A sit-down with Sean of the South
Sean Dietrich was in fifth grade when he realized his love of writing.
“My mom gave me this old typewriter, and I started typing out stories with my index fingers,” he said. “That’s how it started, and [writing] became a therapy for me. I loved stories, and I loved to read, and it really mushroomed in fifth grade, which is ironic, because I failed fifth grade. That was a bad year for me, and yet the year I wrote the most.”
The next year, his mother drove him across the county line to another school and begged them to let her son in. Dietrich said the sixth grade teacher let him into her class with one stipulation: that he would come to class early each day and write a 100-word story. She would edit them and give them back to him, covered in red ink, to make corrections.
“By the end of year, she gave me this whole shoebox of all my stuff,” he said. “The last stories I had written had hardly any red ink. That was my first intro to being a writer.”
He dropped out of school the following year after his father died by suicide. The woman who would have been his English teacher that year came to his father’s funeral and in the registry where she signed her name, she wrote, ‘Keep writing.’
Dietrich began doing manual labor and construction in Florida when he was only 14 years old. He spent time on job sites with Hispanic laborers who also invited him to play the accordion in their bands. He said he learned Spanish because he was the only one who didn’t speak the language.
Once, he was laying tile with a man who told him he was a doctor. Dietrich said he was flabbergasted and responded with, ‘If you’re a doctor, I’m a nurse.’
The man did in fact have a Ph.D. and wanted Dietrich to know that it wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t impossible to get your degree. It just took work and an obscene amount of money, but he believed he could do it.
After that conversation, Dietrich, who was in his late 20s, drove his pickup truck to Okaloosa-Walton Community College (now Northwest Florida State College) to enroll in classes. By the time he graduated, the school had gone through several name changes, and Dietrich jokes that he holds degrees from five different colleges.
After that, he had hopes of attending Florida State University and pursuing a career in teaching or music. He applied and rented an apartment on campus, but it wasn’t until the first day of classes that he found out he didn’t get in.
“I was just devastated,” he said. “But that’s when I started writing in earnest, and for me that’s kind of when my life changed. The best thing FSU ever did was turn me down.”
Dietrich will turn 40 this year and has now been doing his thing for a decade. He initially began writing 250-word story snippets that were always humorous, nothing poignant. That grew to 480 words, then to 700 and finally he settled on 800 words.
“I started on a typewriter and moved to a computer, begrudgingly,” he said. “I’ve written just about every day for 10 years. I think I’m making up for lost times. The initial part of my life was such a flop failure, I’m trying to probably prove to myself what I could have done if I tried a little harder.”
Before the pandemic, Dietrich said he was on the road about 80% of the year, but he has reduced it a bit and has found the sweet spot.
Sean’s Favorites
► Food: I’ve been on a dumpling kick. I’ve eaten them every night of the week for the past two months.
► Dessert: Pound cake; ice cream
► TV Show: “Monk.” I don’t really watch any TV, I like to read. I have watched “Downton Abbey.”
► Authors: I love Lewis Grizzard. I like Mark Twain. I’ve read everything he’s ever written. I love his spirit. Old women are my favorite writers. Kathryn Tucker Wyndham. Maeve Benchy’s “Circle of Friends” touched me.
► Way to relax: When I’m done working, I just want to read something easy.
► Place he’s visited: Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Birmingham is our favorite city, this has really been our favorite place to be.
“We decided we didn’t want to get that out of bounds again,” he said. “Jamie [his wife] puts a cap on it. When we go places, we build in days so we can see places and enjoy it instead of feeling like we’re just working.”
After all these years, he is still working on embracing himself as a storyteller.
“That’s the weirdest part: to be a storyteller, which I hesitate to call myself. It’s ridiculous. No child sits in school and says they are going to be a storyteller, there’s no job description, and it sounds ridiculous even saying you are one. The fact that I’m doing a job that really doesn’t exist and is not necessary, it feels weird.”
His live shows have no set routine, and the flow depends on what he’s feeling at the moment. He said he has about a million songs in his head, a bunch of and his only goal is to make people feel good for the time they’re there. If that happens, he’s done what he wants to do.
In addition to his daily blogs, he spends time daily working on his next book, which follows the bike trip journey that he and Jamie took during the pandemic. He has another fiction book in the works after that one is complete, along with a podcast.
Moving north
When Dietrich and his wife Jamie moved to the Avondale community in Birmingham in March, he said they made more friends in their first six weeks than they’ve made in the last five years of living in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.
“Where I came from, it was more transient,” Dietrich said. “Everybody was from somewhere else. You’d walk into Publix, and you didn’t see your normal people. Here I go in the store, and I see people who live here. We know each other’s names, we’re already friends. It’s awesome. I cannot believe how well we’ve been received by strangers. We love it here, this is home now.”
The couple both have family in Birmingham and Atlanta, so the move north brought them closer to aunts, uncles, cousins and friends.
“For a long time, we had wanted to leave what amounts to a Disney cruise on land. There’s two parts of Santa Rosa: a beach side and bay side, and we lived close to the bay. We bought our lot and built our house 20 years ago when it was still woods. In just 20 years there’s hardly any woods left. All our friends have left; we hung on for her mother.”
Dietrich said they stayed for Jamie’s mother, known to his readers as Mother Mary. Before she passed away, the two sat by her bedside and told her they were probably moving and she gave her blessing.
Having a lot of work here, the couple had spent a lot of time in Birmingham and knew they liked it. They had rented AirBnBs in Avondale as their home base when traveling. They stayed there around six weeks during the holidays, and when they began house shopping, they found something they both loved.
“We found a house driving around, and we both said ‘This is the one,’ but it wasn’t on the market yet, just a sign in the yard. We hadn’t even seen inside it yet,” he said. “We got an appointment to see it, and we had to write a note to the owner telling them why this house was special to us. They wanted me to write it, but I do enough writing and I feel like I do it wouldn’t be organic. So, Jamie wrote this long treaty about why she loved this house, and it turned into more of an autobiography about her mother. We read it, and we both cried. They chose our offer.”
The house is almost 100 years old, and Dietrich said it’s been very well kept. One of his favorite parts of it is his library/office, where he built some book shelves.
“All I’ve ever wanted in my whole life was a place for my books,” he said. “I’ve never really had an office, except a 1955 rundown Yellowstone camper where I wrote three books in it, maybe more. Our house before was really small. My office was one office chair that I got out of a dumpster a long time ago that I can’t part with.”
Dietrich said he feels lucky to be doing what he’s doing and plans to continue as he can.
“I know time is short, this isn’t going to last much longer in the scheme of life,” he said. “This is the most fun I’ve had in my life. I feel very lucky to connect with people. Seeing people, meeting people — it has changed me from the inside out, and I’ve never felt less alone.”
Sean's column can be found in each issue of 280 Living.