“I always did tell stories to my siblings and to my kids,” said Robert Johnson. “That’s how these books started, me telling stories.”
Johnson, 70, is a man who’s been around. He served in the military — four years in the Air Force followed by a long stint in the Air National Guard — and still works as a civilian at Columbus Air Force Base. He’s also worked for Tennessee Gas Pipeline, and even dealt cards at the Silver Star.
Along the way, though, the Louisville, Kentucky native got into something else, something that might not be the obvious guess given that résumé: writing children’s books.
“When my granddaughter, Beyonce, was about six, we were sitting at the kitchen table and I was telling a story and she was drawing pictures,” Johnson said. “That was about 15 years ago. Then back in 2022 I was at work one day and I said I was going to finish that story and make it a book.”
Johnson said he went home and got some scratch paper and sat down with it.
“I vaguely remembered how we (told the story) and then I just tweaked it,” he said. “That’s how I wrote the first book in this series, ‘The Nut That Saved My Life.’”
That book is the first of a planned 12-volume series called “The World Thru the Eyes of the Squirrels.” The first book is already out, and the second will be released late this year.
“Once I sat down to write (the first book) I was just in the mode of writing,” Johnson said. “I wrote all 12 of them, right after the other.”
The books follow the lives of squirrels living among redwoods, and each one has a message for the reader, Johnson said.
“(The first book) teaches kids not to go too far from home, because they’ll get in trouble,” Johnson said. “I also want children to see we can all live together and be as one people. There’s not hate in a child, and they don’t see color when they’re growing up. It’s all built in by the idiot adults.”
Johnson said he had always wanted to write, and went so far as to write a novel back in the mid-1990s. He never published it.
“I enjoy writing,” he said. “Once my mind gets to flowing, I’m talking about it just comes. … It’s like somebody turns a camera on in my head.”
A lot of the raw footage for that camera came from a long RV trip Johnson took with his family.
“We took a 6,000-mile trip around the country,” he said. “Wherever we would go I would watch the squirrels and the chipmunks and the little animals. The trees in the books are redwoods because I really loved seeing the redwood trees when we were out there.”
That RV is still a big part of Johnson’s process, he said.
“It’s quiet,” he said. “It’s a place where I can go to think. I don’t like to write in the house. I need to be relaxed, and then I can just turn it on. I’ll go get me a glass of water and sit out there for about 15 minutes and then all of a sudden click, the camera comes on and it’ll flow all the way until I’m through.”
Once the epic of the squirrels is finished, Johnson said he intends to continue writing children’s books.
“I’m going to start something else after all 12 of these come out,” he said. “It’ll be different characters, but they’ll be children’s books.”
Brian Jones is the local government reporter for Columbus and Lowndes County.
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