Stories From the Middle of Nowhere

From a 13‑year‑old’s makeup‑caked attempt to buy TJ Swann, to Donny aging himself with motor oil, to Judy dodging a police raid by pretending to bus tables, this episode dives into the chaotic, unspoken rite of passage that underage drinking became in small‑town North Dakota. It’s a story about risk, improvisation, and the consequences that usually showed up in the form of our dad — the one author...

At seventeen, both Judy and Donny were evicted from their homes for wildly different reasons — one for smoking, one for a hammer and a radiator — sending them into parallel journeys through mice‑infested trailers, chaotic jobs, and the strange freedom of starting adulthood with absolutely nothing. Judy becomes an apartment manager overseeing convicted felons and whackado renters, while Donny heads...

Judy and Donny are back with a collection of stories from a childhood where every minor incident somehow became a headline. In their family, even the most ordinary days had a way of ending up in the newspaper — whether they wanted the attention or not. There’s the time their mom called 911 over a beehive and a reporter showed up with the police. Judy’s first day at work turned into a public specta...

In this combined episode, Judy and Donny revisit the week that proved Donny should never have been left in charge — and the lifetime of spectacular bad luck that followed him everywhere he went. It starts with a rear‑end collision while driving our mom, escalates when a bicyclist flips over Donny’s hood on the way to pick her up (with a TV news crew filming the whole thing), and ends with a backya...

In this Fast Forward episode, Judy and Donny jump ahead to the years when the family’s car chaos didn’t calm down — it evolved into something stranger, darker, and somehow even funnier. Their dad asks Donny to drive a corpse across the country to save money, suddenly can’t see white cars, and relies on their mom to guide him from the passenger seat. Meanwhile, Judy racks up hit‑and‑runs and Donny...

In the late 60s and early 70s, our family lived in a tiny rental owned by a man named Herb — the place where two unsupervised kids in the middle of nowhere turned boredom into chaos. From painting a neighbor’s white picket fence with dirty oil to accidentally creating a silver spray‑painted “martian,” Herb’s House became the birthplace of every bit of trouble that shaped our childhood. This is whe...

Judy and Donny revisit Perkett Elementary, a North Dakota school that operated by its own logic — where recess was never cancelled, even in subzero wind chills, and frozen dodgeball turned the courtyard into a survival arena. They remember the humiliation of being wrapped in a stiff paper skirt after wet‑pants recess disasters, the secretary who ruled the office with a disciplinarian’s certainty,...

Judy and Donny revisit the family’s most unforgettable sports chapter — the era when football dreams were built on hope, hypnosis, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. Donny’s football career began with big ambition and even bigger expectations, including the time their dad hypnotized him to throw perfect passes. But despite all the effort, all the rituals, and all the belief poured into him, he s...

In Part Two of The School of Strange, North Dakota school life takes an even stranger turn. Field trips to the mental institution and the funeral home, PE teachers driving frozen buses to roller rinks, ski hills, and bowling alleys, and Donny setting off firecrackers in the bathroom reveal how the very institutions meant to protect us instead shaped our toughness, humor, and understanding of autho...

Left alone while our parents were in Winnipeg, we turned loaded guns into a pretend war game—until a real bullet blasted through the picture window. What followed was a secret we kept all winter, only uncovered when the spring thaw revealed the casing and the truth our childhood imagination never understood in the moment. Disclaimer: These stories are based on our personal memories and family expe...

Donny’s dream car, the Gran Torino, turns into a highway nightmare when it breaks down on a road trip with his high school buddies, leaving them stranded with a stranger whose offer to “hang out” feels helpful at first but, in hindsight, was a close call they were too young and too invincible to recognize. Judy rents a car at age 16 in Miami on a school trip only to abandon the car at the airport...

Growing up on the rural edges of North Dakota gave us stories no one believes, no one talks about, and no one ever really explained — until now. Stories from the Middle of Nowhere is a true‑to‑life collection of the late‑night adventures, small‑town mysteries, family chaos, and near‑disasters that shaped us in a place where the rules were loose and the adults were… distracted. Told with humor, hon...