Since before I could read or spell very well, I wanted to write books. The idea of designing the layout was just as exciting and important to me as the words were. There are quite a few surviving examples of my early “books,” as a child retelling the stories of historic tragedies like the Titanic and the Hindenburg. In addition, I always looked forward to participating in the Young Authors Contest throughout grade school.
When I started going to college, I also began work on a book with the intention of publishing it in physical form. I learned to use Adobe InDesign to layout the book structure and used prior experience with Photoshop to design the cover and interior graphics. I scanned our collection of family letters over a century old, wrote the transcriptions, and organized them into categories by topic. Before long, I had a basic outline for my first book. After placing the media into InDesign, figuring out chapter names, a title, and so forth, I could visualize the missing parts of the book. The entire project served as a wonderful learning experience. I spent about half a year working on “Write Soon.” After adding additional narrative, contexts, and related media, I had completed my first official attempt at writing a book.
My first book entitled “Write Soon 1908-1915” was published in 2019. It’s a 200-page book set up as a collection of historic letters with transcriptions, as well as a showcase of other relevant artifacts and contexts. The letters are family heirlooms passed down for over five generations.
My second book, “When Piggs Flew” was published in 2020. It’s a 400-page family saga that tells a narrative of the historically significant Pigg family of Virginia. It mainly explores the legacy and descendants of Capt. John Pigg (1716-1785). It describes the historical contexts of the Pigg’s Mill on Pudding Creek in Pittsylvania County.
My third book, “Piedmont Culture” was published in 2023. It’s a 200-page book that aims to capture the essence of rural life and the unique tobacco culture that thrives within the Virginia Piedmont region of the United States. The content explores personal documentations of history that center around tobacco farming families whose lineage can be traced back to the earliest settlements in Virginia. This is a passion project and academic commentary on the past that is primarily based on historic written correspondence, historic photographs, surviving architecture, and surviving traditions. It’s not meant to be a complete collection of all aspects of the culture, but rather a contextual narrative by someone with deep roots in the area.