About
About Tom Yancey
Hi! Welcome to my web page! I hope you’ll take time to look around. Let me introduce myself. I’m retired from a career of sorts in community journalism, so I have more time to do what I love most and that’s reading and writing. I’ve had one manuscript or another cooking (on the side) for years.
I grew up in Kingsport, Tenn. My early education was interrupted (and broadened) by service as a U.S. Navy hospital corpsman in California, Japan, Vietnam and Florida. On the GI bill I earned a degree in biology with a minor in journalism which allowed me to earn my living working for newspapers and freelancing. I learned and practiced the newspaper craft in Tennessee, Florida, Mississippi and North Carolina, and received a few awards for deadline and non-deadline writing, and for a personal column. For a time I wrote or ghost-wrote and edited industrial newsletters, speeches, trade journal articles and so forth. Today my wife and I live in the mountains of East Tennessee, but we have also lived by the Gulf of Mexico and the Chesapeake Bay, where she grew up.
A short book I wrote last year and revised last month is now available on Kindle. It’s about my Dad, a car he built while in high school in 1930, and a skunk. You can read the first chapter of The Speedster and the Skunk on this site.
I’m working on a romance novel about a doctor in England in the early nineteenth century. Simultaneously I’m writing a children’s book about dolphins.
I have been fascinated by dolphins since I was 10, when I sat quietly as one lingered beside me for half an hour at Marineland in Florida. Nellie the dolphin that died there recently may have been the one, since she was at Marineland at that time, 1956. As an adult I got to know and learned from the late Milton Santini, who had caught and trained an unusually smart bottlenose dolphin he called Mitzi. Mitzi became the first movie “Flipper.” An adventure novel with dolphins and pirates is in progress, and I plan to self-publish it as well.
I also write and post short essays, blogs if you will. Some of them are on this site. Look around!