The Writer
Maybe there is an inherent contradiction in a long book that prides itself on being small and quiet.
We’re familiar with the origin story: at age ten, Jan Karon wins a short-story contest at her local high school, foreshadowing a successful literary career. What’s unusual are the detours: Karon left school at 14, married, and had her first child at 15. At 18, she started working as a receptionist for the Charlotte, North Carolina, advertising firm Walter J. Klein Company. Unfulfilled by clerical work, she was determined to demonstrate her talent by leaving writing samples on her boss’s desk. Eventually, he recognized her skill, and Karon ultimately developed a successful career in advertising.
In the late 1980s, after winning a major award for her advertising work that included a significant cash prize, Karon took the leap and quit her job, moving to the small town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina to follow her childhood dream of writing books for a living. She began publishing the story of Father Tim and Mitford in weekly installments in her town’s local paper, The Blowing Rocket. Thus, Karon’s imagined world began to enter the public imagination in the tradition of Dickens and the nineteenth-century serially published novel.
The history of this unexpected success is well documented in Karon’s archive, which holds extensive files on her development as a writer and her writing process. Inextricably woven into this story are Karon’s relationships with the idea of the American South, and with Christian faith.
Cover, table of contents, and Jan Orth’s “The Day Aunt Maude Left,” in Response 4 (1.4, 1961)
Cover, masthead, and table of contents for Response 5 (2.1, 1962) (AP 2 .R37)
An Avante-Garde Beginning
This remarkable magazine, which Karon edited under her married name at the time, Jan Orth, reveals Karon’s little-known early literary efforts. While working and raising her young daughter in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the early 1960s, Karon was involved in the local arts scene, where her many connections helped her launch Response. The magazine, which called itself “the South’s only independent quarterly,” included works in many genres, including poetry, fiction, criticism, translation, drama, and visual art. It included testimonials of worthies including Jonathan Williams and Langston Hughes, both of whom remarked on the magazine’s format. The earlier issue shown here features Karon’s own writing in the form of a short story, “The Day Aunt Maude Left.”
Twenty-three-year-old Jan Karon (then Jan Orth), participating in one of the first civil rights protests in Charlotte, against segregated lunch counters, 1960 (Box 86)
Artifacts showing Karon’s early-adult political activism present a counterpoint to the pointedly apolitical Mitford novels. Critics have noted that Karon’s books do not grapple with race or racism in the South until “Home to Holly Springs” (2012), which is set in Mississippi and features Father Tim Kavanagh discovering he has a Black half-brother. The archive reveals that some readers were offended by Karon’s decision to confront racism in that book, while others were grateful for the move.
"I am a Writer"
Jan Karon’s Christian faith is indivisible from her work as a writer, but this was not always the case. This remarkable letter is a capsule spiritual autobiography, written almost a decade before Karon began publishing the Mitford stories. In it, Karon narrates her process of becoming a Christian after years living adrift, and the relationship between that process and her final return home to the South after three years living in Berkeley, California. Its pastoral tone and message foreshadow the fundamental concerns of the Mitford books. We have not been able to track down the original article that inspired Karon to write this piece.
Carbon copy of a letter from Jan Karon to “Jo,” 22 April 1981 (Box 72.2)
Father Tim Emerges
Karon first published the stories that would become her first Mitford book, “At Home in Mitford,” in the local newspaper in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The stories were so popular that circulation went up dramatically. Later issues included a teaser on the front page, ensuring readers that another installment awaited within. Karon herself drew the illustrations; her payment was a free copy of the 10-cent paper.
The first appearance of Mitford on page 13 of The Blowing Rocket, 6 April 1990. (Photographs by Kim Goss from issues of the newspaper held by the Blowing Rock Historical Society)
An Artful Rejection
This letter is just one of many in the archive that reveal the difficulty of finding a home for Karon’s unusual work among major publishers. Vaughn had experience with Southern novels about everyday life: he had edited the hit Fannie Flagg novel, "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-stop Cafe", just five years earlier. As is the case with other early rejection letters in the Karon archive, Vaughn shares important, complimentary insights here about Karon’s work even as he rejects it. Here, Vaughn describes something of the distinctive narrative style that would eventually make Karon’s work so successful:
perhaps because the novel intentionally avoids eventfulness, consequence, major matters (in the sense of major events), and other, as they say, ‘plot driven conventions,’ the traditional rules of commercial fiction don’t really apply.
As Karon’s question mark and annotation next to this passage implies, Vaughn’s idea of what constitutes a “major event” is different from hers. Events in the novel include the theft of Father Tim’s dog and the discovery of a jewel thief hiding in the attic of the local church.
A letter from Sam Vaughn to Jeanne Drewsen, Karon’s agent, with highlights and annotations in pen by Jan Karon, 13 April 1992.
The Creative Process
“Tidy, tightly-woven braid offering smooth, polished interweaving of all story lines”
Jan Karon’s visualization of “The writing process as I see it,” 15 August 1998 (Box 86.2)
Karon’s notes for the opening of “Light From Heaven” written on the back of an envelope, undated (Box 13.4)
A Cinematic Frame of Mind
This set of notes — apparently jotted on the spur of the moment — sets the scene for the opening of the novel, yet resembles nothing so much as the action laid out in a film script: “A bird comes to crumbs tossed out upon the snow. A shaft of sweet sunlight. Another bird and another — Chickadee. Jays. Possibly a cat.” Further down the page, after sketching a loose plot set around Christmas, we read “Cut to spring.”
Out of the Research Files
The Jan Karon archive is packed with research materials for her books. Although Mitford is an invented town, its inhabitants perform everyday activities that require accurate description and context, and they often travel to real-world places. The items shown here provide a glimpse into the process of building up a believable world. In one case, a chance seat assignment on an airplane sparked a conversation that eventually provided Karon with valuable information on airplanes for a scene in “A New Song” (2000). In another, an entire book’s concept required more extensive work. Karon has spoken of her process of determining that Father Tim is from Holly Springs, Mississippi: after deciding to send him there in a novel, she traveled to the town and compiled a research file in order to establish a realistic setting for his transformative visit in “Home to Holly Springs” (2012).
A letter from U.S. Air Force Academy student John Coffindaffer to Jan Karon regarding airplanes, undated (Box 19.1)
Items from Jan Karon’s research file on the history of Holly Springs, Mississippi, including the historically Black Rust College (Box 85.11)