Writer's Voices

If you are someone people can count on, particularly in difficult moments, that’s a sign of a life lived honorably.

At a time when the Jim Crow laws were in full force, there was a town in Iowa where black and white Americans lived side by side on equal terms. Rachelle Chase has brought that town alive again in the images and stories of Lost Buxton. This is a history of Buxton told in voices of the people who lived there. Buxton Iowa was a mining town, different in many ways from other mining towns, Fifty percent of its residents were of African American descent. Many of 40 independent businesses were owned by black business men. The schools and neighborhoods were fully integrated. An example from the past of what the future should be. Rachelle shows us the Buxton thas was; a town ahead of its time.

Learn how Chase, a senior business analyst for Fortune 500 companies and a published romance author with an interest in African American history, became interested in Buxton after moving to Iowa, and how she found a publisher for this unique story.

… the freedom to live, the freedom to choose, the freedom to be ” – for the African Americans living in Buxton, “that must have felt like Utopia.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

A poem should not mean, but be.

The goal in the game of life is to develop your talents and skills and then give them back to the world.

It’s better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you’ll be afraid to let things keep happening.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

The world seldom notices who the teachers are, but civilization depends on what they do and what they say.

Remember that anything worth doing is going to take longer than you think.

A letter is never ill-timed; it never interrupts. Instead it waits for us to find the opportune minute, the quiet moment to savor the message. There is an element of timelessness about letter writing.

When you talk you are only repeating what you already know. When you listen you may actually learn something new.