Photo courtesy of Andrew Grayson
Andrew Grayson
Andrew Grayson, a retired English teacher at Mountain Brook Junior High School, recently published his first young adult novel, titled “The Christmas Meeting.” Grayson will be holding book signings at several locations this summer.
When Andrew Grayson was a freshman at the University of Tennessee, he was focused on studying architecture, a career that would carry him through the first 32 years of his adult life.
But something happened in his core English composition course that year that would shape his second and third careers: his professor took notice of his writing.
“They asked, ‘Wouldn’t you like to switch your major from architecture to English?’ And I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do, but from then on, I had this idea in the back of my head to write,” Grayson said.
And now the Mountain Brook native has released his first book, “The Christmas Meeting,” with a second book coming soon.
Grayson said “The Christmas Meeting,” a young adult historical fiction novel set during the Civil War, has a Hardy Boys adventure feel. The main characters get some help from a collection of artists, authors and others, like Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens, who were alive during that time and are now well-known.
Grayson’s second work — “The Five-Year Samaritan,” which should be completed in the next couple of months — is not a sequel, but it is connected.
“It’s about a high-school English teacher who grew up as the child of parents who both worked for FEMA and moved from place to place, from disaster to disaster,” Grayson said.
Like his first book, it has a Hardy Boys feel — the character ends up in a haunted house as a child, and there’s an escape through tunnels. Later, there’s a murder mystery to solve after someone is kidnapped live on Facebook.
“The Five-Year Samaritan” contains the origin story of “The Christmas Meeting” too. But it’s not aimed at young adults, and in a way it also takes on some autobiographical elements — after Grayson’s career in architecture, he started a second career as a teacher.
He came up with the first draft of “The Christmas Meeting” while he was working on his master’s in education at UAB, then he went on to teach English for four years at Hewitt-Trussville High School and six years at Mountain Brook Junior High, his alma mater.
He said it was a “very rewarding time” and that he was happy to give back. During his time in Mountain Brook schools, and then his own kids’ time there, he saw the difference a good education could make.
“When I retired from that and had the time, I really started focusing on writing,” Grayson said. “I got in a writing group with one of my fellow teachers at Mountain Brook High School, and we started reading each other’s stuff and giving feedback. That gave me the impetus to keep writing and keep the story advancing.”
For more information on his work, visit andrewgraysonauthor.com.
