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Terry Roberts was teaching at a high school in Brevard in the early 1980s when he received an invitation from his literary hero and fellow Asheville-area native, John Ehle. At the time, Ehle was one of the most popular authors in the country. In a letter to Ehle, Roberts had praised his portrayal of mountain people.
“He wrote back a wonderful, funny letter,” Roberts says. “He said, ‘Come visit, let us have a look at you.’”
A few months later, Roberts arrived at Ehle’s cabin in Mitchell County. A charming British woman opened the door and introduced herself as Rosie, aka Rosemary Harris, the Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning actress to whom Ehle would be married for more than 50 years.
“While Rosie fried chicken, John and I sat in a side room where he wrote,” Roberts says. “After lunch, we sat on the porch and talked about the mountains all around us and how they shaped the action of his novels, giving the characters something beyond themselves against which to strive.”
Roberts himself had been shaped by Appalachia, and so had his ancestors, generations of whom had struggled in the unforgiving landscape. Roberts was drawn to his grandmother Belva, who’d been born in Madison County in 1888. Back then, Madison had a reputation as a wild, lawless place. Belva’s stories shed light on the danger there, as well as the humanity that was often overlooked. When Roberts was a child, she moved to a cottage nearby after her husband died, and Roberts spent every spare moment at her side.
“It’s hard to stress how isolated parts of Madison County were for much of the past two centuries,” Roberts says. “My grandmother told me stories of places called Big Pine and Bearwallow Gap. Stories of charlatans and swindlers and preachers and bootleggers.”
In 1986, Roberts arrived in Chapel Hill to pursue a Ph.D. in American literature. When he wasn’t holed up in the library, he often found his way over to Winston-Salem, where Ehle and his family lived. They’d spend hours in Ehle’s study with handmade bookcases full of titles by Appalachian writers, including Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe and Wilma Dykeman. When Ehle died in 2018, his wife gifted Roberts his bookcases.
After earning his Ph.D., Roberts became the director of the National Paideia Center in Chapel Hill and continued his interest in Appalachian literature. Over the next two decades, he worked, raised a family, and wrote fiction in his spare time, recalling the stories that Belva shared with him.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
In 2012, his debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, set in the Madison County of his ancestors, told the true story of interned German sailors housed in Hot Springs during World War I. The novel won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction and the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction.
The following year, the National Paideia Center moved its headquarters to Asheville, and Roberts returned to the mountains for good. Since then, he’s published six more celebrated novels about moonshiners, murderers, wayward preachers, and clashes between rural and city life.
Roberts retired in 2025 after a 33-year career with the center. He lives outside Asheville, just north of where he grew up at Belva’s knee and an hour south of the cabin where he first met Ehle. His grandmother and his lifelong friend remain the two lodestars of his literary life. Roberts now writes full-time in a cozy downstairs study with a wood-burning stove, Ehle’s gifted bookcases within reach, full of decades of Appalachian literature and a legacy Roberts is proud to carry.
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photograph by Matt Hulsman
In the early days of the Great Depression, while much of the country is riddled with poverty and loss, hopes are high in the Asheville portrayed in Roberts’s The Sky Club. They’re heightened further by an ever-expanding real estate bubble. In the wake of her mother’s death, 26-year-old Jo Salter leaves her family farm in Madison County and heads for the city, where she finds work at a local bank that’s central to funding Asheville’s rise. While Jo is “country-come-to-town,” she quickly notices the cracks in the city’s gilded facade. After the bank that Jo works at crashes, she becomes entwined with the Sky Club and its mysterious manager. Soon, Jo discovers how easy it is to be seduced by the party around her. Terry Roberts’s fifth novel, based on pieces of Asheville’s history, is rich with the lush language and imagery of the roaring ’20s and alive to the dangers of blind boosterism.
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