About Me

Nick Vulich grew up in a town where the river talked back. Not metaphorically—the Mississippi actually gossiped at night if you listened long enough. It told stories about gamblers, gunmen, and bad ideas that turned into legends. Nick listened. Then he started writing them down.

He was supposed to be normal. Iowa normal. Tractor normal. Instead, he became a professional ghost whisperer armed with a notebook and a case of Diet Coke. By the time the other kids discovered football, Nick was already deep in conversation with Jesse James and probably late for dinner.

 

He crawled out of Clinton, Iowa—a river town that smells like iron, mud, and unresolved grudges.

Eventually, he started writing it all down. First on napkins. Then on keyboards. Then, in a blur of caffeine and questionable ergonomics that produced books like History Bytes and Shot All to Hell. They’re not textbooks—they’re the fun cousins of textbooks that show up late, steal your fries, and tell you about the time Abraham Lincoln nearly punched a guy. (He didn’t, probably, but Nick makes you wish he had.)

 

He drinks Diet Coke like it’s holy water and treats microfilm like a Ouija board. He once said history is alive, which sounds poetic until you imagine dead gunfighters wandering his office whispering, “Use more adjectives, Nick.”

 

He writes for people who actually like stories that smell faintly of gunpowder and old paper—truckers, bartenders, and that one weird uncle who knows too much about the Civil War and keeps a saber in the garage.

 

If Iowa ever builds a monument to him, it’ll be life-sized: Nick at his desk, mid-grimace, surrounded by empty Diet Coke bottles and sticky notes that say “DON’T FORGET JESSE JAMES.” The pigeons will love it.

 

He’s not Hollywood famous. He’s Iowa famous. The famous where if you whisper his name in a diner, three people nod and one tells you a story that may or may not be true.

Nick Vulich writes because he can’t stop. Because the past keeps leaving him voicemails. Because someone has to tell the truth—or at least a version of it that’s too entertaining to fact-check. 

 

He’s probably out there somewhere right now, squinting at an old newspaper, chasing ghosts with a Big Gulp and a grin. And honestly, thank God for that. Otherwise history would just sit there being boring, and nobody—living or dead—wants that.

Before you go ...

Stuff like this is what I always end up chasing—the little lines in old newspapers and magazines, the parts most books skip over.

I pulled a bunch of those stories together into Iowa Crime Time if you want more of it.

And if you just like reading this kind of thing, Buy me a Big Gulp / Support Retro Iowa