"If you're standing behind someone in the check-out line and she's searching through every pocket, through her entire purse, for three cents - THREE PENNIES - " columnist Darrell Huckaby says, "you can get mad…or you can look for what's funny." Huckaby always looks for, and usually finds the funny things in life and often that's what he writes about in more than a dozen newspapers across the Southeast. He's a self-syndicated columnist, an author and recently a "spoken word artist" in the vein of Southern humor writers Lewis Grizzard and Jeff Foxworthy.
Has he always been funny?
"Life's more enjoyable if you sprinkle it with humor," he says, adding that people are naturally funny. They do funny things all the time. He's lucky to have a good memory for details but he recommends and sometimes still carries a small pad to jot down things he sees throughout the day. Sometimes it is simply someone walking by who might be dress a little differently or as he told a class at a workshop, "I saw this woman come by. She was carrying her dog but had her three-year-old son on a leash!" Other times it's an overheard conversation, or that woman in the check-out line looking for pennies.
"I write about everything," he continues, "I live in a household with my wife and three children and I teach high school AP history. There's always something going on!" He used to send friends letters full of stories about things in his life and he tried to make them funny. Since he has gotten successful, some of these friends tell him they still have those stories and how much they enjoyed them.
How long has Huckaby been writing?
"I have always thought I wanted to write," he says, "I thought how wonderful it would be to write and have people read it." But when he told people he wanted to be a writer, they laughed at him, so outside of writing for the school paper in high school, Huckaby kept his writing to himself, squirreling away his thoughts and stories in journals for almost 30 years.
His first professional publication came one Memorial Day in the early 1990s (he no longer remembers the year). He wrote about a friend from high school who had been a soldier and had died in Viet Nam. When he sent it unsolicited to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper printed it, then other papers picked it up and printed it.
"One clipping got laminated and was left by the Viet Nam Memorial in Washington." It was added to an exhibit with other items left at the wall.
He wrote his first book as a lark in 1995. It was supposed to be the novel his idol Lewis Grizzard never got to write. He wrote it without an outline or any planning, just making it up as he went. Need Two is the story of two college roommates who decided in 1980, four days before the National Championship Game between Georgia and Norte Dame, that they had to be there. "I tell people it is not autobiographical even if that is my roommate standing next to me on the cover."
Then he got an offer to write a column for the local newspaper in Conyers, The Rockdale Citizen. He got along so well with the editor that the once a week column became a twice a week column then a three times a week column. Soon after, other papers began calling him asking if they could print his columns. Now he writes five columns a week for 12 or 14 newspapers and some magazines. During football season, he writes another one about Georgia football on the website DogBone.
He currently has eight books, including three collections of his columns, two novels, a cookbook, a biography and a book about taking his kids to all 50 states, which is due out later this year. He has an audio CD of his stories called "Porterdale City Limits" and does a weekly radio commentary on the syndicated show, "Moby in the Morning."
How does he do all that and still teach high school?
"I'm a morning person," he explains. "I get up at 5:30 and work on my columns before I get ready for school." If he's working on a book, he writes in the evenings and uses his summers off as a teacher to do the rewrites and polishing. He does his speaking engagements on the weekends.
He hadn't planned on pursuing his writing career until he retired to coastal South Carolina. "I'm about 15 years ahead of schedule." He's saving his "serious novel," one he has been working on for years, until retirement so he can devote more time to it. He'd like to publish it with a national publisher but it would require the freedom to do promotion tours and other things.
"I still have a 15-year-old at home who needs me here to be her daddy more than I need to be out promoting a book," he says. He'd also like to write a screenplay, maybe for his first novel Need Two. He'd like to do more speaking because he enjoys meeting and getting to know people.
"I think I'm privileged to be able to write and have people enjoy my work. It's still just a grand adventure," he says with genuine enthusiasm.
To learn more about Darrell Huckaby, his books and speaking engagements, visit his website.
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