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"You know, I believe I'll just have french toast." I switch on my tape recorder. It might be important to record Jan Karon discussing food. After all, the Mitford books are full of it. Father Tim often visits the Sweet Stuff Bakery to chat with Winnie Ivey; he's a regular patron at the Main Street Grill and a frequenter of uncounted teas, barbecues, dinner parties, and glad suppers at home with his wife, Cynthia. Such is the life of a fictional clergyman.

While we're waiting to eat, I ask her to tell me a little bit about her upbringing—whom she played with as a child, where she learned to mimic the Appalachian dialect that fills her books.

"My younger sister and I were reared by my grandmother and grandfather in the country on a farm. My sister became the charge of my grandmother, and I somehow became the charge of my grandfather. I was very fortunate. Instead of staying in the kitchen and learning how to cook, I went with my grandfather to swap mules and horses, to buy bird dogs, to buy nails for roofing and seed corn for planting. I got to be around a lot of different people. The world opened up to me. I developed, without even knowing it, an ear for dialect. The dialect you read in my books comes from the Scottish-Irish people in this part of the world. They speak in a very colorful way, and I try to reproduce that as authentically as possible. Never do I do it to embarrass or make fun of anyone, because that's what I was reared with. I love and honor and respect the way these people talk."

No need to convince me; I'm from rural Alabama. As politely as possible, I mention all the Yankees around Blowing Rock. "Do you still hear Appalachian dialect here?"

She tells me that Blowing Rock has many natives, but that to hear the strongest accents, you have to go back in the mountain coves. "And believe me," she says, "I've been back in many a cove, not to hear the dialect, but to hear the music."

Too bad there is no time for "coving" today. I'd like to hear some dulcimer, some mountain fiddle. I consider asking Karon if she knows the words to "Froggie Went A'Courtin' " (maybe we could harmonize), but instead I ask her about her formal education. It turns out that she had just eight years of schooling before she entered the work force: "I have had exactly as much public school," she says with a smile, "as George Bernard Shaw." As for her religious background, she was reared Methodist but didn't make a commitment to Christ until the age of 42, in her bed at home one night. "What precipitated that?" I ask cautiously.

She takes a deep breath. "What precipitated that? Being driven to the wall by the circumstances and tragedy of life, being driven to the wall so that, at the end of myself, I could then cry out outside my ego, outside my own self-confidence and self-doing."

I smile nervously. This is the moment when any self-respecting interviewer ought to circle and pounce; I should discover and define what central, awesome tragedies have shaped this woman's life and books and precipitated her embrace of Christ. But I resist the temptation. Her suffering will have to go unclassified.

What I do learn is that Jan Karon actually felt a call to be a writer at the age of ten. "For 40 years," she says, "I ignored the call." At 18, she found a job as a receptionist in an advertising agency but didn't limit herself to dictation. For every new ad campaign, she wrote her own copy and pushed it at her boss.

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September 1 1997, Vol. 41, No. 10