On a sultry day in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, the customers at a local grill swap wisecracks with the young women behind the counter. "What do you usually eat here?" one newcomer asks the teenage cook.

"Nothing," she says, waving a greasy spatula. Actually, the hamburgers are fine, but the real appeal of this place is the decor. "Don't talk about yourself," a poster declares, "we'll talk about you when you leave." Other wall literature addresses concerns of politics, religion, and male-female relations with about equal seriousness.

But amid the clamor of words, hanging near a window that looks out on Main Street is a little group of photographs. Look closer and you'll see snapshots of the restaurant employees with a local writer who has gradually become a celebrity—Jan Karon, author of the Mitford novels: At Home in Mitford, A Light in the Window, These High, Green Hills, and, this summer thirteenth on the hardback besteller list, Out to Canaan. All four books follow the ups and downs of a likable Episcopal priest named Fr. Timothy Kavanaugh. But the main character of the Mitford series is the mythical town of Mitford itself. Over a million readers have visited it in print and on audiotape, and many of those readers have gone on to become pseudocitizens, following local news in a Mitford newsletter, keeping up with its characters like real friends and neighbors.

Some people think that Blowing Rock is Mitford. With its maple-shaded back streets, its mossy rock walls and bursting rhododendrons, this North Carolina resort town could pass for the place Jan Karon describes in At Home in Mitford:

"Mitford," observed a travel feature by a prominent newspaper, "is a village delightfully out of step with contemporary America. ...

 You have reached the end of this Article Preview

To continue reading, subscribe now. Subscribers have full digital access.

Log inSubscribe

Already a CT subscriber? Log in for full digital access.