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Always Smart… Often Irreverent.
Books and stories about how one thing becomes another.
I’m Drew Tolbert, an Alabama author and storyteller who spends an unreasonable amount of time asking:
How did THAT become THIS?
A small decision becomes a life-changing moment. A family story becomes a tradition.
A forgotten solution becomes “the way we’ve always done it.”
I like pulling those threads and seeing where they go.
What are you looking for?
Books & Fiction
Clean, character-driven stories about friendship, time, consequences, regret, and the tiny decisions that change everything.
Start with the Oak Tree Series, a coming-of-age time-travel story rooted in Alabama.
Stories & Rabbit Holes
Personal stories, observations, humor, family history, small-town Alabama, memory, strange assumptions, and the occasional idea that gets way more complicated than expected.
Some are thoughtful. Some are ridiculous. The better ones manage to be both.
The short version
I grew up in Corner, Alabama, and now live in Pell City.
I write novels and stories. Some of them make you think. Some of them involve livestock. Occasionally it’s both.
My favorite kind of story usually begins with something that looks completely unimportant.
Then you pull the thread.
And suddenly the thing that looked small explains everything.
Books
If you prefer getting lost in a story, start here.
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Under the Oak Tree:
A coming-of-age story built around friendship, regret, and a mysterious path through time. -
Leaving the Oak Tree:
The story expands as time travel becomes less of a mystery and more of a problem. -
Beyond the Oak Tree:
The consequences grow larger as the story moves beyond the oak tree itself.
I’m also writing Cornered, a humorous memoir about growing up in rural Alabama and discovering that the little moments of a life have a habit of stacking up.
The idea at the center of it:
Nothing is isolated. One small thing compounds.
The story under the story
Most things have one.
The company policy nobody remembers creating.
The family tradition everybody assumes has always existed.
The five minutes that looked ordinary until you learned what happened next.
Those are the stories I’m interested in.
Not because every little thing is secretly profound.
But because sometimes the only way to understand where we are is to figure out how we got here.
Still rooted in Alabama
I grew up in a place called Corner.
The name is not metaphorical.
It sits where counties meet.
Growing up there gave me a lifelong appreciation for small towns, family stories, local legends, churches, strange traditions, and people who can give you directions without knowing the name of a single road.
A lot of my stories still begin there, even when they end somewhere completely different.
Pick a thread.
Read a book.
Find a story.
Wander down a rabbit hole.
You don’t need to know where it goes yet.
That’s usually the interesting part.