As Parks wrote on his Facebook page, seeing that his play had been so acclaimed unleashed surprising emotion.  “I thought I might pass out. There was applause that I wanted to rise to meet but my legs were too unsteady. All I could do was sit there and try my best not to openly weep. I know that sounds silly. A grown man crying over something like this...but it means a lot to me so cut me some slack.”

Parks was prompted to write a play after he saw a production of a work last year at Hempstead Hall by UAHT English faculty member Hollis Thompson.  “I thought to myself, maybe I could give play writing a try. I know it's going to be different from screenwriting and way different from novel writing, but it'll give me another avenue to try to hold my craft.”

The result was When the World Ends, excerpts of which can be seen performed in what is called a table-reading at the festival in Tyler this past weekend.  The play concerns a woebegone office worker named Harvey Wilson who receives a message from a seeming angel named Betty who appears to him one night a dream. She tells him the world’s end is coming in one year.  This causes Harvey to think very seriously about what to do with the remaining time. Should he tell that co-worker he is in love with how he feels? Should he make a bigger effort to get what he wants from life like his gregarious friend Larry? 

The plot is a working out of Harvey’s response to this news in the form of decisions made and predicaments created.  The idea came to Parks in a similar way to how Betty’s message came to Harvey.  “He goes on a little bit of a journey of going way too far one way, and then having to be brought back by circumstances that happened to him, which I won't completely spoil because I hope to produce this play here locally in the next year or so, hopefully. But that was the crux of it, and it's like a lot of the stuff that I write upon waking up, or [based on] a piece of a dream or just an idea.”

Parks’ 48 years of being raised in Little Rock, then Southwest Arkansas, then working in law enforcement and raising two children himself have given him the reserve of experience from which those ideas emerge.  To begin with, he was very nearly born inside a Gremlin.  

“My father was a Little Rock police officer. That's where we lived,” Parks explained. “When my mom went into labor, my grandparents lived down here in Blevins. And the doctor told my mother that she wasn't ready and to go home and wait. And she told my dad no. So he drove us from Little Rock to Hope in a 74 AMC Gremlin. Ten minutes after he pulled into the Hempstead County Memorial Hospital, I was born. So I was nearly born in the floorboard of a Gremlin.”

At five, his parents moved him to Blevins, where he went to school, eventually graduating from Blevins High.  He had come from two generations of police, his grandfather wearing the uniform for the Hempstead County Sheriff’s Department and his father working for the LRPD.  Parks himself served with the Hempstead County Sheriff as a deputy starting in 2010, then with the Hope PD from 2013 to 2021.  Following that came the identity crisis that led him toward writing. He took a year off “re-establishing my brainspace,” then did a year-long stint with 911 dispatch and now is senior officer for the UAHT campus police.

It was at the UAHT police station that we sat down to talk at a table in the back where officers take their breaks.  I asked how Parks’ background in policing influenced his writing.  As he explained it, writing actually allowed him to escape a bit from the rough realities of his life at the time but also helped him purge the feelings and thoughts in a way he needed.  

“Well, I needed to take some time away, because I was just overwhelmed, my emotions, my mind and everything, two divorces. I tried to do some therapy. Just wasn't working for me. I sat down behind a computer and started to write. Now, I've always written, but I started trying to really sharpen the craft after that. So about 2022 or so, I was really needing to get rid of some stuff. Lead some stuff off.  I wrote my first novel, which is called What Is and What Should Never Be,” Parks said.

In the book, monsters from the old Universal Studios films of the 1930s and 40s show up in an anthology, each one embodying a particular kind of mental disturbance. Eventually, the stories join together in an overarching plot. 

From that point came a deluge of work, all of which, except for what he is working on now, are available as eBooks and in copies at the Hempstead County Public Library.  “I'm all self-published, but I'm on Amazon. But since then, I've written seven more novels and one memoir, a memoir of my time in being in law enforcement, and not mainly, but also some of my early life. I've also written three novellas under a pen name that I've started as a joke and dark comedy. Everything else I write is pretty much either sci-fi, horror or a combination of the two,” Parks said.

His most recent release, Homer Allen, has a tie to his second hometown of Blevins, whose name, Parks told me, has been changed to Homer Allen, after that of a late uncle. “I made a little bit of a fictional world within a real world. So it's about a small town in southwest Arkansas that has a lot of the Blevins reflection to it. But it's Homer Allen. It's its own thing. I replaced Hope with De Roan. I replaced Prescott with Midway.”

In the book’s preface, the author himself is visiting a cousin living in Homer Allen to dispense with the inheritance from his grandmother of a half-acre that is home to a particular Catalpa tree in the backyard of the house the cousin is now living in.  In its bark is carved HOMER ALLEN POP 85.  Deciding to visit the tree one last time before turning over the deed to his cousin, Parks finds a lunchbox buried in the dirt near the tree’s roots.  

Unearthing it, discovering with chagrin that it’s not the Dukes of Hazard lunchbox he remembers from childhood, and shaking off its lock, Parks finds three cassette tapes inside.  When he plays them, the uncanny story told on the tapes by an insurance investigator about his adventures in the far-from sleepy town in the 1970s takes over. What follows is what the description on amazon.com calls “an account of murder, intrigue, sex and body mutilation.” 

Describing how the play came about, Parks confesses to feeling a little shamefaced about trying a genre thought of so seriously.  He said he thinks of himself as a pulp writer who puts out the sort of material once bought in bus stations and discarded on the Greyhound seat as soon as finished.  But seeing UAHT instructor Hollis Thompson’s play presented made him want to try writing for the stage himself.  Now that his play has won Tyler Theatre’s New Play Festival, with Parks looking on as it was read and voted on by the audience with applause, he looks forward to seeing it performed in Tyler in the spring of 2026. 

“They will do full auditions and select the director and do sets the whole nine yards. It'll be a full- fledged production,” Parks said.  See this website for dates and times.

Here is a sampler of Parks’ work.  Here he is writing in the persona of Pepples W. McMurphy, the narrator of the Misadventures of Harvey Walbanger trilogy:

Truth or Fact?

By P. McMurphy

Fact or Truth? Well, Mr. McMurphy, aren’t they fundamentally the same thing?

Let’s put a pin in that question for a few moments. Indulge me in a few lines of contemplation about the very language we speak, read and sometimes even write. Not that I’m exactly writing this. I’m typing it. So, am I a writer or am I a typist? Does it really matter if it gets me to the same place? After all, I can drive from DeRoan to Homer Allen using several different routes.  What does it matter which I use? Not that I’m all that interested in getting to Homer Allen. No shade being thrown toward that sleepy little community, I just don’t like leaving the house much these days.  

Just like the highways, country roads and deer trails we all use to get from one place to another, our language can meander around the point. Just as I seem to be doing now. We can get quite lost along the way, if we aren’t careful. I’m a writer, an author, a journalist at times (a poor one in more than one sense of the word) but to most people it all means the same thing. I put my thoughts and more often than not, my imaginings, on paper or computer screens for others to read. Yet each word means something different to me. I would explain each word as it pertains to me but that’s not what this little musing is all about.  Suffice it to say, trying to traverse your way through the English language can sometimes have the appeal of trying to figure out how to play ET: The Extra Terrestrial on the Attari 2600. Or for those born after the 1970’s trying to send a text message using a Motorola RAZR. It can be done but it’s a pain in the rear and more often than not, we take a short cut that limits our understanding of what we are doing or have done.

With that said, lets not get lost in the sauce regarding fact and truth. Facts by and large are objective things. A Goliath Bird-eating Spider has eight legs and is thought to be the world’s largest spider. These are facts as we know them. Not that it couldn’t change tomorrow. We could find an unknown species and that would change the facts. It doesn’t change what we knew only what we know now. It forces us to see a bigger picture.

Truth is our perception of a fact or facts. Truth is very much subjective, even if a multitude of people share it. The grass is green. To those of us who aren’t color blind this would seem like truth. To those who can’t see the color green, it means little to nothing. Their truth is that the grass is gray and that’s just fine with them. What if I said that grass isn’t green or gray because it’s only how the grass absorbs the light and our human eyes’ ability to detect that color that makes it green. To another species of life, with different eyes, it might be pink.  I was once married to a woman who could only see the color purple. Can you imagine that for a moment? Everything is a drab shade of gray then there is a splash of purple. Seriously, close your eyes and think about it. On second thought, read the rest of this first. If I lose your attention now I might not get it back. 

Now that we’ve meandered down County Road 217 crossed over to CR 23 and have hit the home stretch down Highway 29 North, I suppose its time to hit you with the point of this rambling, half coherent and (probably) ill-advised article.  Are you ready? Are you sure? Ok then.

Knee jerk outrage does not equal righteous indignation.

We live in a world where we are in a constant state of information overload. Before we’ve had time to fully process something we are bombarded with a rising tide of assumptions and opinions. Most of them with no connection to fact but are presented as truth just the same. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pointing any fingers. We’ve all been guilty of it (some more than others). Most of us who hurt ourselves jumping to conclusions or making assumptions based on faux intellectualism mean no harm. When we discover a mistake or a new fact that helps to change our perception of truth, we do the right thing and apologize. 

But there are others…

In the last couple of months our community has been hit with a couple of controversies that have hit us hard. The outcry has been deafening. Calls from all over the country have come in to demand repercussions. The problem is that those calls came from people who had a knee-jerk emotional reaction rather than a measured educated response. Who can blame them? It’s easy to get caught up in something with only half truths and whole opinions. We should all be civically minded enough to voice our concerns but what good are we doing when we just spit in the wind.  When we ignore fact for a perceived truth, we do just that, spit in the wind.

When I was knee high to a grasshopper, as the graybeards used to say, (I supposed I’m one of them now, and what a wonderfully exclusive club that has become), never judge a man before you walk a mile in his shoes. 

Before we have a big old ice cold glass of Hater-Aid we should spend some time understanding what’s going on.

Facts and truths. 

Reality and Perception.

They say measure twice and cut once. I say consider twice and speak once. 

But what do I know…