Restored English Major, Writer & Storyteller
Eugene Drew Bridges, who goes by Drew, is a retired psychiatrist who has restored himself to his default identity of English major. He lives with his wife Lauren in Wake Forest, North Carolina, and spends his time reading, writing, storytelling and gardening. He owned and operated an independent bookstore for seven years. Drew was featured in the Fall 2015 issue of Gardener-Webb The Magazine on pages 60-61.
Keep reading below to discover his journey from English major to psychiatrist to published writer.
Keep reading below to discover his journey from English major to psychiatrist to published writer.
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In college, I started out as an English major. As a child, it was the bookmobile that first hooked me. The panel truck style library-on-wheels made it up our rural dirt driveway once a week during the summers in the 1950s.
Then a high school teacher encouraged me. He said reading broadly is the road to all knowledge and writing well is the most essential skill. And then I read Steinbeck. My God! How do you know the things he knows and how do you learn to tell those kinds of stories? I graduated from college, the first time, with honors in English literature from Lenoir Rhyne University in 1969. |
But along the way I learned that the perception of the English major as most noble the perception of the English major as most noble of actors was hardly shared by all. Impractical. Unfocused. Not marketable. Fluffy. Unless you wanted to be a teacher or believed you were the next Steinbeck.
I lost my nerve. I couldn’t see how I could earn a living as an English major. Teaching didn’t really call to me, so I notified the graduate school – where I had been admitted in their English literature doctoral program – that I wasn’t coming. I decided to go back to undergraduate school to do something else.
I was working as an orderly in a hospital to pay for school, so I figured there must be something in the medical field I could do. I took a few classes in chemistry and physics.
As it turned out, medical schools were in an era of looking for humanists to be doctors. I told the medical school admissions staff that I was going to go back home to my rural county and be a family doctor. I lied. I knew psychiatry was my future. I got in.
After about 40 years as a psychiatrist, I finally figured out that I just wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. So I opened a bookstore in Wake Forest, North Carolina. I opened its doors just as the great recession hit and the Amazon Kindle came out.
In the store, I hung out with storytellers and writers. I wandered through my inventory and found new and wonderful things. In the end, I lost some money, but restored my soul to my default identity as an English major.
I sold the bookstore. I now spend most of my time trying to do what my high school teacher said in the first place. I read. I write. I learn. I’m in a writing group and I have four published books. I’m still pretty sure I’m not Steinbeck, but my heart and soul have found their way back to where they should be.
I lost my nerve. I couldn’t see how I could earn a living as an English major. Teaching didn’t really call to me, so I notified the graduate school – where I had been admitted in their English literature doctoral program – that I wasn’t coming. I decided to go back to undergraduate school to do something else.
I was working as an orderly in a hospital to pay for school, so I figured there must be something in the medical field I could do. I took a few classes in chemistry and physics.
As it turned out, medical schools were in an era of looking for humanists to be doctors. I told the medical school admissions staff that I was going to go back home to my rural county and be a family doctor. I lied. I knew psychiatry was my future. I got in.
After about 40 years as a psychiatrist, I finally figured out that I just wasn’t cut out for that kind of work. So I opened a bookstore in Wake Forest, North Carolina. I opened its doors just as the great recession hit and the Amazon Kindle came out.
In the store, I hung out with storytellers and writers. I wandered through my inventory and found new and wonderful things. In the end, I lost some money, but restored my soul to my default identity as an English major.
I sold the bookstore. I now spend most of my time trying to do what my high school teacher said in the first place. I read. I write. I learn. I’m in a writing group and I have four published books. I’m still pretty sure I’m not Steinbeck, but my heart and soul have found their way back to where they should be.
"Live" OnAir Conversation with Author Drew Bridges 07 January 2022 GMAP TV
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Available now...The ghost of Ambrose Bierce, American writer and civil war Union soldier, has been displaced from the home he had been haunting. Enlisting the aid of a "haunting agent," he finds a new residence that has the requisite dark history and terrible secret that makes it appropriate for haunting. Here he meets new spirits who reside in this version of the afterlife, a middle place between life and the ultimate destination.
Against his intentions, Bierce becomes caught up in the unsolved mystery of his new haunt. In partnership with an old friend, a Buddhist priest named "Sid" who has inhabited the spirit world for 25 centuries, he reluctantly involves himself in the matters of still living people. Bierce and his friend also become aware of the presence of mysterious "others" who are spirits who never held human form. Bierce, Sid, and other new spirit friends ultimately find themselves as part of a quest to save a human life, rescue another spirit from oblivious, and discover the identity of the "others." |
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Billion Dollar Bracket is now available on Audio
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You can get your Signed Copy here... |
Many lives collide in this quest to win a billion dollars for picking all the winners in the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament. Some are looking for riches, others for simple survival and personal redemption.
Mathematician Sinclair Dane sponsors the contest, seeking money for a safety net for her troubled mother. She does not have a billion dollars to pay a winner. Risking her reputation and possible legal charges for fraud, she pins her hopes on the astronomical odds against anyone picking all the winners. Math professor Lewis Cusac uses the basketball contest to teach remedial math to college students, two of whom are playing in the tournament. He enters the contest and finds himself having selected all the winners with only three games remaining. He also gets a call from the NCAA investigators for suspicion of trying to fix the outcomes of games. Add to the mix a flamboyant retired casino operator, a group of twenty-something social media wizards, and professional basketball’s next megastar. As the contest goes global, the story races to an ending that will surprise the reader. |
May I share some good news?
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My novel, The Family in the Mirror, was selected as one of five finalists in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards Contest, general fiction category. And to my delight, my friend and fellow writer, Bill Finger, won a finalist award in the memoir category. He wrote The Crane Dance: Taking Flight in Midlife while we were members in the same writing group, and contributed greatly to my effort.
As the NC Writers Network so aptly puts it “no one writes alone.” |
