Author Bio
I was born in Mobile, Alabama in October of 1955 and grew up in my mother’s hometown of Orangeburg, South Carolina. During my childhood my grandmother, Big Lurline, would often tell me stories about our family who had lived in the area for many decades. My favorite was one she told about her father, who both owned a country store and doctored on people.
Late one afternoon, great-grandfather had ridden a far distance to treat a man who had taken ill. By the time great-grandfather had finished attending to the patient, the dark night of the South Carolina low country had fallen. Returning home on his faithful horse, Molly, he picked his way through the pine forest, yet in the darkness became lost. Far in the distance—then closer and closer—he heard the howling of wolves. Not a moment before the wolves pounced, great-grandfather put his head down to Molly’s ear and said, “home, Molly, home!” Faithful Molly took off like a shot and galloped through the forest, chased by howling wolves. Did they arrive home safe and sound? Yes, they did. There are no wolves in South Carolina.
Growing up and listening to these improbable stories made me an heir to the wonderful oral tradition which has so defined the South and Southern writers. Like many a defining folkway, it appears more interesting to those who study it than to those who lived it. This oral tradition requires most everyone to talk—all the time. To be part of this oral tradition, you can’t just talk for twenty or thirty minutes a day about who was pregnant before marriage or some distant cousin who once took a sleeping pill and within weeks became a heroin addict. Anyone can do that. No, you have to be able to talk the bark off a tree. Everyday. That’s why so many Southerners have turned to writing. They are trying to get away from their relatives who won’t shut up.
I graduated from Orangeburg High School in 1973. I don’t remember much about it except that I wrote a lot. I only did things that I wanted to do which annoyed everyone. I was different and I was difficult. Teachers used to tell me that my mother, my sister and my brother were all better students than me. True. But I saw the world quite differently then others because I had such few illusions about life. They had been sandblasted off of me by deaths of my grandparents and parents, all of whom passed away by the time I was sixteen. My older sister, one of the two people to whom the novel is dedicated, raised from the time I was a young teenager, to the degree that I would let anyone tell me anything.
Nothing good comes from that kind of trauma as a youth but that experience made me the writer I am. The themes of survival, of dealing with the pain if losing people you love, of moving forward in spite of obstacles to experience life and not hide from it—all these themes run through An Honorable German and are all drawn from my own life. Only after I finished the final draft did I understand my novel is telling two different stories: one story to you and one story to me. I think this is why everyone who reads An Honorable German seems to connect with it on some level.
After graduating from high school, I matriculated at Tulane University in New Orleans. To say I attended would imply far more involvement with the university than I actually had although I did graduate. When the University Marshall gave me my diploma he said, “I don’t believe it” and neither did I. During the eight years I lived in New Orleans, I was a complete hellion. I even got thrown out of the rowdiest bar in New Orleans, Pat O’Brian’s, for being too rowdy.
But there were two loves from childhood which have stayed with me throughout my life: history and writing. And when I say “history”, I don’t mean the boring dates and places where something happened long time ago—I mean what was life like for people? Did they fall in and out of love? What did they eat? What obstacles did they overcome? What psychological and social barriers limited them? Why did they do the things they did? However inexplicable, the things that people do make sense to them. And it was the combination of those two loves and living in New Orleans, which was a very supportive venue for artists and writers, which led me to first write the drafts of what became An Honorable German.
I’ve spent most of my business career in the financial services industry in one capacity or another.