That is, until Amelia responds kindly to a letter from an unknown relative in the North Carolina mountains. They strike up a correspondence; the elderly gentleman grows ill; Amelia receives notification that he has died and left his farmstead to her.
Grace is the only one of the three friends who can drive. They resolve to pack her old station wagon, leave the lives they hate, and remove themselves to the pinpoint village of Covington four states away. There, they set about renovating the farmhouse, pursuing new avocations, finding love, working out their relationships with each other, overcoming their children's protests at their new lifestyle, and generally reviving their spirits in the mountain air.
It's a great concept for a series of popular books designed to appeal to mature women. The first installment,
The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love,
comes out in 2000.
The Gardens of Covington, From the Heart of Covington,
and
The Spirit of Covington
follow within two years. Joan's deal is for hardcovers and paperbacks both.
I ask her what it was like to begin writing fiction at age sixty-six. “That must take a certain self-confidence, to believe you could find success after starting so late,” I say.
“And a certain lack of attaching age to what you can do,” she says. “I don't attach age to it. I may walk slower, I've had trouble with a knee, and I'm careful where I place
my feet. And that's okay. But as long as I'm well, and as long as I've got my mind and my fingers, I have to write.
“I think people have different kinds of minds and different belief systems. I'm a person who always began new careers knowing nothing about them but certain that they would unfold, as these stories unfold. I've always been a storyteller. My grandchildren would come to me and say, âGrandma, tell me a story,' and I would say, âGive me the name of a character or an animal or something you want to hear about,' and they would say a stone, a troll, a monster, or whatever, and then I would make up a story.”
“How long did it take you to place the first book?”
“It took about two and a half years to get it in shape. It didn't take long to get an agent. I sent out query letters to twenty-five agents and received twenty-four no's and one yes. So, naturally, you're so grateful to get an agent, you take the agent gladly. And she was an old-timer in the business and placed the first book very quickly with St. Martin's Press. It was a two-book contract to start with. And then they wanted two more books. But I'm not with them anymore. I'm now with Pocket Books.”
“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 everythingâI discuss how to do the soil, I discuss the entire thing from the bottom upâbecause, 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? âPersist. 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, âAren'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 Juliaâtheir 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, âAnn 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 worst 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 principleâand in the wallop deliveredâit'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.