November 2025

I’ve written a memoir, THE HOUSES OF CLEBURNE COUNTY Memoir of a Southern Boyhood, which was published last December. The memoir covers the time from my birth in Arkansas to the year my family moved to California in 1945, when I was 10 years old.  

The cover image is a watercolor I did of the Cleburne County Courthouse.

The setting of my book is Cleburne County, Arkansas, and it’s structured around the several houses my family lived in, with a cluster of short stories , in sequence, related to each house. As an example, I’d like to read you one of these short stories.

This story is entitled  The Green Dodge and is from the house called “The Bettis Place.” I was about 6 years old at the time of this story.