Publishes “Will the Circle be Unbroken?”
Longtime local and fan favorite Sean Dietrich (sometimes better known as “Sean of the South”) is a traveling storyteller, podcaster, and Southern Living writer known for his daily column filled with stories of steel workers, church potlucks, and trusty bloodhounds, which always give his readers a reason to believe there is good in the world—despite what they may have experienced to the contrary.
In his new book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?: A Memoir of Learning to Believe You’re Gonna Be Okay, Sean is telling his own story—for the very first time. It is one that has been marked by both loss and love and has taken him on an unlikely path. Sean was only age 12 when he scattered his father’s ashes from a mountain range. His father had been a man who lived for baseball. He was a steel worker with a ready wink, who once scaled a 50-foot tree just to hang a tire swing for his son. But he also had been the stranger who tried to kidnap and kill Sean’s mother before pulling the trigger on himself. He was a childhood hero who was now reduced to a man in a box. After his father’s death, Sean dropped out of seventh grade and became a dishwasher, a newspaper deliverer, and then a construction worker to help his mother and sister scrape by. As a self-described “nobody with a sad story behind him,” Sean still could not deny the glimmers of life’s goodness. Such goodness became even harder to deny when Sean met the love of his life, Jamie, at a fried chicken church potluck, and harder still when his lifelong love of storytelling led him to stages across the country, where he is known and loved as “Sean of the South.”
A story that will stay with you long after the final page, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? testifies to the strength that lives within us all to stop the cycles of the past from laying claim to our future.
Sean is a columnist, podcaster, speaker, and novelist, known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Southern Living, The Tallahassee Democrat, Good Grit, South Magazine, The Bitter Southerner, Thom Magazine, The Mobile Press Register SoWal Life, Destin Life and Bay Life. He has authored 11 books, including the novel Stars of Alabama. Learn more at www.WillTheCircleBook.com. Web Site: www.SeanDietrich.com, Facebook: @seanofthesouth, Instagram: @seanofthesouth, Twitter: @seanofthesouth1, Show/Podcast: www.SeanoftheSouthShow.com.
Long-time readers are well familiar with Sean’s monthly column in Bay Life.
