensuality burn equally bright. "I have these two characters I hide behind. The real one is Cosmos Coyote and the phony one is William the Nice. But sometimes I get them mixed up, like now and almost all the time when I'm with you." Cosmos DeHaag is a fast-thinking, law-bending, teenage songwriter from Seattle. In trouble with the law, he is sent to live with his conservative Christian relatives in Iowa and he splits his personality in two: William the Nice will play along, while Cosmos Coyote stays true. When he meets Cherlyn, a beautiful charismatic Christian, their passion takes them both by surprise and the lines between truth and falsehood, Cosmos and William, begin to blur. Now even Cosmos himself is unsure: is he being true when he lies, or lying when he's being true? Jim Heynen explores teenage passion and spiritual yearning in Cosmos Coyote and William the Nice, a book for older teens that breaks boundaries and will entrance readers.

A collection of short stories by Jim Heynen.

From a bar hosting its nightly Sad Hour to the moonlit sandbox of a retired army general, Jim Heynen’s new collection of micro fiction presents character sketches of strange yet fascinating men and women. Modeled after Theophrastus' Characters—brief, verbal snapshots of people created by the Greek philosopher—Heynen captures not just the quirks and eccentricities of his characters, but also their humanity. Guilty of only ordinary and forgivable sins, these sketches reveal universal human idiosyncrasies as much as they do the individual characters. Paired with the wonderfully evocative illustrations of renowned illustrator Tom Pohrt, Ordinary Sins will appeal to story lovers and collectors of beautifully made books alike.

Seventeen-year-old Alice Marie Krayenbraak is beautiful, witty, a star student, and a gifted athlete. On the surface, she has it all. But in Alice’s hometown of Dutch Center, Iowa, nothing is as it seems. Behind the façade of order and tidiness, the family farm is failing. Alice’s mother is behaving strangely amid apocalyptic fears of Y2K. And her parents have announced their plans to send her special-needs sister Aldah away. On top of it all, the uniformly Dutch Calvinist town has been rattled by an influx of foreign farm workers. It’s the fall of senior year, and Alice now finds herself at odds with both family and cultural norms when she befriends and soon falls in love with Nickson Vang, the son of Hmong immigrants. Caught in a period of personal and community transformation, Alice and Nickson must navigate their way through vastly different traditions while fighting to create new ones of their own. Funny and provocative, amusing and unsettling, The Fall of Alice K. marks a watershed moment in the publishing career of author, Jim Heynen.

In 1939, just before graduating from high school in the small town of Ridgeway in northeast Iowa, Everett Kuntz spent his entire savings of $12.50 on a 35mm Argus AF camera. He made a camera case from a worn-out boot, scraps from a tin can, and a clasp from his mother's purse. For the next several years, especially during the summers when he worked on his parents' dairy farm, he clicked the shutter of his trusty Argus all around the quiet town. Everett bought movie reel film in bulk from a mail-order house, rolled his own film, and developed it in a closet at home, but he never had the money to print his photographs. More than two thousand negatives stayed in a box while he married, raised a family, and worked as an electrical engineer in the Twin Cities. When he became ill with cancer in the fall of 2002--sixty years after he had developed the last of his bulk film--Everett opened his time capsule and printed the images from his youth. He died in 2003, having brought his childhood town back to life just as he was leaving it. A sense of peace radiates from these images. Whether skinny-dipping in the Turkey River, wheelbarrow-racing, threshing oats, milking cows, visiting with relatives after church, or hanging out at the drugstore or the movies, Ridgeway's hardworking citizens are modest and trusting and luminous in their graceful harmony and their unguarded affection for each other. Visiting the town in 2006 as he was writing the text to accompany these photographs, Jim Heynen crafted vignettes that perfectly complement these rediscovered images by blending fact and fiction to give context and voice to Ridgeway's citizens.

Stunning photographs by the popular Ohman and short tales by award-winning storyteller Heynen combine in this rich showcase of Minnesota's vintage schoolhouses.

A fascinating compilation of profiles and photographs of vibrant men and women who celebrate life.

"Complementing Harker's photographs are vignettes by poet and writer Jim Heynen. Both whimsical and endearing, each vignette treats barns as organic and intelligent entities, reflecting the living history that can be found inside each rural structure."--BOOK JACKET.