Charles F. Price is the author of the Hiwassee series, four works of historical fiction set in his native Western North Carolina. His first book, Hiwassee: A Novel of the Civil War, appeared in 1996. His second, Freedom's Altar, won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award as the best fiction of 1999 written by a North Carolina author. The Cock's Spur, his third title, received an Independent Publisher Book Award as one of the Ten Outstanding Books of 2001, and Price was named Story Teller of the Year; the book also won the Historical Fiction Award of the North Carolina Society of Historians. The last in the series, Where the Water-Dogs Laughed, also garnered the Society of Historians' award, was a nominee for a second Sir Walter Raleigh Award, and was a first finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award for historical fiction that year. His fifth work, a novel of the Revolutionary War in the South entitled Nor the Battle to the Strong, is forthcoming in 2007. Price has been a Washington lobbyist, management consultant, urban planner, and journalist. In 1995, after working for nineteen years in the nation's capital, he retired to his beloved North Carolina mountains to devote his time to writing.
(Photo courtesy of Jean Ellen Jones)
Interviewer: Britt Kaufmann
After a tour of novelist Charles F. Price's altar of honor, a book shelf devoted to his favorites, featuring works of Hemingway, Faulkner, John Ehle, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez among others, we sat down by his dining room window with the panoramic winter view of the Cattail Creek Valley to drink coffee and chat.
BK: You spent nineteen years in Washington, DC as a lobbyist, and you were a newspaper reporter before that, so you’re going to be completely candid with me in this interview, right?
CFP: Of course I will. What else would I do? I know you’re not really asking me this, but one thing that occurs to me as I look back over my very checkered career, being a newspaper reporter first thing out of the box—I mean I did that right out of the army, my first job—is that I had a really tough city editor, and he was just a tyrant about the discipline of writing; about concision, brevity, introducing ideas in a logical sequence, arranging them in order of priority. I’ve realized since what terrific first exposure that was to the discipline of writing. And doing it under deadline. Every day you had to come in, no matter how you felt and you had to produce. In those days I was often even drunk. I hadn’t gotten over the night before, and I had to put together an intelligible piece of work. That was a good discipline.
BK: All of your historical novels have required a considerable amount of meticulous research. So I wonder if you really consider yourself a novelist, or is that simply your cover for being able to do all of the research?
CFP: That’s a tough one. I do love the research. I guess I’m a frustrated historian. But story is so important to me, and clothing the story in imagination is so important to me too that I don’t think I’d be content with being a scholarly historian like Dennis Conrad, who edited the papers of Nathanael Greene.
BK: Do you think you could write a novel set in modern day, which did not require research?
CFP: I don’t think so. I often tell my wife Ruth that I admire what she does, because she can write something that is placed in the modern world, and write about essentially domestic issues, intimate issues that have to do with relationships between people that are not reliant on adventure or villains or cataclysmic events like wars. I admire that. I can’t do that. I think of myself almost as an adventure writer. I’ve tried a few times to do something that is contemporary or confessional and just can’t do it, and I can’t explain why. It’s just a limitation I have. It has something to do with this fascination that I can’t shake, that I have with the past. And how, if we allow a disconnect between the past and the present, our future could get really fucked up.
It’s just gotten to be a real strong conviction in me over the last few years. I can’t see myself ever leaving that field. In a sense, it’s not that good for me or my career because historical fiction is not really considered any kind of high literature, you know. Well, A Tale of Two Cities is, but you know what I mean.
BK: So what prompted you to switch from writing about your ancestors during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era in Western North Carolina, the subject and location of your first four novels, to the Revolutionary War?
CFP: Well, it’s almost a necessity in one sense. I couldn’t write anymore about the characters in the quartet without treading on the toes of living people! There’s a whole ’nother generation that has to die before I can write about it! I just have to find new material.
I had inherited these papers from my mom about her ancestor, James Johnson. I didn’t know anything about the Revolution, just that he had been a Revolutionary War soldier. So I was really forced into looking at that. I seem to be in this pattern where I have to somehow imagine an ancestor in these places in order to be able to write about them. I don’t know why. I guess it’s just like a hook to hang the story on. Nobody knows anything about this guy. Everything I say in the book about him is invented. We don’t know where he was born or anything about him before the day he enlisted in the Continental Army.
BK: Aside from the fact that you had to completely imagine everything about your ancestor, how long did it take you to read through all of Nathanael Greene’s papers in order to do the proper amount of study on the other main character in Nor the Battle to the Strong?
CFP: Well, I didn’t read all thirteen volumes. I only read the volumes, about half of them, that represented his time in the South. I did read a biography of him. But then I did read every suffering one of those volumes.
I had not intended to write about him. I was just going to write about my little private ancestor. But the more I read about Greene, the more I fell under the spell of this great man who has been totally forgotten. And I kept telling Ruth stories about him. I’d read a passage from his letters that I’d be so excited about, I’d share it with her over dinner. She’s the one who said, “You’ve got to write about him."
Well, that took the project to such a different order of magnitude. I was ready to deal with a private who is uneducated, had been an indentured servant that hadn’t got a pot to piss in, but here I’ve got to deal with one of the leading figures of the time. I mean, if he had lived, he’d have been one of the founding fathers. He was in that company. He just seemed way beyond my grasp. I finally got the gumption to tackle him and then afterwards Dennis Conrad wrote me and complimented me on the book—which was extremely gratifying and made me really proud, as nobody knows more about Greene than Dennis does. I feel like I finally understood Greene, and I helped him live and breathe again for a brief time in this book. And maybe, if enough people read it, this man will not be forgotten.
BK: Your earlier four novels employed authentic use of the mountain vernacular of the time, even in the general narration, not just the dialogue. Did you attempt to accomplish that in Nor the Battle as well? How did you go about doing that?
CFP: Of course, in reading the Greene Papers I found out how they expressed themselves on paper. But one of the things that saved me was a little book called The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.
BK: Published when?
CFP: 1803. It has all the slang from the 1700s. It is so earthy and wonderfully bizarre and exotic that I fell in love with it. I just really loved finding that slang and putting it in the mouths of people. But it was hard because it was so different.
The 19th century was all repressed and Victorian and overly sentimental, but the 18th was exactly the opposite: earthy and unbuttoned and just loose and easy. It was also a very exciting time in the way that people were thinking about the country, the country they were trying to make, and the war they were trying to fight without any of the means: proper clothing or weapons or food or anything.
I am so over the Civil War. The Revolution is so much more interesting, more vital for the nation we are. I’m not downgrading that we had this huge war that cost us a half a million lives to unite us over the question of slavery. But we had a whole different set of issues to settle to get the country started off, and we’ve forgotten all that. I think it bears remembering. There was an as bitter, if not more bitter, civil war in the South in the 18th century than there was later, in what we actually call the Civil War, because they were divided up between the Loyalists and the Patriots, and they just went at it. It was pitiless slaughter, and nobody knows about it.
BK: Do you feel like you have some sort of calling or agenda with your writing? Is it just a matter of gravitating to these stories, or are you trying to instill something in your readership?
CFP: There has always been that sort of didactic component, I think, in everything I’ve written, because I have believed all my life that people don’t appreciate history enough. And the reason they don’t is because they don’t think of it as something that happened to living people. They think of it as dry facts, and one thing I have always done is make it real.
I don’t choose them necessarily for any intrinsic value I think they may have as history or stories, there’s just something that draws me to them. It tends to be the untold stuff. When I wrote Hiawassee, nobody had ever, in recent years, written any fiction about the Civil War in North Carolina. The next year Charles Frazier wrote Cold Mountain, and then it was a big deal. Mine was out a year before his, and one reason I wrote it was because I had never heard about the war in Western North Carolina until I began reading the history, and I said, This needs to be turned into a story! The others just followed, were consequences of that first book. And now the Revolution novel is another untold story. I think that’s the common theme throughout: stories the average person doesn’t know that I think they need to know.
BK: Have you ever been part of a writer’s critique group?
CFP: Not as a student. Have I told you the title of the next course I’m going to teach? Shut up and write! Stop going to classes. Stop going to conferences. Stop networking. WRITE!
I think critiquing is good—up to a point. I was self-taught. I didn’t have that opportunity, so I guess I’m prejudiced. I learned by reading good writers, reading them analytically. How did this writer get characters in and out of the room or up and down the mountain? I think a lot of people, even people who are interested in writing, when they read another writer’s work, they get so caught up in the story that they forget to notice structural things, the technical things about how the book was actually assembled. And I think going to conferences is fine up to a point, but when they become your life’s work, they become an excuse for not writing. It’s hard work! You don’t just go off to a conference, get a few tips, come back and apply those tips, and suddenly and magically have your book appear on the paper. It’s the hardest work the mind will ever do, and you’ve got to concentrate on getting the work right before you think about peddling it. Your job is to work on your work!
BK: What are your writing habits?
CFP: They’ve changed over the years as I’ve gotten older. Since I have been published, I’ve been pretty regular. Before that I would try to squeeze it in around work, and it didn’t work. Early on, when I was younger and had more stamina, I would get up really early in the morning—because that’s when I tended to be clearest in my head—and work really hard until about lunch time. Then I would take a walk, and because the novels were set in the mountains, that was part of the research: to take in the scenery, notice what trees grew where and at what altitudes, think of metaphors and similes and all that. I was still writing even though I wasn’t writing. Then I might come back and do a little writing, and by then I was pooped. That was my routine for the first five or six years, but as I’ve gotten older I’m a lot groggier in the morning. I’ve got arthritis, and I moan and groan and drag around, and go and have two cups of coffee. And so, I’m not as prolific. I can get in a couple of hours maybe in the morning, and a lot of times I spend two hours in bed in the afternoon getting over it.
BK: Talk about your choice not to have an agent.
CFP: That’s not a choice. I couldn’t get one. I tried and tried and tried and tried, then I finally got sick of it. Everybody told me, “You get a book published, and the agents call and contact you." I’ve got four published, and no one has ever contacted me. I can’t even get them to answer my letters.
BK: And you’ve won the Sir Walter Raleigh award.
CFP: I send out my little thing that lists all my little awards. That and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee. The only thing is that I get a better grade of rejection letters!
BK: Shoot, I’m satisfied with a good rejection letter at this point in my career. By the way, thank you for the cup of coffee and for letting me interview you.
CFP: As we say down here, Bless your heart! You haven't in any way been a pain in the ass.
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