William Charles 'Chuck' Conner said he decided to write his life story the day he turned 50.
However, work on the project didn't begin until more than a dozen years later, when he retired in 1996 from a successful psychiatry practice in Atlanta.
The result is a trilogy of books recently completed, with the publication of Out of Penumbra joining his debut effort, Eating Dirt, which traced Conner's hardscrabble upbringing 'on the prickly side of the poverty line,' as he called it. Boy Jumps Over Moon describes a three-year stint in the U.S. Navy that set him up in 1955 to begin attending Emory University at Oxford and later medical school.
Out of Penumbra – a penumbra is the partially shaded outer region of a shadow, which Conner said represents for him 'a lasting metaphor for the partial darkness of my ignorant childhood' – picks up the story of the now-90-years-old memoirist, who was signing copies of all three books last Saturday at the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art in Morgan County's rural Buckhead.
"I just started with that single idea of writing literal history, but then I got more ambitious and decided I wanted to try to capture the feeling of this journey in addition to the facts,' Conner said during downtime between autograph seekers. "I'd always wanted to write creatively from college on. Once I had done a lot of reading, though, I wanted to make it as good as possible to tell the story as well as possible. So, I wrote these books over several years."
Before starting, however, Conner said he spent much time attending writing camps and seminars to 'learn how to do things right' since he'd never had formal writing training.
"After 30 years of writing prescriptions, I was ready to learn about how to write a book,' he said. "And I enjoyed it very much. It made for a nice vacation."
Conner said he wrote three novels 'that never went anywhere' before finally settling on conveying his life story through prose.
"I realized I was the most interesting person I knew," he joked. "And I always had a good memory and a memory for details. So, the more I did it, the more stimulated, the more inspired I felt to do a good job and finish it. It was very satisfying to write for me. I realized that I was sort of enjoying the introspection of the journey."
Though he has no more books, the recently minted nonagenarian said he still enjoys meeting new people, seeing new things, and having new experiences.
"The more you're out in the world, the more you learn," Conner said. "Then, after a brief pause, he added, 'But only if you pay attention to what's going on."
Copies of all three entries in Conner's trilogy — Eating Dirt, Boy Jumps Over Moon, and Out of Penumbra — are available for $15 each through Amazon.com or at the Steffen Thomas Museum of Art, 4200 Bethany Rd., Buckhead (SteffenThomas. org).