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Nearly every man in Kevin Kling's extended family for three generations -- including Kling, his father and grandfather -- has been struck by lightning. In "The Dog Says How," a collection of short essays, Kling relates this and sundry other anecdotes from his wide-ranging but deeply rooted Minnesota life. He is awed, amused and grateful -- often all at once; it makes a person wonder whether maybe the lightning left him with a permanent aura of genial charisma.

Here is a man who seizes the everyday thrill. His farmer grandpa "always referred to our guinea pig as livestock. Could back up a car trailer into a thimble." Kling is a man of great humanity who, one winter's eve, feels emboldened enough to sit down at a table in the Uptown Bar with a woman he has never seen before; later, he accompanies her to the bus stop from which she will be whisked back to her nursing home. He's a man unafraid to express himself in a society where people mostly keep things to themselves: "I'm the kind of guy who wears socks with sandals just because I know it ticks people off."

His perspective even on the mythic has been hewed by the no-nonsense Midwesterners around him. "From what I can tell, Hephaestus, the disabled god, was the only god that actually held down a job. I think that's why Aphrodite, the most beautiful goddess of all, married him. He had a job."

Over the past 25 years, Kling has accrued a gentle mob of fans for his plays -- starting with "21A," a monologue about the exotic ecosystem aboard a Twin Cities crosstown bus, and continuing with works that range from offbeat imaginings ("Lloyd's Prayer," about a boy raised by raccoons) to offbeat

He also has performed widely as a storyteller and essayist onstage and for National Public Radio. Reading "The Dog Says How," it is impossible not to hear Kling's voice: the moderate rhythms of Flyoverland, which hesitate almost as if apologizing before a bright observation; the closed Nordic "o's"; the intonation contoured like a prairie where every hillock of enthusiasm is a fresh delight.

His prose is not lyrical in any typical way. It has bumps and edges and gaps like a worn dirt road that everyone else has forgotten, where a new vista pops into view at every other bend. Kling has the eagerness for experience of a daredevil hero in a children's book -- grown up into an industrious, optimistic smart-aleck, but still "all boy" in middle age. His language reassures his audience that "it's only me," giving his trenchant insights all the more punch.

He writes, for instance, about being on a bus with people with disabilities. (He has what many people refer to as a "withered arm," shorter than the other, a congenital trait; his other arm was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident.) It does not occur to us at first that Kling is one of the people with disabilities on that bus. Then we realize that we are all people with disabilities on that bus.

Because he can't type, Kling uses a voice-activated computer, which provided him with the title of this book. Whenever his dog barks, the noise-sensitive machine types "how," and when his cat meows, it transcribes "why." In a different voice, the same questions reverberate for everyone.

Here and there, one wishes that "The Dog Says How" had undergone a bit more editing. It is not that Kling goes off-track, but rather that certain repetitions that can be made interesting out loud lie flat on the page. Still, you cannot help but like him: buying art for the first time as a grade-schooler, making friends with that old lady at Christmastime, convincing his Boy Scout troop to tackle a homemade taxidermy project whose centerpiece is three squirrels playing poker around a log.

Kling has never quit being spellbound by the view out the kitchen window, which is, after all, what most of us spend a lifetime trying to parse. He savors those around him, who in turn savor what they have. Consider Dave, a third-generation farmer whose neighbors "thought he was crazy" when he planted a field of sunflowers. "No money in sunflowers," they told him.

Why would he do something so foolhardy?

"Because I can't afford a Van Gogh."

John Habich is a longtime newspaper arts editor and writer based in New York City.