From the campfire to a novel, retired mail carrier is telling Emory’s Story

    Paul Holleran, retired City of Falmouth mail carrier, will hold a book signing on Saturday, Dec. 5, 2020, at Simply Gifted near the corner of Shelby and Maple.
    Writing a book was not originally in Holleran’s plan. The mail carrier who roamed Falmouth for nearly 15 years, getting to know every person, dog, and cat, he says, as he delivered mail to the residents across the downtown area, originally found himself in a situation where he needed to think fast.
    “When my kids were 12 and 10,” he says, “we held a Cub Scout campout behind my house. We had a campfire back there, and I knew a campfire needed a story, so I made up a story about something found in the walls of my house.”
    He said the boys in the crew soon grew fidgety as they listened to the story, but his wife told him later that he should write it down.
    “So I got a composition book and I started writing. I thought it would be a short story, but then I figured that I needed to tell how the item got there, and then I needed to tell what happened after they found the item.
    “I ended up filling up five composition books. The story took on a life of its own.”
    The story ended up being 400 pages in his computer, and that translated to nearly 1,000 pages in a book.
    “I hired an editor in Northern Kentucky, and she told me it was a very large book. She asked me if I could make it two books, but I just couldn’t make it happen.”
    Now, he is trying to write a sequel. He says his sons were the inspiration for a lot of what he wrote.
    “If I needed some help, I would stop and listen to them argue,” he chuckles.
    Indeed, those brotherly conflicts inspired him at first to share biblical accounts of brothers, so when he started writing Emory’s Story, he knew he wanted the story to have a moral.
    “The story is a faith journey. It isn’t Christian fiction, but it is a moral faith story. That part is underlying.”
    Holleran will be at Simply Gifted from 2 to 5 p.m. on Saturday, December 5. He will have books to sell at that time. The book is also in Kindle and in iBooks and is available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.