Last year I wrote my first novel. I hadn’t planned to. It just sort of happened.
It all started when I got sick and ended up in bed for a few days. To pass the time, I grabbed a wild image that had long been bouncing around in my head—an image of a young Daniel Boone helping a winged fairy combat a deadly wampus cat atop a mountain—and converted it into a brief, fanciful tale. The next day, dissatisfied but tantalized, I went back to add more details, producing a much-longer story. It became the first chapter of Mountain Folk, a historical-fantasy novel largely set during the American Revolution.
Thomas Wolfe famously observed that “the reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.” Although surely the case for some writers, my experience was different. The more time I spent in the world of Mountain Folk, the more I longed to return. I go there still, in my dreams, though it’s been more than a year since I wrote the story. I stand next to Daniel Boone as he takes on a monstrous cat. I join my other characters on their adventures, too. I know them intimately. They have become like family.
Which was, for some key characters, no great stretch. They really are my family.
I had no intention of writing a novel last year. In fact, I had no intention of writing anything more than my twice-weekly newspaper column and an occasional magazine piece. I’d written books before. But they were all nonfiction books of economic or political history. Researching them had consumed lots of time and energy. Witnessing all this, my wife decided to intervene. “No books,” she told me after my last one, a 2015 biography of a former North Carolina governor.
Over the ensuing years, whenever I said anything that could be construed as the seed of a book proposal, my wife had a ready reply. “No books,” she commanded, over and over, imitating the dismissive tone that costume designer Edna Mode used in The Incredibles to warn her superhero client against “No capes.”
So how did Mountain Folk come to be? Well, when I shared my short story with Mrs. Hood, she was dissatisfied and tantalized. “Where’s chapter two?” she demanded. Naturally, I complied. And while the resulting novel does rely on much research—both about early American history and about European, Native American, and African-American folklore—it wasn’t so crushing a burden. You see, I began the project with a pretty big head start. Two of my prior books were family histories, richly detailed but written only for a small circle of relatives and friends. By studying the life stories of my ancestors, most of whom had traveled down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to settle the mountains and backcountry of the Carolinas during the mid-1700s, I’d already learned a great deal about events that Mountain Folk recounts, such as border conflicts with the Cherokee and the 1780 battle of Kings Mountain.
I also began with some ready-made characters to help populate the novel. One was Isaac Shelby, a Patriot commander at Kings Mountain who later became the first governor of Kentucky. I am his first cousin, six generations removed. Having read some of his correspondence and a 19th-century biography of Shelby, written by another relative, I was able to include some of his actual phrases in the dialogue, giving it a more authentic sound. For instance, even as an adult, Isaac referred to his father Evan Shelby, a famous militia leader and diplomat in his own right, as “Daddy” rather than “Father” or “Pa.” More than one editor, including eagle-eyed Mrs. Hood, flagged “Daddy” for sounding too childish. I made sure my cousin’s own word stayed in the text.
In another nod to verisimilitude, I gave many of the lesser characters the names of actual people present at the historical events I depict in Mountain Folk. How did I know they were there? Because I know my family stories.
A key character in the book is Peter Muhlenberg, a Lutheran minister in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley who later became one of George Washington’s generals. According to a bit of American folklore preserved in story and art, Muhlenberg gave a final sermon before marching off to war. “We are told in the Book of Ecclesiastes that to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” Peter tells his congregation in my version of the tale. “We learn there is a time to be born and a time to die, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to rend and a time to sew, a time of war and a time of peace. As for me, there is a time to preach, but that time has passed away.” Then Peter throws off his black clerical robes to reveal his Continental Army uniform, adding “the time to fight has now come!” Among the congregants who cheer their minister-turned-soldier in the scene are “old Henry Long” and “the widow Catherine Pence.” Both are sixth-great grandparents of mine, and they almost certainly attended the church in question.
I also mention ancestors who served at the battle of Sullivan’s Island, where the Patriots fended off the first British attempt to capture Charleston, and in North Carolina’s 1776 expedition against the British-allied Cherokees, during which the Carolinians raided deep into the mountains and fought some skirmishes in what is now Jackson County.
Using material I’d already unearthed for my family history books didn’t just satisfy my wife’s insistence that I not drown myself in research. It also made Mountain Folk more of a personal project. I wasn’t just telling stories about colonial Americans. I was, in a sense, telling my own family’s story.
Yes, there are purely invented characters in it, too. And fairies. And monsters. It’s a historical fantasy novel. Still, all stories have an inescapable element of speculation, even if it is rooted in history or tradition. “Fiction is not fact,” Thomas Wolfe wrote in Look Homeward, Angel, “but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.” One of my purposes in writing Mountain Folk, it turned out, was to introduce a broader audience to my family. I hope readers enjoy meeting them as much as I enjoyed crafting the introduction.
About the author: Hood is a newspaper columnist, educator and foundation executive in North Carolina.