At home in Charlottesville

Author Jan Karon made an appearance at the Virginia Festival of the Book, whose lineup reads like a SXSW for English majors. The sold-out “high tea” with Karon happened Thursday afternoon in Charlottesville, VA, and got a slightly irreverent writeup on the blog of the local weekly paper, The Hook:

Albemarle resident Karon created the wholesome Mitford series and published the first of nine books about Episcopalian priest Father Tim and his flock in 1994. “When I started writing the Mitford books, I thought he was a little boring,” she said.

Her relationship with the pudgy priest changed over the years, and in her most recent book, she leaves Mitford, set in her native North Carolina mountains, and follows Father Tim to his new fictional locale, Holly Springs, Mississippi. She compares the launch of the Father Tim series to “giving birth on Sunday and getting pregnant on Monday.”

And does she miss Mitford, the setting that sold more than 20 million books? “No,” she says firmly.

Karon also confesses that she writes as she drives, and warns, “Multiply that by the number of writers living in Albemarle County– and order your groceries in.”

Her faith is an integral part of her fiction. “What I write about is redemption,” she told the Book Fest crowd. “We need it, we’re starved for it. I write about God’s love.”

From here, with an additional punch line of how to find, um, sex scenes in her books?

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