Russellville journalist’s ‘Strong Like You’ published
Walker Lauderdale is a 15-yearold high school student in the small Ozark town of Samson and is barely holding it together. His volatile, drug-dealing father, Hank, has been missing for a month, and Walker and his mother are having trouble getting by. There are missed meals, and a relative is threatening to kick them out of their home.
Like his daddy, Walker plays on his high school football team; also like his daddy, Walker has a temper that has gotten him in trouble more than once. What he wants more than anything is to have his father back home and he sets off on a dangerous, ill-advised search to find his old man.
This is the story of “Strong Like You,” the debut young-adult novel from T.L. Simpson of Russellville that was published last month by Flux, an imprint of Minnesota-based North Star Editions. The book is a gritty, unflinching look at masculinity, toxic and otherwise, as Walker tries to make sense of his life and the people around him, especially the absent Hank. There is violence, trauma, betrayal, friendship, football, a massive twist and, yes, hope.
Simpson unspools the gripping narrative in first person, with Walker addressing his father directly. From the first grim lines of the prologue:
“I haven’t cried one time since you disappeared. Not even at football practice when Paton Roper told the whole team you were probably dead.”
Later, Walker says: “Some folks got it soft, but I am not one of those people.”
He is reminiscent of characters from the novels of S.E. Hinton, the Oklahoma writer who, beginning with 1967’s coming-of-age classic “The Outsiders,” introduced young readers to the lives of troubled teenage boys in places other than New York or Los Angeles, whose sensitivity and compassion are threatened to be stomped out by larger, uglier forces beyond their control.
The 40-year-old Simpson is editor of the Courier in Russellville, where he started out as a sports reporter in 2012.
“This is weird,” he says during an interview last month. “I’m normally on your end of the phone.”
His father was in the Navy and the family moved around a lot. By the time Simpson was 5, they had settled in Russellville.
He traces his interest in reading to summers visiting his grandmother at her farm in Missouri. Her house “was stuffed with books,” he says. “I would do all of the outside farm things, but there was a significant amount of time when there wasn’t much to do. So I would just pull the books off the shelves and start reading.”
By fifth grade, inspired by Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park,” he was writing his own stories and never really stopped.
“All through high school I took creative writing and that lead me to journalism,” he says. “I just wanted to write for a living.”
Simpson and his wife, Melissa, have four children, ages 18, 17, 9 and 3. Scheduling time to write around family and his job at the paper was difficult at first, he says. But he found that getting up early, around 5:30 a.m., and writing before the rest of his family stirred, was best. He set a goal for himself to write 500-1,000 words a day and completed 13 manuscripts before “Strong Like You” was accepted and published.
The observations Simpson made as a reporter covering sports and crime in his hometown spiraled into the idea for “Strong Like You.”
“I would go to probable cause hearings, or cover a capital murder trial, or I’d be standing on the side of the road after someone had been shot,” he says. “Then I’d be at a football game that night. Smashing those two things together is sort of what this book is.”
Simpson was working part time at the Pope County Library when he first conceived of the character that would become Walker.
“I’d be shelving books and brainstorming,” he says. “What if there was this kid who idolized his father, but his father didn’t really deserve to be idolized? How does that kid learn the lessons you need to learn to be a good person?”
With “Strong Like You” now out in the world, Simpson is already at work on another young-adult novel that he says is “thematically very similar to ‘Strong Like You,’ but it’s also quite a bit different.”
He’s not giving up life as an inky wretch, however.
“I love newspapers,” he says. “I love being plugged into my community. I could probably [get] a million-dollar book deal and still turn up to work at the newspaper. I enjoy it that much.”