It’s the birthday of southern novelist Steve Yarbrough (b. 1956), whose most recent novel, The Unmade World, came out on January 6, 2018. The Unmade World is a suspenseful novel about a tragic encounter between an American journalist and a Polish businessman, with lots of current politics, immigration issues, violence, and a murder mystery thrown in. (Stay tuned for more on the Polish inspiration of the book.)

Yarbrough was born in Indianola, Mississippi, to Mississippi Delta cotton farmers and had a difficult childhood thanks to an intelligent, angry, unstable father. Yarbrough’s mother once tried to flee her husband, taking her son and parents with her, and a five-state, several-day chase ensued. They ended up back with the father and Yarbrough spent the rest of his childhood in what sounds like a near-constant state of dread over his father’s moods.

Yarbrough studied at the University of Mississippi and got an MFA from the University of Arkansas. Yarbrough had published two collections of short stories and was a tenured professor at Fresno State when, discouraged over a novel that wouldn’t sell, he wrote a nonfiction essay about Southerners and guns. (His own father had recently purchased two M1 carbines modified to be fully automatic and “was armed to the teeth.”) The essay caught the attention of movie producer Kathleen Kennedy and her husband Frank Marshall, who ultimately paid Yarbrough to write a screenplay of his unpublished novel, The Oxygen Man. The film was never made, but in the process of writing the screenplay, Yarbrough rewrote The Oxygen Man, which was finally published in 1999 and received great reviews; Yarbrough was even compared to Faulkner. (I mean that in a nice way.) His career took off and he’s now published a total of eleven books, eight of which are novels.

Yarbrough is married to Polish writer Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough; they have two daughters and live in the Boston area. Yarbrough met H-Y when he was an instructor at Virginia Tech and she was a (married) graduate student. H-Y eventually went back to Communist Poland to end her marriage there but while home came under pressure from the Polish secret police to return to Virginia Tech and inform on the Polish population there; she flatly refused. Eventually she was able to return to the U.S., and she and Yarbrough have been together about 33 years. Yarbrough writes in a Psychology Today article that his “sense of impending loss has returned” recently, as he knows that “One day another ocean will separate us” (Steve Yarbrough, “Reflections on a Lifetime of Waiting,” psychologytoday.com, Jan. 5, 2018).

Have a beautiful Wednesday with those you love and stay scrupulously honest to the data.