Manure Dreams and Other Stories is a collection of travel, memoir, descriptive, humour, and nature essays, all sewn together with the themes of writing, teaching, and literature. Most of the essays involve situations leading to humorous or epiphanic outcomes. As Joan Didion famously asserted, she didn't know how she felt about something until she wrote about it; with the process of writing comes clarity and, perhaps, instruction. By describing what happened, Richard Holinger is led to understandings that often reveal a universal theme.

One evening on a fly-fishing pond he discovers how he's influenced unusually an acquaintance not met for fifty years. Or, asked to be the guest speaker (when not Catholic or a Knight) at a Knights of Columbus dinner celebrating 8th graders who won a writing contest responding to what it is to be an American, he discovers patriotism.

One essay was deemed "Notable" in Best American Essays 2018, edited by Hilton Als; others appear in journals Chautauqua, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cimarron Review, Hobart, Cutleaf, among others