The Artist
Amid pamphlets and proofs, fan mail and letters from publishers, drawings pepper Jan Karon’s archive. Pen and pencil sketches by the author, which can be found on paper scraps, professional correspondence, and in the margins of magazine clippings, reveal an important fact about the ideation process behind Karon’s novels: she is a visual and spatial thinker. As a novelist who also draws, Karon’s work has found an apt home at UVA alongside the archives of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, writers whose sketches also rest scattered throughout their papers.
The fact that art appears throughout Karon’s archive should come as no surprise; her success in the advertising industry prior to her turn to fiction reflects her talent for conceptualizing information both verbally and visually. The content of Karon’s graphical musings range from Mitford folk to typographical brainstorms to cover designs for the books themselves. Some drawings also include blueprints of Mitford locales or sketches of environmental elements.
Jan Karon’s sketches of the ruins of Mitford’s old Lord’s Chapel and Mitford character Emma Garrett, with later annotation, 1990 (Box 86.2)
Places and Faces
The archive contains many items that Karon has returned to and annotated, as is the case with this drawing. She notes that the character sketch here is “my first drawing of Emma Garrett,” and was made in 1990 in Blowing Rock, the year that the first Father Tim story was published. Karon’s second illustration of Emma Garrett appeared in The Blowing Rocket, and may be seen in the section, “The Writer.”
Unifying Text and Image
Karon drafted these clever advertising concepts for Lion, her first publishing house, as they prepared to publish her first novel, “At Home in Mitford” (here called “Father Tim”). Throughout the archive are examples of her sketched suggestions to her publishers for visual elements to be used in her books and related products: it is no surprise that her astute suggestions have often been taken up.
An early Mitford advertising idea drawn by Jan Karon, ca, 1996-1997 (Box 48.7)
A Collaborative Cover
Karon was deeply invested in every aspect of her work’s paratexts, well beyond general design principles. The files documenting “In this Mountain” (2002) show how closely Karon collaborated with artist Donna Kae Nelson to reach the final design of this cover. Similar collaborations appear throughout the archive.
A folded sample of the final dust jacket design for Jan Karon’s “In This Mountain”, featuring a Donna Kae Nelson painting, ca. 2001-2002 (Box 9.6)
Magazine clipping that inspired the cover concept for “In This Mountain”, unidentified source, undated (Box 9.6)
A fax from Donna Kae Nelson to Jan Karon regarding the book cover design of In This Mountain, with sketch, and with Jan Karon’s reply, October 4, 2001 (Box 9.6)
Jan Karon’s notes with sketches for characters in “In the Company of Others,” ca. 2009-2010 (Box 7.1)
Drawing as Drafting
On these pages, we see Karon writing and drawing in tandem: her sketch of the teenage character Bella, for instance, is accompanied by a brainstormed list of facts about her interspersed with draft dialogue by Bella’s mother, Anna Conor, and an unnamed second character. The character of Maureen appears drawn above a “poet-savant,” a character that Karon excluded from the final draft of the novel.