Richard Mills Allen’s résumé reads like a road atlas. He hauled wheelbarrows at a truck yard in Montana, flipped burgers in a small Kentucky diner, and deciphered foreign dialects for the Navy in Monterey. In Georgia he sifted classified chatter for the NSA; back home he pulled night shifts as a volunteer firefighter. He chased protest lines for a metropolitan daily, filled quiet airwaves on rural radio, ghost-wrote for political campaigns, worked discreetly in funeral homes, and produced live video feeds when distance kept people apart.

Between jobs he thumbed rides across the West—Vegas to Flagstaff, Denver to Butte, Albuquerque to Chicago—gathering stories the way others collect postcards. From Richmond to Paris, Augusta to Helena, his routes keep expanding. Now he writes screenplays: spare, candid, and stamped with every mile he’s traveled and every face he’s met.