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SEAN of the
SOUTH
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A
STORY BY BETSY ILER & PHOTOS BY KENNETH BOONE
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At a weathered lakeside picnic table opposite Sean Dietrich at Lake Martin, I wondered what I could possibly learn about him that he hasn’t already told you. His Sean of the South blog is followed daily by many thousands of online readers, and he is published in newspapers across the Southeast. On any given week, he crisscrosses the country, weaving Southern Rockwellian stories of a modern day Mark Twain childhood gone terribly awry, and his books belie a wisdom far beyond the years of those who read him. And yet, we cannot stop reading because Sean Dietrich makes us chuckle. He makes us wipe tears from our eyes and press hands to our hearts. He makes us nod in agreement, shake our heads in shared shame and laugh with abandon. And he does it on purpose. He told me so that second day of spring as we sat in the sunshine below Wind Creek State Park’s iconic silo. Sean has been visiting Lake Martin with his wife, Jamie, since they married 19 years ago, or shortly after the Spanish-American War, if you read the blog he posted about the true nature of marriage the day after I interviewed him. Jamie grew up in Brewton, Alabama, and they came here often from their former home in Florida. “We used to come to avoid spring break,” Sean said, and since Jamie and he moved to Birmingham in March, he expects they’ll come more often now. “I’ll have to learn freshwater fishing. It’s a different world than what I’m used to.”
56 LAKE
MAY 2022
The lake has changed a lot since his younger days, he said. “There’s been an explosion of campers here,” said Sean, who has renovated three AirStreams, including a 1961 Shasta and a 1953 Yellowstone. “When I played in a band, I just spent time camping after playing. That has been a big part of my life. My writing career started out of that margin of camping days.” It’s a writing career that includes fiction and non-fiction books, as well as newspaper syndication – his childhood writing dream come true. He’s written some 4,000 blog posts about the extraordinariness of life, like his March 1 post about finding his book on display at a store where he once applied for a job and was soundly rejected. He cried then, and readers cried with him. He writes passionately about veterans and young soldiers, like the recruit he saw at a busy airport March 2, stoically bidding his mother goodbye on the sidewalk. Later at the gate, he saw that mother’s baby boy, the stoicism replaced by tears. Sean thanked the soldier for his service. And we cried when we read it. “Are you trying to make us cry on purpose?” I asked this writer whose childhood hero was the legendary humorist Lewis Grizzard. “I’m trying to make people feel good, whether that’s crying or laughter. The misnomer is that crying is painful. It’s really good. It’s a release.”
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