Reagan said, Hey, guys, but guess what?

We've got a chance.

He was my fraternity circle of about 200 people.

Hospice communities of healthy environments.

Trust me, she lived in Traficant for four years.

I really felt for a lot of reasons I felt, but I didn't have the guts to stand.

Shawn Dietrich always like to write, but when you drop out of school in the seventh grade, it's hard to get a credible writing job.

Somehow, Dietrich maneuvered himself back into the classroom at a junior college.

Then he was shunned by big time university academia.

So he did what writers do right, and it's worked out rather well.

You probably know him as Shaun of the South.

His work has appeared in Newsweek, Garden and Gun and Southern Living.

He has a popular podcast and radio show.

It's a mix of storytelling and music, and he's authored over 15 books.

His latest, a novel entitled Kinfolk.

We welcome Shaun of the South, The Conversations.

Thank you for joining us.

My friend.

Proud to be here.

Thanks for having me.

It's our pleasure.

It's been a long time coming.

We tried to put this show together back before COVID, so it's worked out well for us because you've only become more popular.

How far down the world has gone?

The.

Tell me a little bit about how you got started.

I mentioned in the intro that you like to write as a kid.

So where did it start?

Where did all that germinate?

When I was a child, I'd love to write because it was primarily a form of like escapism.

So I could I could write longhand or type, and I could be in this world that I created for myself.

And that's the most early memories of writing that I have.

I remember my mother bought me a letter, a 32 typewriter made by the Olivetti Corporation, and from this I don't know where she got it.

It was seafoam Blue had a crooked spacebar and the B button.

Becky did not work so I could write without BS.

And I remember writing on that thing for a long time.

Use my index fingers.

And that was about fifth grade when I started using that typewriter.

And my life has been in trouble ever since.

Tell me a little bit about kind of your early childhood.

You make no bones about it.

You kind of had a rough time.

Yeah, I was, uh, so I wasn't a very gifted child.

Nobody really expected much out of me.

And for the most part, I. I'm pretty sure they haven't been disappointed.

No, they.

They really.

The people I come from were blue collar people.

Uh, my daddy was an ironworker.

His daddy was an iron worker.

All his brothers were workers.

And I think perhaps that's what they expected from me.

But my father was very unique in that he he grasped the finer things in culture, and he wanted those accessible to his son, me, even though he himself did not understand them or like them or appreciate them.

And a great example that is he was a Hank senior fan.

Music was, but he always, always listened to classical music on his truck radio because he wanted me to somehow like and appreciate classical music.

And I remember listening one day thinking, I don't understand this stuff.

And what is this?

He said, I don't know.

I can't stand it either.

But you need to learn how to like it because it's good for you.

So those are the people I came from and my dad, a barely finished high school.

Uh, he, he was a a he had, he was a very terse individual.

Uh, is his, his I think today we would call them bipolar.

Uh, but back then there was at least no name among my people for it.

Maybe manic depressive.

Um, he had a lot of problems.

He came from a very, very broken, busted up home, and he brought those problems with with him, and he, uh, shot himself when I was 11 years old.

And it was a dark time of life for me.

Uh, I learned what it meant to be blackballed by a community because there's certain taboos and folkways that are associated with such a terrible death like that or with crime.

I see this a lot in kids who go through like a parent who's incarcerated or something, um, in the way that children deal with it among themselves and the way that adults deal with children like this is not to do it at all, is to just distance themselves.

So I became, uh, kind of a, a disease is what I felt like, and that's how I grew up.

Um, I grew up an outsider, which now at the stage in my life was very good for a writer, uh, because it gives you a different perspective.

You learn a lot about your fellow human being, and you learn a lot about yourself.

Uh, so, uh, as you said in your intro, I dropped out of school when I was in seventh grade, which wasn't very far after that.

Education.

It this hasn't been that long ago, but I'm getting older, I guess.

But in those days, among my people, education was not as pushed or valued or stressed as it is today.

And so there was really not a whole lot of fuss put up about it.

You either worked where you went to school, uh, and you really didn't do both.

And so I dropped out.

Nobody said anything about it, and I got a job, uh, hanging drywall and, uh, I learned immediately that, uh, that people out there work really, really hard for their money.

I mean, that day that I was hanging drywall, I was set on mud duty and mud at all the joints, and I taped them and then sanded them until I looked like Casper the Friendly Ghost at the end of the day.

And it was about an eight hour work day.

And I rode in the back seat of the truck on the way home with some Mexican laborers who didn't speak English.

And they were looking at me and kind of smiling because they had all been working since they were much younger than that.

And there was just this camaraderie that I felt.

And when I got out of that truck, I knew that my life would really never be the same.

And so I worked I worked my way through those years.

I'm giving you more than they asked for.

But you told me to elaborate when I was a when I was a grown man, I was already married.

My wife encouraged me to try out college and I had always wanted to go to college, but I heck, I didn't have any.

I didn't have full middle school, no high school.

There's no way that could happen.

I remember I was on a job site one day and what really drove me to the arms of academia was a man who was land tile next to me.

By then I was a toddler and we were on our knees and we were traveling the floor within set.

And he said, Did you know that I'm a doctor?

And I said, If you're a doctor, I'm a nurse.

And he said, No, I really am.

I'm a doctor.

He says, Non M.D., Ph.D., He says, And you know how easy it is to get all that.

He says It's not nearly as hard as people tell you.

It's we want everybody to think it's hard, but it's not, he said.

All it is is you go into a room, you listen to a professor who has an ego the size of Texas, just gesticulate for about an hour.

You remember everything he says, and you remember enough to vomit it back onto a page to soothe and gratify his ego.

If you can do that and pass the test, you get your cancer degree.

Well, I said, Well, I can do that.

So I went to the community college, Northwest Florida State College, where it is now.

But when I was going there, I believe it was O.W.

The college used to be O.W.

J.C., which is Okaloosa Walton Junior College.

Then it changed to O.W., CC, Okaloosa Walton Community College.

Then it changed to O.W.

see Okaloosa College, then O.W., then Northwest Florida State College, which means I hold a degree from five separate universities.

And I walked in there and I told them I like to go to college.

And the lady behind the counter told me, I don't see that happening.

If you don't have transcripts, you have nothing good.

I said, No, you don't have anything to show me.

I said, Nothing, but I'd like to be here.

And I turned to walk out after getting kind of told that there was no hope and a lady came from the back and told me that there was a way and a way to go to college.

She thought for me was to take a test that they give to people who have been homeschooled and they have to test these people who come in to be to know that they have learned what they say they've learned, even though they have no official transcripts.

And if you pass this test, you're in college.

Well, I come from a long line of men who make bad decisions.

Yeah, I looked at her and I said, I'll take that test now.

She said, Well, it's very hard.

You don't want it.

You don't want to just, you know, try to willy nilly this test.

I said, I want to do it on my own saving grace in the time after I dropped out, my one saving grace was that I was a huge patron of my local library, and these local librarians were good to me and they curated selection of books for me every week.

And they started with the addictive spy novels and pulp novels so that I could read these things and in effect, a desire for reading in me.

And then they would move on to some of the books that were, you know, a little headier.

And I read I never quit reading.

And it's amazing what you learn when you read and you don't know you're learning it.

That's right.

That's right.

So I took this test, I passed it and the lady looked at me and said, You're in college.

And after that, the first class I took was a creative writing class.

And that was that's how I began doing what I'm doing.

You're off to the races.

I do want to get to the point just kind of quick.

Like you tried to take your degree one step further.

Yeah.

After after I came to a to the end with community college, I was going to go and try to really, really pursue writing on a much more aggressive course of action and I went in, applied to to a university which will remain nameless, but is located at 1600 Florida State University Parkway.

And I had to audition or submit my stuff to the program and they were honest with me saying that your education is a shipwreck and we have we have no space for you.

And I said, Well, will there be any space for me in the future?

And I said, I don't think so.

And I had already rented an apartment at that time over in Tallahassee and I went back to that apartment and I was that was a wreck.

And actually that was the first week that I began writing what became the showing of the South blog, which has become my career, knock on wood career.

How fast did it take off?

Very fast.

A lot faster than I thought.

I had shopped around some of my writing to to newspapers and before.

I've always admired the structure in the format of a columnist because the columnist is totally different than a novelist or a long form writer in that you have your long form and they're more like a mozart Mozart could or in any composer, a composer can take a year of time and compose an hour's worth of music for you.

But what you're listening to during that hours a year, whereas a jazz musician takes an hour gig and plays an hour's worth of stream of consciousness music in a lot of ways, a columnist is a lot like that jazz musician, and so he has to develop a different set of chops than the long form writer has.

He has to know how to sell something very quickly, and I've always admired that.

It's a very it's a very unique skill that's disappearing at the end of the newspaper age.

So I had gone to newspapers and submitted my work, and I was told consistently that nobody wants to read this anymore.

This is this is like the old stuff, the old columns.

This is not this is not where the world is, where if it bleeds, it leads.

We want we want guts.

Get out there and find this, you know, gut wrenching story with some action of blood to it.

And I couldn't do it.

That's not who I am.

So every time I'd mind for a story, I would go to the nursing home, which is not, you know, good in there, mind.

So I began publishing these stories, these kinds of feel good stories, for lack of a better term, on a blog.

And I had no clue that anybody would care.

And I believe the first story that really, truly went when I guess would be termed viral was a story of me walking around a Winn-Dixie, and I saw three Latino boys who were at the meat counter, and these boys stood at the meat counter looking at the cheapest cuts of meat they could find, and they were covered in drywall, mud.

And these boys, as they looked at this food, decided that it was too expensive and they turned to walk away.

And as they're trying to walk away, the butcher came from behind and said, look.

And he said this huge pile of of contained meat in the stack and said, I have to get rid of this tomorrow.

No one's going to buy it.

It's going to go bad.

It's going to go to waste anyway.

I'm just going to give it to you.

Would you like it?

And the boys in there limited English, thanked him.

I wrote about it.

I wrote 500 words about it and put it online.

And the thing had comments and in almost every language on the globe.

Wow.

And it it was powerful to me to realize that I might have found something that I was made to do.

Maybe I had found something that I was formed to do, which was something I've been looking for for a long time.

What was your first big published article outside of the blog?

I mean, because you've been in magazines, you've done books.

I wrote a story that was my first Newsweek story was, uh, it was about visiting a grave in Auburn, Alabama, of a close friend.

And I didn't expect that anything to happen with it.

And I wasn't even shopping it around to happen for anything to happen with it.

Uh, and Newsweek picked it up and I think I had to change my trousers.

After I got that phone call, I was.

I was completely shocked.

Uh, uh, yeah, that was the biggest.

That was one of the bigger ones.

Um, there have been others.

I mean, that's, you know, in particularly a few years back, I mean, Newsweek, I mean, that's a big yeah, yeah.

It was very validating.

And I think what's sad about me is that I've needed validation and I hate that about myself.

I hate that I need have needed validation.

But knowing that about myself, I want to give validation to other writers, which is what I try to do, because a lot of people need validation.

It's not unique.

It's and so I get a lot of messages, a lot of email, a lot of snail mail from writers.

And my goal, if I can, is to give them, if they see me as anything, which that's their problem.

If they do, I want to give them validation because it's amazing what somebody can do when they when they believe they have the credibility to do it.

I'm just curious, Newsweek magazine, I'm going to I'm going to backtrack.

Okay.

When you were riding around in that pickup truck with your father and he was playing classical music.

Yeah.

Newsweek magazine would have been huge.

Newsweek, TIME, U.S. News World Report.

Did it go back in your mind at any point and go, Did you go, Dad?

I made it because could you imagine what Oh, he off little handle.

So there have been many of those little punctuations in my life where that's my thought.

Like, I can't imagine what he'd be thinking right now.

That was definitely a crest where I thought that that was he was a big reader and he's he was one who taught me to love reading.

I say this because I'm on PBS, which is bizarre.

But he was he loved Masterpiece Theater and we would watch Masterpiece Theater.

And whenever he would find a show that he liked, he would always research phonics.

That was he had been a book first.

And then we would cease watching any of that series and we would go back to reading the books first before he allowed us to watch Masterpiece Theater.

Such as Sherlock Holmes or the Agatha Christie stuff.

And so we had this thing between us where we always read, and he read things like Newsweek.

So that would have been huge.

Same thing with like the opera and the other things.

And I want to I want to talk about that because your your show, your genre is novel, is storytelling, and you do it through your writing, but you also do it through performing and through music.

And if I'm not mistaken, thus far, you've been on the Grand Ole Opry two times.

3 to 3.

Three times.

Yeah.

And for anybody that knows anything about music and especially country music, that's a huge, huge deal.

Yeah.

So I read somewhere your parents had taken you when you were a child.

The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

Take it from there.

So we lived in Nashville.

We lived in Spring Hill, Tennessee for a year for a short time because my daddy, being the ironworker, would go wherever the need they called him Boomer's.

He'd go wherever the work was, and they were building what was then the Saturn plant, but became the GM plant.

And it was the biggest thing my my daddy had ever done.

And I didn't think about it like that until until just recently realizing the size and breadth and enormity of this plant and the position that they gave him as a foreman, which was unusual for him.

This was a big, big deal for him.

So we lived there for a short time.

And being so close to Nashville, he he wanted to take me to the Opry because we listened to our opera.

And back then, people still, you know, they listen to talk radio.

Sure.

So we always tuned in on Saturdays, loved it.

So they took me to the Opry and I remember where we sat.

I must have been five years old and my mother later would recall that she remembers where we sat too.

And she, in the middle of the Opry, changed my diaper on her lap in the stands while the show was going on and everybody was giving these dirty looks.

And she said, I've paid enough money for these seats.

They're going to watch my baby.

And I just hope that the time that I got called to the Opry, that I didn't have a similar experience, though.

But so so this was special.

And we went back several times.

But I'll never forget it.

I'll never forget sitting there and smelling the popcorn and eating a hotdog and watching the men in the ten gallon hats and the twin fiddle intros and the steel guitar solos and all these wonderful things that make me feel so American and then make me feel so connected to the music of my my ancestors, my father and all that.

And so that was my first initiation into the Opry.

Years have gone by and I could listen to the Opry.

At a certain point, country music ceased to do anything for me.

The modern version of country music.

I find myself listening to the older stuff I was working on a manuscript for, for a novel that will be released in the next two days.

I think it is.

And as I was working on this manuscript I had not been telling anybody about.

I never tell anybody about my fiction work until until I have a what I would consider an almost finished manuscript, because it'll change so many times that and you'll jinx it.

If you have a good idea and you tell someone about it.

But the nugget of the idea that this manuscript was that I'm going to take an underprivileged child and I'm going to send them somehow to the Grand Ole Opry.

That was the idea for the book, and I had just finished the manuscript.

You know, it had taken me eight, eight or nine months to get to that space.

And we got the phone call that said, and no one knows about that.

My wife doesn't know about this book.

Nobody knows about this book, not even my publishers.

Nobody knows what's happening.

And this phone call comes through.

My wife, who's like the CEO of our little deal, and they say, this is the Grand Ole Opry.

We would like to have you on the show.

And I remember looking at Jamie saying, you're you're lying to me.

Who told you about what I'm doing and who told you about this?

Because this is a joke.

And she said, no, this is real.

And it was real.

We got there to the Grand Ole Opry and I was just I mean, it was almost like my wedding.

I can hardly even remember the details because it was all going past me in like a monet style border.

And I get in there and they have a parking place designated for me with my name on it.

And the guy, the security guard knows my name and the lady who has to frisk me and warned me to make sure that I'm not, you know, the security is a fan of mine and reads me and wants her picture with me and I'm crying, you know, And they lead me to a dressing room that they could neither deny and confirm was Dolly Parton's at one time.

And I said, My cups runneth over.

And then comes the show.

It's played on a big monitor backstage and I'm wearing my monkey suit and I'm tuning up my guitar and I'm trying to figure out what what's happening here.

You know, none of this is real.

I'm looking in the mirror at myself and my wife's in there and I hear on the monitor, you know, they're there explaining who's going to be there tonight.

And my name comes over the intercom and then the lady comes back stage manager says, It's time.

And I mean, my gut just went sunk to my and I walked to that corridor and I got on to the stage when they called my name.

And I doubled over because I saw that wooden circle ahead of me, which is a circle of salvaged wood from the Ryman Auditorium where all of the old greats have performed.

And I doubled over and I cried.

And I cried because in the front of the audience was one of my readers who had printed out a giant cutout of my father's face, who had found it online because I've written about him extensively, and there was my daddy's face cut out and he was holding it up.

And I saw that face in the audience.

And it was not just that.

It was my mother who was sitting in the same section where she had changed my diaper.

And I saw people in the I mean, I saw I saw friends and family everywhere.

And as I was doubled over, I thought, okay, you have got five more seconds to keep crying.

Then you better suck it up because you are on the Grand Ole Opry.

And so I did.

Something clicked in my brain.

The tears shut off.

I slipped up the snot up my nose.

I walked up to the microphone and I don't even remember what happened next.

But it was the greatest, most transformative night of my life.

Not because it was the Opry, because it was one of those rare moments that you get in life.

And I believe everybody gets some where everything comes full circle.

Yeah, And that was why I'm going to have you grab that guitar and play us out of here.

I have about two more minutes left.

Your new book is called Kinfolk and Shawn Dietrich dot com.

Correct.

You track you down.

Yeah.

Find all your blogs, radio, podcasts.

Yes.

Yes.

And so on and so forth.

My mother says it's like stepping on horse hockey.

I'm everywhere.

That's a good thing.

You've got a lot of fans.

I wish you all the best.

I hope maybe that university down the street gives you a call with an honorary doctorate on point.

Let me just float that out.

There might not be a bad idea.

Oh, boy.

Short of sure.

Grab the guitar, but I'm going to do a little closing thing here, and then I'm going to get you to play one of your favorite Hank Williams songs As we get out of here, I just want to let everybody know that they can see this and many more of our conversations on the PBS video app or at our Sorry Dawgs conversations.

I'm Jeff Weeks.

Thank you so very much for watching.

I hope you enjoyed our program.

Take wonderful care of yourself and we'll see you soon.

Shawn Dietrich, Take it away.

Say, hey, good lookin, who wants you got cooking?

How about cooking something up with me?

Hey, sweet baby.

No, I think maybe we could find a brand new recipe.

You got hot around food and a $2 bill and another spot right over to their soda pop and dance for me.

So if you own, have fun.

Come along with me.

See?

Hey, good luck.

What you got cooking?

How about cooking something up with me?

Perfect.

Good.