Macon Magazine

90 maconmagazine.com | October/November 2026 STORY BY LANE RICHARDSON | PHOTOS BY DSTO MOORE Macon Chose Me is a photo series by DSTO Moore highlighting residents who weren't born in Macon but actively chose to move here and enjoy positively representing the community. Eric O'Dell M A C O N C H O S E M E T he plan for interviewing Eric O'Dell was simple: meet at the Flying Biscuit Café and talk over a late breakfast. The day of, I got a message: "Lane, the Biscuit is temporarily closed, forgot about that fire. Can we meet in front of The Hummingbird at 11? I promise it'll make sense when we meet." In another life, I spent my nights making questionable decisions at The Bird, a downtown dive. I haven't been back in more than a decade, but you only live once. Eric pulled out a ring of keys. "My wife says I have too many," he said wryly. Three flights up was his studio, packed with the general clutter of a life spent making art. No AC, but he opened the windows and turned on a fan. I had a list of questions. It never le my pocket. For the next two and a half hours, Eric showed me the Macon that made him. "When I got to Mercer, I was terrified. I figured I would do my best to be a C student. If I failed, I'd bail." Things we take for granted as Maconites made a lasting first impression. "I went to a party at an Orange Street apartment, and just stood at the door with my jaw dropped. I had never seen ceilings this high in my life. I remember the crown molding. I was thinking, 'Oh my God, you could put a basketball goal in here.' Florida was all drop ceilings and ranch houses." That feeling never really wore off. "I think I was tuned into, subconsciously, that it was a place where stories can happen. Everything was so rooted in the past. Macon felt haunted, in good and bad ways. Just stories in every nook and cranny." He compared Macon to trying to draw Venice: "There's no place where your eyes can rest. You want to draw everything. Macon is like that with stories." Even farther back, it seemed like Macon was calling to Eric. "In 1982, before my twel h birthday party, my dad told me that the mill had closed. He was a colorist. He could look at a swath of yellow and tell the formula and the additives, then say, 'Mix up this much and run two miles of it.' "The first job he was offered was in Macon. We were in school, and he had heard the Macon schools were terrible. He couldn't afford private school. So, they gave the job to someone else. A few weeks later, he was offered a job in the cultural mecca of Panama City." The Panhandle became home. There, he met Greta, his high-school sweetheart and future wife. Then Macon got another chance. "I applied to Florida State and Mercer. The Mercer scholarship was really good, but I think the real reason I came was that it was smaller. "Mercer wasw the greatest act of grace in my life. Like every Flannery O'Connor story ever, right? Grace can be hard and hurt you. I got smacked upside the head with the best. The teachers I was fortunate to land in front of made me feel like who I was, was okay and becoming a deeper, better human being in that way was kind of mandatory. Being more of who I was, what I was supposed to do, and Macon was a great place to do that." His parents had grown up surrounded by generations of family in the hollers of Virginia. In Macon, Eric says his daughters got something close to that. "They see people at the grocery store that they knew in kindergarten. I never had that kind of continuity." "The Odyssey" kept surfacing as he talked about what home meant. "I felt kind of like Odysseus. Always looking for my Ithaca. I had lots of great stories, lost a lot of the crew, but me and Penelope finally landed where the kids are connected. I just feel like that's grounded them in the world." That wasn't the only place the Odyssey had followed him. "At the end of the Odyssey, Odysseus goes to see his father. His dad has been sleeping in ashes and leaves and pulling his hair out for 20 years because his son disappeared. He's going to tell him a bullshit story, and his dad looks at him and Odysseus can't do it. A sadness goes through him and he says, 'Dad, it's me.' "His dad says, 'It can't be you.' He points to the orchard and says, 'Dad, we planted these trees.' He names the trees, and that's when his dad says, 'It's you.'" During Hurricane Michael, Eric's father called from Lynn Haven, Florida, inside the eye, terrified. The storm stripped away so much that he couldn't see a single neighbor's house. Then the phone went dead. Eric eventually learned that his father was alive and went down to help. "This painting is my dad's backyard "Having a studio, that's kept me in town in large part. It's not what pays all the bills, but I know if I didn't do it, I wouldn't be me."

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