Photo courtesy of Billy Ivey.
Alton Hardy, left, stands with author Billy Ivey. Ivey’s latest book, “Long is the Way,” tells the story of Alton Hardy, the pastor of Urban Hope Community Church in Fairfield.
Oak Mountain resident Billy Ivey spent 25 years in advertising, but it wasn’t until he wrote his first book that he realized he could also be an author.
“A Sea Between Us,” released in August 2022, took Ivey 16 months to write, but his second book happened much faster.
Ivey released “Long is the Way” in September 2023. Similar to the first book, it tells the true story of a man who faced obstacles and overcame them.
The idea for the book came about from a friend who knew the story of Alton Hardy, the pastor of Urban Hope Community Church in Fairfield, and knew Ivey was just the person
to tell it.
“He said, ‘I just read your book and I was blown away by it,’” Ivey said. “He told me, ‘I didn't see you in this story at all.’ That's the best compliment I have been given about the book. He asked what I was going to do next and said he had a story for me.”
It turns out, Ivey had heard Hardy’s story years before, when he came to speak at Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church. While Ivey said he remembered the message, he didn’t really know Hardy’s story.
Hardy’s life began in Selma, where he was one of 12 children in a sharecropper family. He moved to Louisville at the age of 11 and “basically grew up on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky,” Ivey said. There were many twists and turns along the way, but Hardy eventually wound up back in Alabama just 12 years ago.
“His whole story has happened in my lifetime,” Ivey said. “He’s 56 and I’m 51. I learned so much and was overwhelmed with gratitude, but also shocked at how ignorant I am to what's been going on even in my lifetime.”
During the writing process, Hardy and Ivey met every Wednesday for six months, and the two also took a road trip to Selma to revisit Hardy’s hometown. Ivey said the book is “more of a memoir written like a John Grisham novel,” and that the friendship he developed with Hardy has taught him a lot.
“We never left [our meetings] without him weeping throughout the story,” Ivey said. “Not from sadness, but overcome with emotion because of where he sees God has brought him from then to now.”
Hardy now focuses his entire message on peace, hope and reconciliation. He is the co-founder of Urban Hope Development and the visionary behind the Urban Hope Leadership Initiative, a one-year intensive discipleship and training program for African American college graduates.
The friend who convinced Ivey to write “Long is the Way” is also the co-founder with him in his new publishing company, Small Stories Studio. Ivey said this new project is a place not only to publish the things he wants to, but also to provide that opportunity for other writers, creators, filmmakers and podcasters who either don’t know how to produce their project or want to go through the traditional means.
“When you feel called or led to do something, you gotta lean into it,” Ivey said. “There are so many stories out there, and I'm just very confident my desire to tell the stories is going to be matched by people’s need to hear them.”
He hopes the reach of his book is far, because the message interwoven throughout is one that he thinks will really change people and make them think a bit more about how far we need to go.
“The irony in the name of Small Stories is that small stories make big things happen, small stories make a big difference because we can relate to them,” Ivey said. “People have to be heard and seen and known.”
To find out more about “Long is the Way” and Small Stories Studio, visit smallstoriesstudio.com.
