Beech Tree News Network

Beech Tree News is pleased to announce that Dennis Kinkade will be a new columnist beginning tomorrow, Saturday, May 7.  Writing under the heading Phil's Philosophy, Dennis will be writing about a wide range of topics, will include a variety of writing styles, and will seek to engage readers through his observations, reflections and musings.  As always, Phil's Philosophy will feature contributions by his children - Taylor and Drake. 

"We're excited to have Dennis writing for Beech Tree News," said John Embry, editor of the news site.  "Dennis is an experienced writer with a unique writing style that I think our readers will enjoy."

Phil's Philosophy by D.P. Kinkade (with contributions by Taylor & Drake Kinkade) will appear on Saturdays in the Beech Tree News opinion section. 

Now, a little about Dennis Kinkade in his own words: 

I was born a Yankee, near the shores of Great Lake Michigan, in lower Wisconsin. When the job, that my father went North to find played out though, we sought the familiarity of our roots and moved to Kentucky, where both of my parents family trees sprang from. I consider myself a Southerner and I am proud of that heritage, I concur with the maxim “ If you're not from the South, then Bless your heart,” but I think I kept some Yankee complexity running in my veins.

I finished my education here, right after the era of the hippie had went by but in this rural area they never really flourished anyway, it was in High School when I got my first inkling that writing might be calling when Whitman and Frost and Jonathon Livingston Seagull became friends but a career in writing was unfamiliar, so I ignored it. Shortly after High School, when I started dating a sweet young lady from a neighboring county who would one day become my lovely wife ( they didn't know me over there,) I again got hints that writing might be a niche I was suited for, but being a thick headed lug, I ignored it yet again.

It was several years later, when the birth of my children stirred something in me once again. I began writing bedtime stories and fairy tales for them, to share that part of my soul with them. It was also at this time that I met a fellow who shared the same hometown and had some ties to family, who happened to be a songwriter . We hammered steel for a living together but had in common, hearts of a wordsmiths and every since then, I have been writing on a fairly consistent basis.

It is because my children awakened my inspiration that I always share credit with them on every thing I write. Shortly after I began writing, for others to see, on a regular basis, I found out I have a form of chronic leukemia to battle with. Writing has become sort of therapeutic for me, a way of dealing with fear and anxiety. I became a father, found out I have cancer and started a serious spiritual quest, all in a very tight time frame together. What I have discovered is that for me and my legacy I want to leave  to my family and friends is, I want to leave the world around me, just a little bit kinder than the way I found it.

Join me on this journey as we travel down the road, always with a Kingdom as our ultimate destination but the yellow brick road we travel on, will always begin and end, in kindness.