– I was taken aback, dumbstruck.

As we rolled through the desolate neighborhoods of Los Angeles, the steward walked by and handed me a ticket with the letter “F” on it.

During his career as an industrial engineer, John Rumbold, wrote several technical papers for presentation at conferences. Since retiring, he has spent ten years working on a creative non-fiction account of his mother’s experiences during the 1930s living on a rubber plantation in Sumatra, a story she only shared with him in his adulthood. John studied writing in Los Angeles, where he lived, with noted writing teachers and published pieces through Orange County Writers (Calif.). John now lives in Mooresville, North Carolina and is a member of the North Carolina Writer’s Network.