II LOVE TO TELL THE STORY

 

After decades of city life, I am now a country boy, residing in the lovely rural community of Mooreland, Oklahoma, with my beautiful wife, Rhenda, and my trusty sidekick, Rascal (a Maltese who thinks he's a Great Dane). 

 

Over the years, I have written (and rewritten) stories about my life experiences involving real people and actual events; about my childhood and teen years in Tennessee and the Carolinas; about my 31 years as an officer in The Salvation Army serving in ten different cities and two countries; about my experiences over 20-plus years as an assessment, planning, and resource development consultant for nonprofit organizations in dozens of communities throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Many of the stories were published in The Southern Spirit in the1990s under my byline and column title, "Characters & Saints." They can be found here on the Characters & Saints page.

​

Currently, I am nearing completion of a work of fiction about life in the idyllic mountain community of MISTY RIDGE in the 1950s and early 60s. Nestled in a broad valley of the Blue Ridge chain of the Great Smoky Mountains, Misty Ridge, North Carolina, is a charming place, a picture-postcard community with its Southern, small-town aura, breathtaking landscape, and majestic mountain backdrop. But its citizens range in makeup from saints to scoundrels and everything in between. The novel, The Characters & Saints of Misty Ridge, includes intersecting stories of romance, mystery, murder, and miracles. You can find excerpts from the book on the Misty Ridge Journal page/blog on this site.

 

Disclaimer: In the fictitious stories, names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.