The letters written in 1975-1976 were sent from Dirk Shears in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Laura Rempel (initially spelled Remple on the envelopes) in Lindsborg, Kansas, while she was going to Bethany College. From 1978-1980 Shears was studying at Brown University and so sending letters from Providence, Rhode Island to Laura at Bethany.

After Richard Klocke and Laura Rempel married, they went to graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shears wrote to them both in Chicago from McPherson, Kansas in 1981 and Lindsborg in 1982. By 1983 Dirk Shears married Laura Giles and was living with her in Arlington, Massachusetts near Harvard, where she was teaching. He wrote from there to the Klockes in Lawrence, Kansas, where they settled after graduating in Chicago. Their Lawrence address remains consistent throughout the rest of the letters, but Shears continued to move around.

Shears and his wife moved to the Chicago, IL, area, and he wrote from there from 1991-1994. In February 1994 Shears wrote to Richard Klocke in his official capacity as Chief of Exhibits at the Kansas Museum of History in Topeka, Kansas, inquiring about a job. Shears indicated he arrived in Lawrence in the August 3, 1994, letter and he thanked the Klockes for taking him in and saving his life when he was hospitalized for reasons to do with alcohol. This letter has no envelope and seems to have been written while living with the Klockes, which it seems he did until a note in early January 1995 mentions moving out.

By late January 1995 Shears was living with his mother in his childhood home back in Hutchinson, Kansas, or possibly in a cabin on the property. Letters arrived from his parents’ address until the early 2000s, except for one that was sent to Laura Remple from Laura Giles in Evanston, Illinois in 2000, though the couple divorced in 1996. In it Shears tells of a month spent in the “Larned St. Spa, Center for Psychical Chiropractic,” presumably Larned State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Larned, Kansas. His mother died in October 1998, and he apparently lived in the house with his brother until a letter mailed from an apartment in Dodge City, Kansas in 2002. In the last letter in the collection, sent from the Dodge City apartment in 2008, Shears was preparing to move to Lawrence.

The letters range widely in subject from art, architecture, literature, philosophy, science and politics to personal items, mental health, addiction and employment after incarceration. For example, Shears mentions a drunken barfight, a Rimbaud quote and Jacques Maritain’s philosophy all in the same missive. In his second to last note he mentions that he should reach out to a friend at the holidays, because he knows what a depressing time of year that can be.

Throughout the letters Shears writes about his compulsion to create art. He seems to have consistently produced work, except when he was sober, because of the strong connection for him between drinking and painting. Based on his writing, it seems that his reading in the areas of science, philosophy, literature, art and architecture never abated, or at least his ability to quote from these areas is consistent, and, scientifically at least, contemporary.

Envelopes are included in dated folders unless otherwise noted.