By Sanjea Taylor, Contributor Writer
Wendell Speer, a campus Safety Officer, might be known by students for his friendly face and kind smile, but only a few know the amazing journey behind it. From Traveling the world, to having various published books, there is so much more to his story than meets the eye.
Before working at Saint Leo, Speer lived an exciting life, writing various poems and even stories that would later become published for children. With a love for writing and a great story idea in his mind, Speer was able take this passion and make magic with it.
Speer’s story began in Dade city where he grew up the youngest of six children and came from humble beginnings. However, during these years he gained a passion for something that would later change his life completely.
“I was in my early teens when I started writing poetry. One of my earliest was called the cat and the hat featured with the Dr Seuss character,” said Speer. “When I graduated from high school in Dade city, eventually I got a scholarship to Florida Atlantic University and got a Bachelor of Arts in mass communications, specializing in film theory.”
“While being a junior at Florida Atlantic University, I decided to go hitchhike around Europe for the summer. When in London I met a Polish girl, and we traveled around together, decided to stay together and the easiest way to do that was for me to go to Poland at that time,” continued Speer.
And even though love brought him to Poland, he really made the most of his time there, living there for 21 years. Throughout this time, he still stuck to his passion and with the help of the inspiration of the Harry Potter books, he would begin to create his very own magical fantasy world known as Magic Space.
“It’s a world in which fantasies, legends, myths, fairy tales, they all take place, in Magic Space,” stated Speer. “If anyone in the real world (Hard space) has magical abilities they may be able to transition to magic space, and then they would have adventures there.”
With this use of this space, Speer was able to write a few of children books which included Simon Peppercorn: Login to Magic Space and a spin-off, My Magic Summer, which was set in his hometown Dade City.
“The reason I wrote the book and set it in Dade city was from the beginning it was intended as a literacy drive. So, the idea was to distribute to the book to local school children for free, to encourage them to read and to have a love for reading,” said Speer. “So that’s that was the main reason for doing that book, besides wanting to do a series of spin offs.”
Speer accomplished so much being a self-published author and being recognized by the people of Poland, however due to various circumstances he found himself back in his hometown.
“I made a big attempt to produce a movie based on a screenplay that I wrote in Poland, and I seem to have secured all the financing but when I came back to the biggest financer, which was the Polish public TV station, they withdrew for some reason,” explained Speer.
“After a couple of years, I grew frustrated and felt like I wasn’t going anywhere since my goal was to produce films, so I decided to return to Dade City,” Speer continued. “After spending about six or seven years working a mundane job, I eventually left. That’s when I saw an opening at Saint Leo.”
What turned out to be just a regular job changed for Speer after joining the Saint Leo community. While being apart of the campus community he continued writing, in fact he found inspiration on campus for his writing, especially writing poems about Saint Leo, its community and Dade cityand he got a lot of support from the campus community.
“The people that have read those poems about Saint Leo really love them”, stated Speer. “So ever since I started working here, writing my poems and getting to knowing the students, I just really got that more intense feeling of Saint Leo as a community.”
