About: Dale McCurry

Dale McCurry is an Ozarks’ born and bred guy with an unusually fluid pen. A guy whose dubious business skills ensured him a cell in federal prison from 1999-2004. Dale spent his childhood in southwest Missouri, growing up in the family business washing dishes, checking oil and kicking tires at a truck stop on US 65. He escape the drudge and the grunge by creating stories about the characters who stopped for a hamburger and gas. He wrote reaction reports for a high school psychology class about being son of a well-known local family whose writing heart was yanked by the “nearly silent voices from the valley where the sun sleeps.” The Buffalo [Missouri] Reflex printed Dale's column, “Thoughts from Cedar Ridge” in the late 1980s, and Missouri Life Magazine selected him to interview William Least Heat-Moon, author of Blue Highways: A Journey into America, during the height of the book’s popularity. After a stint as a U.S. Navy Seabee, Dale vowed to provide his wife and two children with a good life, providing the requisite personally designed rural home with a view of the river valley. He held obligatory real jobs common to an artist, but eventually creative generation of venture capital for an environmental company earned him a five-year stay behind razor wire and iron bars. Writing was fundamental for his mental survival during incarceration, and he sent a flawless, thoughtful column documenting his life in prison to a young, hotshot weekly newspaper in northwest Arkansas, the Lovely County Citizen, which gained him a following of readers who weren't sure if he was really a prisoner or really a writer. How could he be both? Dale’s custody by the federal government was concluded in 2005, though restitution will take many more years. Following work release from a halfway house in Springfield, Missouri, the Citizen hired Dale as a reporter, and the next year he was appointed editor. After six months of that he threw up his hands in anguish, claiming he wanted to write, not journal the bickering of small-town politics. Dale lives alone in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, with his dream of describing the universal good life that’s gone bad, gone good, and getting better. A collection of his columns, Letters from the Pen, was published by Boian Books in January. To read more or to buy his book, visit boianbooks.com.
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