Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.
Jan Karon’s novels are ubiquitous in bookstores across the country. So much so that it’s nearly impossible to believe that she spent the mid-1990s rattling around the Southeast in an old car, visiting booksellers with a trunk full of her books, trying her best to get them on the shelves.
“The first contract I signed was with a very small publisher,” Karon says. “I didn’t have an agent, and I ended up with a publisher who didn’t know how to distribute books.” So Karon took matters into her own hands. She wrote her own press releases, visited bookstores, and met with managers.
Around this time, she met the late Nancy Olson, the original owner of Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books and someone whose early support of North Carolina writers made her a kind of patron saint in the eyes of authors like Ron Rash and Charles Frazier.
“Nancy really believed in the authors,” Karon says. “That’s where she invested her time, energy, and praise.”
According to Karon, Olson believed Karon could find success in Mitford, a fictional hamlet influenced by places Karon had lived, including Lenoir, Hudson, and Blowing Rock.
“Series weren’t even fashionable at the time,” Karon recalls, “but Nancy felt that in writing about Mitford, I had something to offer the market that simply was not there.” Olson connected her with Stephen King’s literary agent at the time, Liz Darhansoff. “I was this little unheard of Southern writer, but the agent actually liked what I was doing.” That was 25 books ago.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
Given the number of titles Karon has written, not to mention the number she’s sold, it’s hard to believe that her literary career didn’t begin until she was 50. She’d spent the previous three decades in the advertising industry, harboring a lifelong dream of being an author. At 48, she had moved to Blowing Rock, where she began writing a novel about a woman who moves to the mountains and opens an inn. The more Karon wrote, the less engaged she was with her characters. After prayerful consideration, she had a vision late one night of a man walking down a village street. She climbed out of bed and wrote the following: “He left the coffee-scented warmth of the Main Street Grill and stood for a moment under the green awning.”
Karon soon discovered the man’s intended identity: He was Father Tim, an Episcopal priest from Mississippi who shepherds a congregation in the town of Mitford, where he navigates all of life’s glories and tragedies with a strong faith in both God and humanity.
While Karon often writes about lofty themes with characters who face existential questions, she does so with directness, a result of the years she spent in advertising. “I learned to get right to the point and not to waste a reader’s time,” she says. “But you also have to give them something in return.”
For Karon’s readers, that something is the familiarity and solace they find in Mitford and the complicated, and ultimately hopeful, lives of its residents.
Karon has also spent years giving back to the real-life community of Hudson. In 2021, she opened The Mitford Museum inside The HUB Station, a center for arts, business development, and events that is housed in Karon’s old elementary school, the place where a teacher named Nan Downs first fostered a love of literature and art in a 5-year-old Karon who was being raised on a Foothills farm.
Those patron saints, whether they be booksellers, priests, or teachers, have been foundational to Karon’s career and to the town of Mitford, where all those years ago, Father Tim stepped out of a restaurant, and Karon stepped into a world of her own.
The 2025-26 Elon University Speaker Series brings purposeful voices to the forefront. Hear from Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and Army intelligence officer Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Robert P. Ashley, Jr., as they explore what drives leaders to make a difference.
photograph by Matt Hulsman
Jan Karon’s 2018 book Bathed in Prayer: Father Tim’s Prayers, Sermons, and Reflections from the Mitford Series is a compendium of excerpts from her popular series. They detail the private, public, and religious life of Father Timothy Kavanagh, an Episcopal priest who arrives in Mitford as an outsider, but whose dedication to the lives and souls of the town’s citizens quickly puts him at the center of life. Readers of Karon’s beloved series might recognize the characters and scenarios. But she’s woven in new insights from her own life and work, including how she — and Father Tim — arrived in Mitford.
More to Explore: Hear from Jan Karon in new episodes out August 5 and 19. Listen at ourstate.com/book-club-podcasts.
print it
After a visit to the Newbold-White House, extend your journey into Perquimans County by exploring local history and downtown shops and finding tasty treats.
From pocosins to hollows, black bears shape North Carolina’s wild places — with persistence, silence, and strength.
To save her beloved holiday casserole from a Tupperware fate, one chef dared to reimagine a family classic.
This month, we give thanks to the men and women who devote their lives to keeping safe the people, places, and traditions we hold dear.
