About Alvah Arts

     My wife, Lynn, and I met at Kennett High School in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania in 1975, when I was a seventeen-year-old senior and she was a twenty-five-year-old ninth-grade English teacher. No, she was never my teacher, at least not in school.
     We met in study hall where I was pretending to study, and she was a study hall monitor. We started talking and discovered that we both loved to read, and we also shared a deep appreciation for poetry and music. She played clarinet and oboe, and I had been teaching myself the guitar for several years and singing since I was a toddler. We started writing songs together, her poetry set to my guitar chord patterns and tunes. This eventually became our first company, Alvah Music, and we copyrighted more than a dozen songs.
     Flash forward more than ten years to where I found myself repairing medical equipment in a hospital. In that environment I saw and experienced many things that I thought were funny, interesting, and worth writing about. I began taking notes and talking about them with Lynn. This became the impetus for my first book, Kirkwood, and Lynn became my editor.
     After that I wrote my second book, Esbenshade, which was about my experience as an EMT. We called the genre 'autobiographical fiction', fictional stories based on my actual experiences.
     My third book, Rollover, is a chronicle of my learning to deal with disability. As always, Lynn was right there helping me deal with both my disability and how to tell my story.
     The fourth book, Roadwork, revisits the first three years of our relationship from 1975 to 1978. It's a book that I've long wanted to write with Lynn, not as editor, but as my co-author. The story required both of us. It came to incorporate humor, adventure and mystery, and of course, it had to be sexy in quite a few places. With the publication of Roadwork, Alvah Music became Alvah Arts.

     JAB