by Royce Rigdon

The book of short stories called Desert Rose was compiled of musings, poems, songs and tales that the author began writing out of real life experiences years ago. In High School, Royce Clayton Rigdon was smaller than the other children and often kept to himself. He was a moody boy and often wrote songs or stories as an escape from the real world. These adventures became an avenue to explore things that were often kept hidden in the rural south.

Growing up amidst the farming communities of the rural south before they first began prospering in the early 60’s, the author witnessed first hand the effects of death on the human psyche. Witnessing his father die in a farm-work related accident while working with a close kinsman from a distance too close for a five year old to fully comprehend, Royce learned early how to escape from that which was confusing him. From this realm of fantasy, the five year old began dealing with the issues of a life relative to a young family of four suddenly without a father. Surviving these foundational events in his life while grappling with stepfathers and other father figures who failed to understand the terrible sickness that befalls a five year old who has seen the terrible slaying of someone he loved more than life, became a real challenge. But the first time he put a pencil to paper to write about a dream he had, the author knew he found a way to express these challenges.

Royce started looking at things from another world, and it seemed that there were two realities always competing with one another. There was the outer realm that many families kept propped up as a socially acceptable religious veneer but there was the inner life that was always threatening to expose this façade where these same families might be suffering from abusive drinking, spousal fighting, and carrying on other hidden agendas that revealed an undercurrent of dark dissatisfaction with life. This was the way of life for so many and it became obvious to the author that the baby boom would certainly go off into history with just that, a boom and a loud commotion.

The small boy grew as big as others and the friction between these two realms of what is hidden and what is hoisted up for everyone to see was even more manifest when the author had a religious experience in a rock and roll bar in 1980, and he lost the fear of speaking his mind. After discussing these issues with the pastor from the church he grew up in, Royce was told he only had an emotional experience and it meant nothing really. This experience so moved the author that he quit drinking and using drugs and began praying and studying the bible and reading every religious commentary he could get his hands on, yet he was told it was only emotional agitation. These events all combined to send the author out of society all together to find answers that at least he needed to find. His first adventure was the high mountain wilderness in Fairplay, Colorada in the mid 80’s. It was such a calamity that many new short stories grew out of it. Will St. Ronger is a work that actually began from this experience.

After returning to Georgia defeated, emotionally bankrupt and crippled from back surgery, a new prospect was offered. The author went back to college on a scholarship and became a Registered Nurse, but while in school he took all the English literature and creative writing classes he could finance. This inspired more writing, and as he lived and worked in the homeless shelters and halfway houses to support his schooling, even more stories developed. The characters that this author sees are not socially acceptable in society and many of them were found hidden amidst the ruins.

After a painful divorce and another journey to the wilderness in 1994, the author began life one more time and started a family in the four corners area of the southwest in the wilderness known as Disappointment valley where he lived from 94-98. This desert was mostly government owned wilderness on the Delores River and the names portrayed the life of the author. Delores means river of sorrows but amidst this river, a revelation of God began to emerge. The author was seeing wonderful things, but things he knew would not be acceptable to the present state of rising “prosperity teachings” and positive thinking philosophies prevalent in Christendom and in the business world. These philosophies were shaping government and society in general and this mindset was bound to make us all rich and bankrupt at the same time. So, while breaking wild horses in Colorado, the author wrote Concrete – present city of Utopia.

Concrete is almost science fiction and was the first work of a diversionary nature where issues may be hinted at that may be too obvious for many to see any other way. Royce’s books are like himself. They are seeing it from the outside in, and it seems the houses are all on fire in the city but those in the wilderness are learning to live without the chaos. This is at least the author’s view, but while breaking horses in Colorado, the man was broken and became more manageable.

The author loves mankind but hates the disease -- that beast that like a deep sea serpent slitherers along the muddy depths of the masses and cast up murky influences that corrode the psyche and swallow man in oblivion of moral decay and deformed images. Soon, a man will not be described as he was 40 years ago but will be some kind of morph between male and female and the animal kingdom. Though this will be a deformity, the intelligentsia will call it evolution.

While working on the Indian Reservations as a flight nurse between the years 95-96, the author lived in a camper in the desert with his beloved wife and small children among the Navajo Indians. It was a happy and moving experience and the author completed In Search of Will St. Ronger after seeing the failure of federal government answers to Indian affairs as seen thru the symptoms of alcoholism and suicide in the tribes. The delusion of false religious experiences and the effects of mood altering substances combined with a sense of failure displayed itself thru the ravages of reservation life, but the author seen the same life manifesting in evangelical Christendom also. Many false religious experiences were causing terrible damage to the whole concept of who and what God really is and how man is related to Him. It seemed that TV preachers were the problem, not the answer. The author finds a way to discuss it in a somewhat indirect way that is as much an adventure as it is an argument for change in the Desert Rose stories, the Lazareth prophesies, Concrete and others stories.

After returning to Georgia in 1997 under a dark cloud but after many visions, the author returned to work in the mental institutions of the south and became involved in evangelical church life again. Certainly many stories erupted from these experiences. After publishing Lazareth, the Last Lazarus and distributing it to many Christian lay persons and leaders, the author was read by others but became ostracized by the growing cult of the “get rich quick” evangelism that was sweeping the denominational churches. In its stead, he found a growing audience amidst many others who seemed to be outside of the camp. The Lazareth book was a direct argument against the “madness in Israel” but it was the last one written in this genre as the author enjoys the fiction more and has also found another level of writing.

From 2001-2004, the author studied the scriptures and taught bible classes at least two to five times per week and began writing short prose with many scriptural references. This is quite different that the stories but the response from the students and many other readers was quite surprising and showed that many people are truly hungry to learn what the bible is really saying in those places that many preachers never teach or preach from. Faces of the Temple, the Antichrist studies and the Coming Storms were all studies written during this time.

In 2006, the author once more closed down shop, closed down his church and moved to the wilderness of North Dakota and is currently living on a remote river near the Canadian border. The escape worked even better this time and as this writer feels more at home on this prairie than anywhere else, he completed two more books in the last year and started several more. He formed the Desert Rose Publications as a way to self publish and also distribute the audio and written bible studies. Since forming Desert Rose Publications, he has written Ark in the Phillistine Camp, Sons of Eleazar, Image of God, and is currently working on a project called Image of Woman. He will also be working in the mental health field as an RN but writing is his way of saying, “Things must change soon or the inmates will surely take over the house.” The growing mental health issues that manifest in ways as can be clearly seen on national news networks means that man’s spirit is sick, and his soul is dying. The heart certainly needs more than chicken soup, and there is healing outside the camp.