WARREN ­– Talk to Ron Book for any length of time, and he’s likely to say, “I have a wonderful story about that.”

Book has no shortage of stories, from his travels through Europe to a life that includes stints as a writer, an actor, a model, a family court employee, a high school football referee and a poet.

Book was born in West Virginia, but his family moved to Warren when he was 4 after his father’s service in the Korean War. He called growing up on Sidells Court NE in the ’50s and ’60s a utopia.

“It was a wonderful neighborhood full of families that were all the same,” Book said. “Most were war veterans, blue-collar people.”

Still, it was a utopia he was ready to escape after graduating from Warren G. Harding HIgh School in 1969 and enrolling at Kent State University.

“I think my goal at that time was to leave Warren,” Book said. “My dad was a union organizer at (IUE-CWA Local) 717. I could have gone straight out of high school and worked on the line at Packard for 25, 30 years and then slowly disappeared. No offense to my buddies who did that, but it just wasn’t for me.”

By his own admission, Book wasn’t much of a student at Kent. He was there from 1970 to ’74, but didn’t graduate.

He was interested in doing theater, but didn’t have the courage to make the move to New York or Los Angeles.

Instead, he ended up in Utah, following a woman he thought he was in love with who was going to Utah State University. He got a job in the advertising department at Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution, founded by Brigham Young and billed as the “first department store.”

He started doing theater in Utah and met his first agent, who started booking him for modeling jobs.

“I had this huge porn mustache and all this flouncy hair, and she said, ‘Yeah, we can use you,’ and I started doing modeling around there while still working at ZCMI,” Book said. “I became well known enough that, OK, what’s next?”

A photographer friend told him Paris was the place to go. He’d broken up with the girlfriend in Utah, so a man who’d only known life in Ohio and Utah bought a one-way ticket to France.

As a model, Book said he “bombed” and returned home to Warren with his tail between his legs. But the experience cultivated an interest in world travel that continued for several years.

He didn’t stay in hotels, he’d live in residential areas, get to know his neighbors and frequent the local haunts.

He’d wander the streets. In one of those wonderful stories, he came across a church in Milan, Italy, that was undergoing a restoration. It was the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie, and what was being restored was Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco “The Last Supper.”

“I just stood there for 45 minutes watching,” Book said. “It was an amazing experience.”

Back in Warren, he continued modeling for an agency in Cleveland. When they opened an office in Chicago, he moved there and later lived in Los Angeles, where he worked “on the periphery of the film industry.”

He came back to Warren for good in 1992.

“I was working on a screenplay,” Book said. “I had a rough draft and sent it out. A small production company wanted to option it. It was a good story, based in Warren. An ex-football star falls on bad times, comes back home and reinvents himself. I got a check from the production company, signed a contract, and the next day my younger sister passed away.

“I came back for the funeral. My mom was ready to retire, and my sister left two teenage boys. She didn’t know what she was going to do so, ‘OK, ma, I’ll come home and help you out. Once the boys are out of high school, I’m going back to my lifestyle.’

“I returned home, met a girl, had a relationship, and my daughter (Chloe) was born. I’ve been here ever since.”

Book took a job at Trumbull County Family Court and completed his bachelor’s degree at Kent in 1997, 27 years after he started.

He didn’t stop there.

“I was sitting around my house one day,” he said. “I came across an old little metal case with all the old things I’d collected over the years. I came across a poem I’d written long ago (and thought), ‘I’m going to go to grad school. I’m going to find a poetry program and get my MFA.’ It was like an epiphany. It was so weird.”

He registered in the long-distance learning program at Ashland University and poetry has remained a passion ever since.

He tries to write everyday — or at least sit in front of that blank screen and think about writing — and he reads at least one poem by another writer each day.

“I find it gives me inspiration,” Book said. “I love to listen to other writers’ voices, how they put a sentence together, how they color their sentences. I get pumped by that, and then I sit down and I write.

“You just write, then you go back and begin to craft it … You begin to whittle and form it and erase it and come back up to the top until it’s one fifth the size.”

Book has hosted poetry readings at Modern Methods Brewing Company in conjunction with National Poetry Month.

Over the summer he posted unsigned poems on lamp posts in Courthouse Square, and he took great pride in the fact that some friends recognized his writing style and sent him messages.

It’s the personal satisfaction that keeps him writing.

“If you’re writing just to get published, in my way of thinking, you’re not a true poet,” Book said.

“You have to write honestly and believably to yourself. You have to be honest with yourself when you write. If it sounds good to you and you feel good about it, send it out, but I don’t think it’s necessary. So I do write for myself.”