These days I call myself a Southern Yankee. South Mississippi for 24 years, Oklahoma for 8 years, and now New Jersey for 39 years, I've been a college/high school English teacher, a technology consultant and CEO, and for 15 years even a real estate agent in the Dominican Republic selling beachfront property (even doing a few HGTV shows). And now, a writer of Southern fiction.

 

It’s not that I can’t keep a job but rather that every few years I get the urge to molt out of myself and grow a different direction. But always deep inside I carry two things: a love of nature and a love of words. I scribbled poetry and a few essays in my youth, all kept secret. In Oklahoma as I prepared to exit my teaching career, I started writing short stories and poetry, mostly primitive stuff as I always had the image then of a garden hose turned on where it sputters and spits a choppy flow not worth tasting.

 

An AT&T relocation from Tulsa to New Jersey filled me with terror. I was a single parent, didn’t make enough money to support my son and I the way I wanted, had a job for which I felt thoroughly unqualified. Well, you get the picture. Doubt. Angst. Otherness. These emotions smoldered without outlet, until I met Sally. It took our relationship time to cement, but in retrospect the wait was worth it because our nearly 4-decade long marriage has led me to stop storing words. Sally is the story of arthurbyrdbooks.com because our bond has released the hidden parts of me as expression, and not simply as change.

 

My books speak of nature and the interior lives people lead, about how private self is catalyzed by human connection, and about how love delivers meaning to existence. I’m a Southern Yankee, and in my books you will find the rivers and woods of my past, the friendships and mistakes that shaped my understanding, and you will find Sally infused into time and me And now a writer of Southern Fiction.

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