Pen Name:
None
Genre:
Memoir
Websites:
Social Media:
Email:
jacanapress@gmail.com
Bio
Born on New Year’s Eve, 1940, Kent grew up enjoying the outdoors, competing in football and track, and trying to outdo his older brother Doug in their hometown of Sheridan, Wyoming. He quit school during his senior year at the University of Wyoming, giving up his engineering scholarship, and served in the Peace Corps in Colombia. Upon his return, he enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Oregon, and married Pamela Thompson. He taught philosophy at South Dakota State University in Brookings for more than twenty years. He gave up his teaching career to take off for life on a sailboat. His memoir: We Ran Away to Sea is written with a combination of his late wife Pamela Thompson Kedl’s letters and his own stories of their adventures.
Books
Title: We Ran Away to Sea: A Memoir and Letters
♦ Co-author: Pamela Thompson Kedl
Published: 2023
Genre: Memoir
Frustrated with teaching philosophy to bored South Dakota undergraduates, Kent dreams of living on a sailboat. The wind would blow them where they wanted to go, and the sea would feed them. They would reduce their footprints on the fragile earth. What a fantastic opportunity it would be for the children! After reading sailing classics (they’re academics), Pam and Kent decide to leap into the unknown. They sell everything, give up their jobs, and take their two children across the Atlantic, where they purchase a small sailboat. They sail (not without some family compromises) to the Caribbean with a book in one hand and a sextant in the other in the days before GPS. Miraculously, they reach the Caribbean, but there are troubles even in paradise, and after a year, they return to South Dakota. But the dream does not die.
