The start of my life as a fiction writer was an accident that didn’t occur until well after my careers as an educator and an Air Force officer were over. Before then, my writing was confined to articles about science and education, all with abundant footnotes and references to back up the narrative.
After I retired, my daughter Kim, a writer for the Ventura Star, asked me to write about my early childhood during the great depression and the dust bowl in the southwest. She pointed out that I was one among a diminishing few who were witnesses to that era. Also, it was important to her that this bit of history was not lost.
I told her that I could tell stories but I couldn’t write. She countered my resistance by emailing me a question about my childhood every week. At first, my responses were brief without the benefit of efforts of careful recollection. With time I became more comfortable with the arrangement, my responses became longer, and I looked forward to my weekly task.
A year later, I opened a Fathers Day card from Kim to find an article, called “Notes from Dad”– two complete pages from the Sunday edition of the Ventura Star filled with copies of stories. The note with it said, “I hope you are ready to share your life with a hundred thousand people.”
My reaction was a mixture of pride, love and embarrassment. The embarrassment ebbed when my daughter called to tell me that the paper had received a large number of very positive comments from readers, including the editor. As one reader put it, “There is something compelling about these stories of ordinary life because, really, no life is ordinary.”
Thus, I was gently tricked into writing, an activity that is no longer a task but a joy. The description of the lives of the colorful characters in a small farming community in Indiana grew into the book-length collection of stories called “Lone Tree.”
