Have you read...
"Garden Spells" is written by North Carolina author, Sarah Addison Allen. I hadn't heard of Ms. Allen until I read a recent article in Our State Magazine. She's written four books thus far and is a NY Times Bestselling author. I'll be reading another one, "The Peach Keeper", when I'm soaking up the sun on a North Carolina Beach later this month!!!
If you are interested in reading more about Sarah Addison Allen, here's the article from Our State Magazine:
Writer’s Magic
By Janet Hurley
Photography by Amber Wallace
Asheville native Sarah Addison Allen delights in life’s mysteries and uses those true stories to inspire her fantastic fiction.
Bestselling author Sarah Addison Allen was renovating the Asheville home that she inherited from her great-aunt Charlotte when she pulled an old bureau away from the wall and found one of Charlotte’s favorite bracelets.
“It was like she left it for me,” Allen says.
For a writer who allows the magic of discovery to connect characters to the past and each other in her four carefully crafted novels, the find affirmed her faith in serendipity.
“I think there’s magic around us all the time,” she says. “We just have to see it.”
Hometown girl
Allen, 39, sets her newest novel,
The Peach Keeper, in a small mountain town reminiscent of Asheville, a place she never plans to leave. “Asheville is like this rubber band, only letting me venture out so far before I get pulled back,” she says.
Her parents, now divorced, still live in the area. Her mother, Louise, is a petite redhead, friendly and energetic, who shocked Allen when she got her nose pierced at age 50.
In contrast, Allen is an introvert, tall and blond, who loves sameness and familiarity. She draws daily comfort and inspiration from gazing through the windows of her home office that looks out on Spivey Mountain. Themes of place, family, and returning home wind through Allen’s novels as characters reckon with fraught histories to discover what they want in life.
“I am most interested in how people change — or don’t really change,” Allen says. “But ultimately, my novels are all love stories.”
Making the list
Allen’s schoolteachers placed high expectations on her writing because of her well-known journalist father, Zack Allen, who worked for the
Asheville Citizen-Times. A ninth-grade teacher bolstered Allen’s confidence when she recognized Allen’s gift for fiction. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Asheville with a degree in literature, however, Allen found the writing life to be about rejection. At best, it was confusing. When she did publish a Harlequin romance,
Tried and True, under the pen name Katie Gallagher, editors told her it fell into the comic romance category.
“I was astonished,” Allen says. “But then, when
Garden Spells came out, people told me it was uplifting. I thought it was a really dark story.”
Written in just four months and sent to two-dozen agents for consideration,
Garden Spells was Allen’s last attempt, after four years of focused writing effort, to break into publishing. She enrolled in a medical transcription course as a backup.
“I hated it,” Allen says. “But I’d given up that I could really make a life as a writer.”
An agent accepted the novel, sold it, and Allen quit the transcription course. She calls the success a combination of luck meeting hard work, but the timing was serendipitous. While reading at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, she got the call that
Garden Spells made The New York Times’s best-seller list.
In character
While Allen acts surprised by her literary accomplishments, she doesn’t feel undeserving. “I work my butt off every day,” she says. “There’s a lot of responsibility now — contracts, deadlines, making sure I connect with fans.”
She keeps in contact with fans through her website, where her sense of humor and playfulness come out. She also reveals personal longings and aspirations that she writes into the lives of her characters — such as always wanting a pink streak in her hair, something Julia Winterson, from her third novel,
The Girl Who Chased the Moon, gets to flaunt. Allen doesn’t plan out her novels and often writes from multiple points of view as her characters and stories demand.
“I just sit down and write from the heart,” Allen says. “And that’s magical.”
— Janet Hurley
