# Meet R.K. Roberts

*The storyteller behind the novels*

Hi there! R.K. Roberts here. It's a pleasure to meet you.

If there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I have very little patience for formality, especially when someone comes to visit.

So come on in. Sit wherever you like. Help yourself to something from the refrigerator, pour a cup of coffee, and make yourself at home. Around here, there's no need to stand on ceremony.

I suppose that tells you something about my upbringing in the Upper Midwest. Wisconsin, to be precise.

I grew up in one of those little towns where everybody knew everybody, or at least knew somebody who did. I attended the same school from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and our family lived eight miles outside town, in a country house perched on a hill overlooking the surrounding farms and fields.

To a young boy, that hill seemed enormous, with a view that stretched almost forever.

Funny how the hills of our childhood seem to grow smaller when we return to them as adults.

Our home sat along good old County Road O, surrounded by the countryside and the kind of neighbors who made rural life so memorable. It was there, on what I still affectionately call the prairie, that I met some of the most remarkable characters I've ever known.

And believe me, there were characters.

I remember a bull getting loose in our front yard, leaving us unable to venture outside. Another time, when I was about ten, I was helping corral a horse when Kenny, one of our neighbors, instructed me to stand my ground, even if that horse came charging straight toward me.

I can still hear him saying it. I'm not entirely certain it was the best advice!

And then there were the cows. Good heavens, the cows. I couldn't begin to count the number of times we helped neighbors round up cattle that had decided the grass was greener somewhere beyond the fence.

But of all the people I remember, one of my favorites was old Mr. Engles.

He was a farmer who, even in his seventies, still worked at the town lumberyard. He occasionally enlisted my help baling hay or shoveling heavy Wisconsin snow from the roof of the trailer home where he lived, not far from the barn. The old farmhouse where he had grown up still stood nearby, though time had made it unfit to live in.

I can still picture that farmstead.

Mr. Engles belonged to a generation of hardworking people who rarely complained, expected you to pull your weight, and understood the importance of looking after one another.

Those neighbors became more than neighbors. They became family.

And that mattered enormously, especially after my father died, not long after we had moved to our country home on the hill.

Looking back, I realize just how much those people gave us. Their kindness, their humor, their peculiarities, their generosity, and their quiet strength became part of the fabric of my childhood.

I didn't know it then, but they were also teaching me how to tell stories.

## From Country Road O to Washington, D.C.

Life has taken me a long way from that little house on the hill.

These days, I make my home in the Washington, D.C., area, where I've spent much of my professional life working in government affairs, international diplomacy, and humanitarian development. I've had the privilege of serving as an American diplomat, working on international food assistance and development, and leading government relations efforts for a prominent organization dedicated to ending hunger.

It's a world rather different from the farms and country roads of my childhood, though perhaps not as different as you might imagine.

Whether sitting across from diplomats, walking the halls of Congress, or sharing a conversation with a farmer back home in Wisconsin, I've discovered that people are endlessly fascinating.

Their ambitions, convictions, contradictions, kindness, and occasional foolishness make for wonderful stories.

And while I prefer to keep my professional life and my fiction writing separate, I suspect the storyteller in me has been quietly paying attention all along.

## The People Behind My Stories

The simple truth is this: **I write, in many ways, for the people I've known.**

For the neighbors who became family. For the unforgettable personalities who crossed my path, sometimes for years and sometimes for only a moment. For the people who showed extraordinary courage in ordinary circumstances, and for those whose lives were far more complicated than they first appeared.

I've always been fascinated by what makes people tick. The things they believe, the secrets they keep, the kindness they show, and the surprising ways they respond when life doesn't go according to plan.

Many of those impressions have stayed with me for decades.

I can still recall the landscapes of my childhood with remarkable clarity. The rolling countryside, the sound of gravel beneath tires, the smell of freshly cut hay, the creaking of an old barn, and the stillness of a winter morning after a heavy snowfall.

Those sights, sounds, and memories have become an extraordinary gift to me as a writer.

They help me paint pictures with words and breathe life into the fictional worlds I create.

Whether a story unfolds on a farm in the American South, along a busy street in New York City, or somewhere across the Atlantic in London, the inspiration often begins with the people and places I've known.

Now, before any old neighbors begin worrying that they'll recognize themselves in one of my novels, let me offer a little reassurance.

I'm not in the business of putting anyone's private life on public display!

My characters are inventions of the imagination. They may carry a familiar mannerism, a bit of humor, a certain stubbornness, or the warmth of someone I once knew, but they are entirely their own people.

It's not so much about recreating a person as it is about capturing something true about being human.

And that, to me, is where fiction becomes magical.

## Stories Worth Getting Lost In

I love a novel that pulls me in so completely that I forget the world around me.

The kind of book where the characters become real, the stakes feel personal, and you find yourself reading just one more chapter long after you intended to turn out the light.

That's the experience I want to give my readers.

My fiction is inspired by the tradition of Classic Americana, but my imagination knows few boundaries. I'm drawn to compelling characters, suspense, mystery, the complexities of human nature, and the timeless struggles between good and evil.

I believe the best stories entertain us first, but they can also make us think, feel, laugh, grieve, and occasionally see the world a little differently.

Above all, I want my novels to be stories you genuinely love reading.

Stories that transport you. Characters who surprise you. Places so vividly imagined that you can almost hear the wind in the trees or feel the floorboards creak beneath your feet.

And perhaps a few twists along the way that you never saw coming.

## Come On In. There's a Story Waiting.

So when you pick up one of my novels, I hope you'll find yourself somewhere wonderful.

Perhaps you're curled up beside a crackling fire on a cold winter evening. Maybe you're sitting at the end of a pier overlooking a beautiful Wisconsin lake, or enjoying a cup of coffee in a little café in New York or Chicago.

Wherever you are, I hope the story carries you someplace else entirely.

A place filled with people you'll come to know, characters you'll root for, perhaps a few you'll want to shake some sense into, and others you'll wish you could invite over for supper.

And if I've done my job well, perhaps you'll find yourself wishing you could climb right into the pages and spend a little more time with them.

After all, that's one of the marvelous things about reading.

With a little imagination, a willing heart, and perhaps a touch of childlike wonder, there really is no limit to where a good story can take us.

**My greatest ambition is to create characters you'll love to meet, welcome into your home, and remember long after you've turned the final page.**

So make yourself at home. I'm glad you're here.

And when you're ready, there's a story waiting for you.

*— R.K. Roberts*

The literary influences and storytelling philosophy of R.K. Robert

I write in a tradition I like to call Classic Americana.

I'm not entirely certain that phrase carries the same meaning it once did, but to me, it represents something timeless: stories deeply rooted in the human experience, rich with memorable characters, moral complexity, hardship, hope, and the enduring spirit of ordinary people living extraordinary lives.

Think of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, or John Grisham's A Time to Kill. And then there is Stephen King, a master storyteller whose remarkable understanding of human nature transcends genre.

These authors remind us that great fiction is about far more than plot. It is about people.

The finest novels explore the good and evil within society. They capture the struggles, triumphs, injustices, and contradictions of their time. They offer us a window into history, but more importantly, into the hearts of those who lived it.

We come to love certain characters, despise others, and sometimes find ourselves unexpectedly sympathetic to people we never imagined we could understand. We experience their fears, their grief, their courage, and their joy. For a few precious hours, we inhabit another world.

That is the kind of storytelling I aspire to create.

I grew up surrounded by stories.

In my family, tales passed from grandparents to grandchildren reached back well into the nineteenth century. There were stories of civil wars, ocean crossings to America, horse-and-buggy journeys, unimaginable tragedies, and extraordinary triumphs. These weren't simply accounts of history. They were the lives of people whose courage, sacrifice, and determination helped shape the generations that followed.

I remember elderly Jewish friends of my parents sitting me down, looking directly into my eyes, and telling me never to forget the Holocaust. I have never forgotten those conversations, nor the solemn responsibility they placed upon me.

I remember the veterans of the First and Second World Wars marching proudly in small-town American parades. As a boy, I admired them. As a man, I wish I could go back and thank them, shake their hands, or embrace them one more time. Those my family knew are now gone, but their stories remain.

And there are heroes among us still, whose stories deserve to be heard.

Yet the American story is not one of triumph alone.

It is also the story of slavery, racial injustice, the Dust Bowl, the mistreatment of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and the long struggle for equal rights and human dignity.

Some chapters of our history fill us with pride. Others should humble us profoundly.

We cannot erase the painful chapters, nor should we wish to forget them. They are part of our collective inheritance, and understanding them is essential to understanding ourselves.

To me, this too is Classic Americana.

The beauty and the brokenness. The courage and the cruelty. The failures and the redemption. The extraordinary possibilities found within ordinary lives.

These are stories worth telling. And retelling.

Fiction offers something remarkable that history alone sometimes cannot.

It allows us to step inside the lives of people we have never met, to imagine what they feared, what they cherished, what they sacrificed, and what gave them the strength to carry on.

A good novel can transport us to another place. A great one can leave a part of that place within us forever.

When I write, I am drawn to the goodness that persists even in difficult times. I believe there is something extraordinary about America, not because our history is without blemish, but because of the courage, generosity, faith, resilience, and capacity for renewal that have so often defined its people.

There are many competing narratives about America today. My ambition is not to ignore its troubles, but to explore the humanity that lives beneath them.

I want to write about people who struggle, stumble, love, lose, forgive, and sometimes find their way home.

Above all, I want to create characters who feel real. Characters whose voices stay with you long after the final page.

My Christian faith is inseparable from the way I see the world, and naturally, it influences the stories I tell.

I believe in God's grace, in the redemptive power of love, and in the extraordinary worth of every human life. I am endlessly fascinated by the struggle between good and evil, the consequences of our choices, and the possibility of forgiveness and redemption.

These are among the oldest themes in human storytelling, woven throughout Scripture and retold across centuries in countless forms.

But I do not believe a novel must preach to reveal truth.

Sometimes truth is found in a quiet act of kindness, an unexpected sacrifice, a deeply flawed character who chooses to do what is right, or a moment of grace when all hope seems lost.

These are the moments I love most in fiction.

And they are the moments I hope to bring to life in my own work.

My literary influences reach across generations, genres, and even continents.

David Wroblewski's The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and William Paul Young's The Shack are two novels I particularly admire for their emotional depth, imagination, and exploration of love, loss, faith, and the human spirit.

But if I were to cross the Atlantic and name one of my greatest literary influences, it would be Agatha Christie.

What a remarkable storyteller she was.

Christie understood something essential: a compelling story does not need to be burdened by unnecessary words. Her plots were ingenious, her characters distinctive, and her storytelling wonderfully accessible. She could draw readers into a mystery so completely that the world around them seemed to disappear.

I admire that enormously.

Whenever I find myself becoming overly descriptive or complicating a scene, I think of her extraordinary gift for clarity, pacing, and suspense.

How I wish I could have taken a writing class with Agatha Christie! Since that is no longer possible, I have sought wisdom from other accomplished authors, including Margaret Atwood, whose insights into the craft I greatly admire.

And then there are the great creators of unforgettable worlds: Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and J.K. Rowling.

Their imaginations remind me that fiction has no boundaries. A writer can build an entire universe, populate it with characters who feel as real as our neighbors, and invite readers into a place they will never quite forget.

If even a small measure of their imagination, discipline, and storytelling genius finds its way into my work, I will consider myself fortunate.

I cannot promise that every reader will love every character I create. Nor would I presume that every story I tell will resonate with everyone who opens one of my books.

But I can promise this:

I will strive to write stories with heart, imagination, honesty, and purpose.

Stories that honor the complexity of the human experience. Stories that remember where we have been while imagining where we might yet go. Stories filled with people who are imperfect, sometimes exasperating, occasionally heroic, and always human.

And perhaps, if I have done my work well, you will come to know a few of these characters so intimately that you will think of them as old friends.

Because above all else, my ambition as a novelist is simple: to create characters you will love to meet, invite into your home, and remember long after you've turned the final page.

— R.K. Robert