Byway Souvenir

The Road Remembers.

From the cornfields of the Midwest to the cotton rows of the Mississippi Delta, from the chiseled grandeur of France to the emerald hills and flatlands of Arkansas, Byway Souvenir traces the backroads of a distinctly American life.

Author Richard Massey spent five years and 50,000 miles riding the Greyhound, and tacked on an extra 5,000 when he hitchhiked across country in 1993. He spent fifteen years as a small-town newspaper reporter, so he's been to plenty of ancient courthouses, covered dozens of murder trials, and even went out on a dawn raid with the high sheriff of Coahoma County. Along the way he witnesses a country caught in the twilight glow of the old world -- just before smartphones and the internet remade everything.

With a poet's instinct, Massey brings readers into LATEXIOSSIPPISAWCUTYONIA, pronounced LA-TEX-IO-SSIPPI-SAW-CUT-YON-IA, the personal country he built out of every place he's called home: Louisiana, Texas, Ohio, Mississippi, Arkansas, Connecticut, Lyon, and California. It's a landscape stitched together by the lonesome highway.

In this series of micro-stories, you'll meet the people who shaped this rollicking journey: friends and family, the girl that got away, and above all, his mom, who throughout Massey's adventures, was always just a phone call away.

Funny, rugged, and deeply human, Byway Souvenir is a memoir about the experiences that formed one man -- and about an America that once felt a little smaller, a little stranger, and a lot more alive.