Scribblers Page 17

  “And what are your plans from here?”

  “There are to be six books,” she says. “And now they’re talking about a Christmas book, and they’re talking about a cookbook, and they’re talking about a gardening book. And I don’t want to write fluff, do you know what I mean? So if I write a gardening book, it will be where I take individual kinds of gardens that Hannah would make, and then I do everything—I discuss how to do the soil, I discuss the entire thing from the bottom up—because, you know, part of my background is horticulture. So there would have to be some meat to it.”

  “That’s an opportunity not many people come across,” I say.

  “You’re right. So I’m going to leave that to those people up there to make those kinds of decisions. And I’m flexible at this point because I have three other novels finished that are not Covington novels. And Pocket Books bought one of those novels.”

  “Is it a stand-alone?”

  “Yes, and then I have two others finished. I cannot believe my own productivity, okay? And I’m almost a hundred pages into another novel.

  “You know what I would say to writers? ‘Persist. Keep on doing it. If you’re using a computer, what difference does it make if the first sentence you write ends up on page 92 or 150 at some later date? Just begin, and keep writing, and keep improving.’”

  I remark on the thematic similarity between her Covington books and Ann B. Ross’s Miss Julia novels. Though they’re far apart in tone, both series revolve around women who are empowered late in life. They’re about mature women having to learn new skills.

  “And Ann Ross is very much a Southern woman herself,” Joan says. “She has taught for years at the university, she’s married to a doctor, she’s lived in the Hendersonville area, and I think that she can speak intimately of the Southern experience. I’m an outsider. I can put outsiders into a Southern environment, and I can draw Southern characters, but I cannot be in the head of a Southern woman.”

  Ann B. Ross is so much in the head of her Southern woman, Julia Springer of the fictional mountain town of Abbotsville, North Carolina, that people confuse the creator and her creation.

  “I’m forever getting that question, ‘Aren’t you Miss Julia?’ ” Ross tells me. “But no, I really am not. Maybe I would like to be. And I’m amazed at how many people say they know a Miss Julia—their mother, their aunt, their next-door neighbor. She’s a composite, I think, of qualities that a lot of us recognize.”

  “Do you feel an obligation to play the part?” I ask. “Miss Julia is a pistol. It seems to me it would be difficult to give a reading.”

  “Oh, bless your heart. No, I tell you, I enjoy it. It really takes it out of me because I get full of adrenaline when I have to speak. But a little bit of classroom experience I suppose helps. But no, I don’t play the part. In fact, I make a very strong point that I am not Miss Julia. She says things that I can hardly dare think, so I guess she’s my alter-ego, if anything. But when I go out and fifty, seventy, ninety people show up at seven o’clock at night, and I realize what efforts they’ve made to come out, I just feel I need to entertain them. And I talk about how the ideas came to me, and just try to have a good time, but I don’t pretend to be Miss Julia by any means.”

  At the opening of the first novel, Miss Julia Speaks Her Mind, Miss Julia is flipping through a Christmas catalog one August morning when she receives a knock on the door of her home in Abbotsville. It is a young woman with too-yellow hair who’s wearing too-high heels and a too-short dress. With her is a nine-year-old boy with a runny nose and a clip-on bow tie. The woman, Hazel Marie, says he is the illegitimate son of Miss Julia’s late husband, produces a birth certificate that confirms the fact, instructs Miss Julia to look after the boy while she is away attending beauty school, and speeds off.

  Miss Julia has only recently found her husband dead in the driveway, slumped over the wheel of his Buick. During their marriage, he had encouraged her dependency, so she was completely ignorant of the family finances. Now, when she should be settling peacefully into her later years, she unexpectedly finds herself the steward of a small fortune and a bastard boy, the latter a great embarrassment in her church-centered existence.

  The series is played for laughs, Miss Julia’s sharp-tongued grit-lit narration overlaying incidents that veer into slapstick. In one novel, the boy, Little Lloyd, is kidnapped, and Miss Julia, her black housemaid, and Lloyd’s bruised and battered mother, Hazel Marie, have to rescue him from a greedy televangelist during a broadcast. In another, Hazel Marie is kidnapped, and Miss Julia finds herself in a chase on a NASCAR speedway.

  There’s considerable overlap between Jan Karon’s readership and Ann B. Ross’s, despite the divergent attitudes toward organized religion in their books.

  “Ever since Elmer Gantry polluted the waters … [ministers in novels are] all running off with the choir director or doing something worse,” Karon remarked to the Orlando Sentinel “Father Tim is an ordinary human being, a decent human being.”

  If it were possible to find them on a map of the North Carolina mountains, Mitford and Abbotsville would be neighbors, yet Father Tim’s species is unknown in Ann B. Ross’s town. Miss Julia’s spiritual leader, Pastor Ledbetter of First Presbyterian Church, plots ways to gain control of her money. Meanwhile, Brother Vern Puckett, the televangelist, pursues the same money through his blood relationship with Hazel Marie and Little Lloyd, who he feels is due an inheritance from Miss Julia’s late husband.

  “Your ministers and church people tend to be bad guys,” I say to Ross. “How much of that is tongue-in-cheek and how much is real feeling on your part?”

  “I’ve noticed that myself and done it, I suppose, sort of unconsciously,” she says. “It’s sort of a theme running through it. I am a Christian, and I’ve been associated with a church all my life, but I’ve seen a lot of different preachers, some of them very rigid, very dogmatic. I’ve got all the answers.’ And they don’t. I’ve been with a church that has split twice. So I’m sure a lot of things that I maybe would have liked to say are coming out in the books.”

  “Are you active currently? If so, I’m wondering how your fellow church members react to the books.”

  “Most of my life, I was a Presbyterian. And a few years back, I changed. I’m now an Episcopalian. You know, I live in a small town, so word always gets back to me if anybody says anything. After the first book was published, I heard that everybody in the Presbyterian church was mad at me. And that really kind of made me feel bad, because it was not aimed that way. I used Presbyterianism because it was the one I knew the best, so I didn’t have to do any research. But then I felt a whole lot better when somebody told me that another woman in town said, ‘Ann says it’s the Presbyterians she’s writing about, but I know it’s the Methodists.’ And so that’s exactly what I wanted people to see, that there are greedy preachers and gossiping parishioners in any place you’ve got human beings.”

  Ann’s first books were a pair of what she calls “little murder mysteries set in Charleston.”

  “I was very, very fortunate to have the very first thing I wrote published, and then to have the second one immediately published,” she tells me. “But I still didn’t think I knew what I was doing. My children were then well into school, and so I went back to graduate school and got a master’s and a Ph.D.”

  Then came a mainstream novel, The Pilgrimage. “I wrote it in one summer, between semesters, but then I got busy researching a dissertation and didn’t do anything until I started on Miss Julia.”

  Like Joan Medlicott, Ann is a writers’ group graduate.

  When Joan resolved to take up novel writing, she approached it with the same clear purpose she did her other careers, taking classes, hiring an editor, reading copiously, and disregarding the professionals who told her she shouldn’t switch from nonfiction to fiction. “When I meet any of those writers’ group people somewhere, they have their mouths open, because they cannot believe that somebody who was the wors
t in the group could get published,” Joan tells me.

  Ann started with her group, the Wordwrights, after her dissertation interrupted her published writing.

  “The reason that the Wordwrights were of such help to me on that first Miss Julia book was that I had lost all contact with any editors or agents or anything, and I did not know where the story was going, and so I was writing sort of when the mood struck me, or when I was supposed to have a chapter to turn in to the group. So I was going very slowly, because I just did not know what it was going to do. And so they gave me a great deal of help on that.”

  “Was it strictly a ladies’ group?” I ask.

  “Well, it started out with some men, but it kind of gradually got down to about six or eight of us when we were really getting serious about it.”

  “People dropped by the wayside?”

  “Yes. When it first started, there must have been close to fifteen. And then, very quickly, they realized that the core of us were not there to make people feel good about themselves.”

  Ann left the group following her first Miss Julia.

  “After that was accepted and published, and I was working under a contract and had to have a book a year, I was going too fast to really get a lot of help from them.”

  Writing three or four hours per morning seven days a week, she now turns out a four-hundred-page manuscript in a little over half a year.

  Initially, Joan Medlicott’s Covington ladies plan to spend most of the year at their boardinghouse in Pennsylvania and travel to the North Carolina mountains for the summer. But renovations on the Covington farmhouse go so well that they see new possibilities. They realize that, for senior women, the company of peers is more important than the approval of their children. There’s nothing that their caretaker in Pennsylvania provides that they can’t do for each other. They resolve to pool their resources and move to the mountains year-round. Amelia will supply the residence, thanks to the elderly gentleman’s bequest. Hannah’s monthly income is fifteen hundred. Grace has twenty-one hundred per month. Hannah will plant a vegetable garden, an herb garden, and a flower garden. Amelia will take up photography, a lifelong interest never pursued. Grace, the nurturer, will repair to the kitchen to fix her special dish, Meatballs and Prunes.

  Meatballs and what?

  The dish comes up again a hundred pages later. Grace is on poor terms with her gay son, Roger, who wants her to sell her rental property and split the money with him. He entices her back to Pennsylvania by saying how much he’d enjoy a taste of his favorite dish. Though she’s fearful of flying and suspicious of his motives, she can’t resist the call to Meatballs and Prunes. Soon after arriving, she learns that the real reason Roger summoned her is to break the news that his lover, Charles, has HIV. The health-conscious couple has gone vegetarian, thereby defeating Grace’s ball-rolling plans.

  But only briefly. Back in Covington, she prepares the dish monthly for Hannah and Amelia, as well as on special occasions.

  To make Meatballs and Prunes, you push a prune into the center of each meatball and make sure it’s covered on all sides. In principle—and in the wallop delivered—it’s like packing snowballs with big chunks of gravel. You roll the meatballs in breadcrumbs, brown them, and then simmer them in a pot with water, tomato paste, onions, and, yes, more prunes.

  I learn these details from Joan’s website. I also learn from the website that Grace likes the meatballs with rice. Hannah prefers them with potatoes and Amelia with noodles.

  Popular mainstream women’s writers like Joan Medlicott know how to take care of their readers. Besides Meatballs and Prunes, the website offers recipes for Grace’s Multicolored Vienna Cake, Cold Zucchini Soup, Cheesy Cauliflower Bake, Apple Oat Bran Muffins, and Avocado and Pineapple Dip. It also includes biographical material on Joan; a schedule of her appearances; information on large-print editions; synopses of the novels; reader’s guides; a map of Covington; photos of Joan with some of her fan clubs; review excerpts; readers’ testimonials; personal statements from Grace, Hannah, and Amelia, Amelia’s addressed to “Mes amis”; and contact information for Joan.

  “Let me put it this way: I am accessible,” Joan tells me. “On the back of my books is my address and e-mail. People can contact me. There’s no mystery. The minute I get a letter from somebody, I answer it immediately. I just sent out a mass mailing to people in my address book, letting them know that the third book is coming out in paperback this month, and the fourth book is coming out in hardback. I have been deluged with mail. People say, ‘How kind of you to think of me’ and ‘Thank you for not forgetting me.’ People write me for recipes. Even though they’re in the books, they still write, and I will immediately send them a copy, gladly.”

  Ann B. Ross’s website has tips for writers and outlines of future Miss Julia books.

  But Jan Karon puts out the best supplementary material for readers.

  In her newsletter, More from Mitford, you can learn what Jan is reading.

  You can also find out what movies she and her daughter are watching.

  You can read about the real-life village of Mitford, England, a third the size of the fictional town but just as quirky and quaint.

  You can meet the good folks who make Mitford quilts; who write poems about Mitford; who bake Esther Bolick’s Orange Marmalade Cake, the series’ signature dish; who read their children the Mitford books as part of their home-school curriculum; and who dress up like characters Miss Sadie, Winnie Ivey, Cynthia, Father Tim, Olivia Davenport, and Esther Cunningham to hold a Primrose Tea.

  Like the books themselves, the supplementary material is mostly fun but occasionally poignant. You’ll meet a woman in the final stages of cancer, a wife with multiple myeloma, and a lady recovering from hip replacement, all of whom take solace in Mitford. Indeed, by means of electronic bulletin boards, the series’ fans have fashioned a long-distance support group in the very image of Mitford, a town that doesn’t exist.

  Of course, there are sales opportunities to be had, too. Readers of the Mitford newsletter are encouraged to purchase not only the principal volumes but also holiday boxed sets; children’s books by Jan; Patches of Godlight: Father Tim’s Favorite Quotes, supposedly recorded in Father Tim’s own handwriting; and Mitford-themed Hallmark merchandise.

  Publishers like popular mainstream women’s writers for the same reason seniors like Meatballs and Prunes: they move product. But that’s not to say profit is what mainly drives the authors.

  “It is my intention to give my readers a sense of hope,” Jan Karon once told a public-radio interviewer. “I want my readers to love this town and love these people. To go away from their heartache and go into this town and find it real. People ask me, ‘Is Mitford real?’ My answer is, ‘Yes, Mitford is real.’ And you know why? It is simply a town where people still care about each other and where old values still work. I live in a town like that, so I know it is real.”

  CHAPTER 11

  The Worthies’ Parade

  Over time, I quit traveling to my writers’ group meetings. There comes a point when I need to do more writing and less hobnobbing. Once I have a firm deadline, I can’t afford to give up any more Saturdays. Moreover, since beginning my book, I’m on my third decrepit, high-mileage car, this one farther down the path to the boneyard than the others ever got. On my last trip to the mountains—to Blowing Rock to look at old issues of the Rocket, then south on the Blue Ridge Parkway for a publication party and autographing in Asheville—my would-be chariot overheated so badly that I had to shut it down three or four times and wait for it to cool. It has a leaking head gasket, I’m told. It can limp around town, but I’m afraid to run it hard.

  Even though I’m absent in body, I pay the dues to maintain my membership, which enables me to keep in touch with my friends’ doings via the minutes of the meetings.

  For nearly a year and a half, the members comprise a nomadic tribe. One month, I read in the minutes that the group must find a new space, since the bra
nch library that hosts the meetings will be undergoing renovations. The first temporary quarters is a place I’ve never heard of called the Unity Center, near the airport. Following that, the group meets for several months in the downstairs community room at the library in Weaverville, north of Asheville. Then comes a full year at the fire station in Skyland, a stone’s throw from the branch library being upgraded. You park in the lot with the flagpole, I read, and then ring the buzzer at the door on the right and take the elevator located to the right through the second set of doors.

  The group holds together just fine through the moves. In fact, attendance is higher than when I used to go. There’s talk of putting out a newsletter in addition to the minutes, of starting a group website, and of sponsoring a group table at events at the Asheville Mall and the Grove Arcade. Eileen Johnson reveals at one meeting that the group’s origins can be traced to the Blue Ridge Romance Writers back in 1981 or 1982. The next month brings word that one of the founding members is writing a history of the group. Though this doesn’t promise scintillating reading, it does speak to the group’s spirit, longevity, and closeness.

  The members submit their poems, stories, articles, memoirs, and novels to contests, magazines, agents, major houses, regional companies, and self-publishing printers. They report back on book fairs, conferences, and seminars they’ve attended in Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, St. Petersburg, Key West, Chicago, Iowa, Maui, and elsewhere. They sign their books whenever the opportunity presents itself and drum up what publicity they can.

  The new blood includes a community-college instructor working on a children’s book series, a budding suspense novelist who used to write scripts for Hollywood, and a partner in the eatery located next to the Weaverville library. What the restaurateur writes isn’t quite clear to me, but I do know from the minutes that at least one longtime member can vouch for her lasagna. Later, I read that, as part of National Novel Month, she’s completed a fifty-thousand-word manuscript in thirty days. There’s also a Thomas Wolfe scholar who’s written a book identifying the real people and places in Look Homeward, Angel and is trying to find a publisher for her manuscript about Wolfe’s Asheville homecoming in 1937. And there’s a local native now living in Australia who returns to the North Carolina mountains for part of the year and wants to publish in the United States.