Jay Botten

3 Stories

48 karma pts

Activism in My Youth

Submitted to Contest #45

I went to seven different public schools before I quit grade-school altogether. I stopped attending classes a few months before my sixteenth birthday. My final slide out of public education began when I left Southwest High School after the first quarter of tenth grade and started attending an “Alternative School” located a few blocks from my house on Lake Street and Colfax; it was called the Work Opportunity Center (W.O.C. for short), it was Uptown in Minneapolis At W.O.C. the administration was barely holding things together, the quality ...

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Jim and kathy - The Return

Jay Botten

Submitted to Contest #44

Everything is entangled in consciousness, and the preservation of individual consciousness beyond the life of the body is the hope and dream of every living being. This is the sustaining vision of eternal life, of ascending to the heavens, which is the hope and promise that provides the basic organizing principle in the daily lives of trillions of people across a billion worlds. There is one place in the galaxy where the mystery was resolved, on the HomeWorld of the Ancient People whose colonies filled the galaxy with inhabited planets; the ...

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Jim & Kathy – The Call

Jay Botten

Submitted to Contest #43

The phone rang.This surprised Kathy.She didn’t receive many calls, and when she did, she usually anticipated itShe would know both the caller and the time of the call. The datum would flash in her consciousness minutes, sometime hours before the call would actually take place, the variables only depended on how long the caller might have been thinking about dialing her number.Throughout most of her life, the moments between the first sound of the telephone ringing and the time she choose to pick up the receiver from the cradle, were moments ...

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Author bio

Jay was born on a Tuesday (April 22nd, 1969) and 89 days later we set foot on the moon.

Born at West Point, New York where his father was stationed. Jay is a fifth generation Minneapolitan, an American of mixed Scandinavian and Irish descent, and a lifelong resident of South Minneapolis, Jay attended three elementary schools, two middle schools and two high schools before dropping out of school altogether and going to work at the age of fifteen.

Jay served in the United States Navy as a Hospital Corpsman between 1990 – 1994. Graduated from the University of Saint Thomas (Saint Paul, MN) in 1999, from Saint John’s University, School of Theology (Collegeville, MN) in 2001, and from Hamline University, Creative Writing Program (Saint Paul, MN) in 2017. Jay is a Historian, Philosopher and Theologian educated in the Benedictine tradition, and practitioner of Buddhism in the Zen-Sufi tradition.

"This much I know, whatever comes next we are all in it together..."

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3 Stories

48 karma pts

Activism in My Youth

Jim and kathy - The Return

Jim & Kathy – The Call