Rob Wheeler Writes

April 8, 2026

It is for love of a warmly lit room that I leave the light on even when I won’t be there to enjoy its glow.

That is why I write.

I fell down the hobbit hole in first grade. Every morning as I ate my cereal, my mother would read to me a chapter of The Hobbit. I was hooked. I started seeing dwarves and wizards and furry-footed farmers everywhere. The houses on my newspaper delivery route became the treasure-filled lairs of monsters, rows of sweatshirts hung in halls were the colorful cloaks of Thorin & Company, waiting to be worn out into the drizzling day. Unfriendly dogs were wargs, snapping wicked warnings, and friendly ones were Beorn, ready to lend a paw in the fight against those terrible orcs (my three older brothers). There was magic everywhere in the world when I was very young, and I resolved to add something to it, if it turned out I had the talent. That remains to be seen, I suppose, but I feel I must try. I’ve been telling stories all my life, sometimes to get out of trouble, sometimes to get into it, but most often for the sheer joy of weaving the threads of an imagined world into a blanket not-too full of holes. Like a lot of the survivors of my generation, I have buried my dreams beneath a cynical layer of excuses and denials and reasons that success would never be allowed for someone like me. Getting older either means getting braver or retreating from the field. I must not be ready to flee quite yet, because here I am, launching a blog and something like a writing career at the ripe old age of fifty-five. I’m in a middle year, in the middle part of my life, and that feels like a threshold. It was time to step through or else close the door.

The wonders of the modern age don’t often tickle my fancy, but the sudden possibility of self-publishing seems a useful kind of magic, one too good to ignore. A month ago, or thereabouts, I published my first book. It’s called ‘Beyond Saint Arden’s Wood,’ a title one good friend didn’t like but more than a few have said smacks of mystery, which seems a good sort of smacking. You can find it on Amazon.com, in the New Gloucester Public Library, or the wonderful Green Hand Book Shop if you happen to be in Portland, Maine. It’s full of magic, of course, but I hope it’s full of truth too. I write as an act of discovery– no outlining for an impetuous charger-inner like me. It was a total surprise when Nat met Abner (but I won’t tell you who or what he is), but admittedly less so that he fell in love with the green-eyed May. I once told my wife, Mariah, that if a writer is in love, then every story he writes must be a love story. The remark earned me one of her smiles, the fuel that keeps me going, which was more than prize enough for giving voice to what seems to me an unavoidable truth. And speaking of truth, a promise I make to my readers, both real and imagined, is that I will never lie to you, not if I can help it. The characters who emerge from my labyrinthine mind are presented as honestly as I find them, and the things that they say, and think, and feel that hopefully feel true to you are as truly recorded as I am able to do. I’ve always thought that learning is like remembering, and that a good story feels as familiar as a pleasant dream reemerging from the background noise at the day’s oddest moment. Give me a chance and I’ll tell you the things that feel the realest to me and maybe give you a reason to smile along the way.