About
The Story Behind the Stories
Thirty years of teaching, training, and learning the same lesson over and over: connection is what holds us together.
I was born and raised in Waverly, New York, a small town in the Southern Tier where the hills roll and the summers are short and the people are stubborn in the best possible way. I grew up in a household where baseball mattered — the Baltimore Orioles were my religion long before I had the words for it — and where the outdoors was always the answer, whatever the question was.
After high school, I enlisted in the Navy and served as a Religious Program Specialist — a role that put me alongside chaplains, in the thick of people's most difficult moments, long before I had any formal training for it. That work shaped something in me that I didn't fully understand until years later.
I entered special education in 1990, almost by accident, and never left. Over the next three decades, I worked as a classroom teacher, a behavior intervention specialist, and eventually a trainer and curriculum developer in trauma-responsive crisis intervention. In 1998, I began training in the MindSet curriculum — a philosophy of connection over control that changed how I saw everything.
Today I'm the CEO of MindSet Safety Management, based in Clayton, Georgia, in the mountains of Rabun County. I live here with my wife Tammy, close to the Appalachian Trail, closer still to the river.
The writing came later, but it came from the same place as everything else. The books I've written — two novels, two memoirs, and a professional nonfiction work — all ask the same question in different voices: What holds us together when everything tries to pull us apart?
I believe the answer is connection. I believe it the way I believe in the mountains and the river. And I've spent thirty years trying to prove it, one relationship at a time.
Steve McMahon is an author, educator, and trauma-responsive crisis training specialist with more than thirty years of experience in special education and behavioral health. He is the CEO of MindSet Safety Management and the author of five books: the literary novels What the River Gives Back and What the Current Carries, the adult memoir Choosing Connection for Love's Sake, the Young Adult memoir Gritty and Relentless, and the professional nonfiction Transformative Crisis Management: A Journey to a MindSet. He lives in Clayton, Georgia, in the mountains of Rabun County.