A Closer Look
"There's a strong tradition of storytelling in the South, and I grew up listening to that great southern regional voice."
Roy Owen, MBA '72
Deloitte & Touche, Atlanta, Georgia
Southern storyteller finds a voice
The literary world has always had writers with dual careers: doctors who write novels (Walker Percy), insurance executives who write poetry (Wallace Stevens), lawyers who write blockbuster best-sellers (Scott Turow). Now, Roy Owen , MBA '72, is hoping to add real estate consultant/children's author to the list.
"Consultants don't have quite the exciting subject matter that lawyers have," concedes Owen, whose first book, The Ibis and the Egret , was published in 1993 by Putnam. "There's yet to be a steamy real estate consultant's novel, for example -- there's not enough sex and violence."
Owen has worked for Deloitte & Touche as a consultant specializing in bankruptcy and reorganization since 1990. Before that, he worked as an independent real estate consultant for 13 years. "Basically, I'm trying to take a difficult situation and make it better. You rarely make things great, you just make them better. So writing is a nice counterpoint to that." Owen has had the kind of success first-time writers dream about: The Ibis and the Egret was a Children's Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and his second book, My Night Forest , will be published by Macmillan in September.
How did a bankruptcy expert come to write children's books? "When my daughters, Hadley and Bryn, were young, I enjoyed children's books and bedtime stories -- there's something magic about that time. At a certain point, I realized that books get written by people. I started writing recreationally; on Saturday mornings I would sit down with a cup of coffee and spend a couple of hours writing."
Owen started The Ibis and the Egret one spring morning in 1982. It is a charming tale of a talkative ibis and a taciturn egret who debate the merits of the changing seasons on the marsh. ( Publishers Weekly said, "Evoking a quiet, still appreciation for nature, this book may quell the day's bustle and provide a gentle segue into sleep.")
"I was inspired to write The Ibis and the Egret by the beauty of springtime in Charleston, with that pervasive humidity carrying the smells of the surrounding tidal marshes. You can feel the tides and the salt air. I started writing down a conversation that began, 'I think spring is my favorite season....' I didn't know where it was going, but somehow I decided the character should be something more appealing than a Stanford MBA. I like the words ibis and egret, and that's where the next line led, until I had worked through the seasons. I wrote for a half hour every morning and finished it in about a week."
It took seven days for Owen to write the book and almost a decade to find a publisher. "I started trying to market the book, sending out the manuscript to various publishing houses. I got some personal rejection letters but no acceptances, so I put the book away. Then, in 1991, a writer friend gave me the name of an agent in New York who specialized in children's books. I sent her a note that said, in essence, 'I've got something in my drawer that I thought would be published posthumously. Any opportunity to get it out prehumously would be most appreciated.' Within two weeks she had sold the book."
Owen credits his affinity for language to his southern upbringing. "There's a strong tradition of storytelling in the South, and I grew up listening to that great southern regional voice. In high school I won three essay contests, yet the bell never went off in my head that this was something I could do for a living. Instead, I went to Georgia Tech ('68), because in the early sixties, kids were encouraged to go into the space race -- that's where the best and the brightest were going.
"When I got to Stanford Business School, one of the things that appealed to me was the fact that I could take courses in other disciplines. I took a class in Faulkner, and being a Southerner, I really had my eyes opened. I remember reading The Bear , which had me in tears, and then heading off to William Sharpe's investment class. It was a wonderful juxtaposition. It was hard to go one-dimensional after being at the GSB in the seventies. People were very idealistic and entrepreneurial.
"I believe there's more to life than just a single career. There was a day recently when I was shuttling back and forth between Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was engaged in intensive business meetings all day long, and I got a call from my editor at Macmillan saying, 'On page 5, would you consider changing forest to meadow?' It's nice to have that contrast in my life. Writing books is my reach for immortality -- or at least a card in the Library of Congress."
Julie Carlson
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