“God spoke to my heart and said, ‘Go and don’t look back.’ Timing really is everything.”Īt that time, Blowing Rock was a village of about 1,000, and it had many of the qualities Karon’s readers would identify as the fictitious town of Mitford: sidewalks lined with shops, merchants who knew every customer’s name, churches packed with parishioners. “I left a career in which I had been very successful,” said Karon. She knew her future wasn’t in advertising, so she quit her job and moved to Blowing Rock, North Carolina, to become a writer. In the late ‘80s, Karon won an industry award that came with a cash prize. Two more short marriages would follow, the last one landing her in Berkeley, California, before she returned South again, winding up in Raleigh, North Carolina, working at an ad agency. Karon read poetry, took her daughter to foreign cinema, listened to jazz and was part of a Charlotte lunch counter protest for desegregation in 1960. She was also a bohemian in the classic sense. Soon the largely self-educated, auburn-haired young woman was writing advertising copy. The executives soon noticed her intelligence and wit, aided by the fact that Karon would leave writing samples on her boss’ desk. Karon found a job as an office assistant at an advertising agency. Karon found herself alone at 18 with a child to support. By the time she was 15, she had a daughter named Candace, but the marriage didn’t last. Two years later, Karon dropped out of school and eloped across the state line in South Carolina. When she was 12, Karon moved to Charlotte to join her mother, who had remarried after Karon’s father left. Inspired by “Gone with the Wind,” she wrote her first book at age 10 and “got a switching” for including the word “damn.” Around that same time, she won a short story contest. But she distinguished herself by being an eager reader, skipping a grade, developing a fascination for dialects and displaying a gift for drawing. Like most children in the farming community, young Janice and her sister grew up churning butter and gathering eggs. “She’d be rolling bows in my hair, telling tales of her five courtships,” recalls Karon. Her childhood was spent in the tiny textile town of Hudson at her grandmother’s feet, listening to her stories.

Despite modest beginnings, Janice Meredith Wilson did not waste time living an eventful life.

Jan karon at home in mitford series