Life with “the ladies” is more than a garden party

She first met them in a pink bathtub, where she was trying to soak away writer’s block.

Barnardsville-based author Joan Medlicott (pictured with Daisy) believes “there’s always something to write about.” photo by Nelda Holder

Barnardsville novelist Joan Medlicott was working on a different book at the time (one she never finished) when she hit a creative snag and retreated to the bathtub in the mountainside perch that became her home 17 years ago. “All of a sudden, the story of the ladies started coming to me,” she says.

And that was how Rose, Hannah and Amelia—“the ladies”—came to Western North Carolina and began to weave themselves through an ongoing series of popular books, the newest of which has just been released: An Unexpected Family (Pocketbooks, 2007).

The books are set in the fictional Covington of the very real Madison County, where a twist of fate (an inheritance) has delivered three disparate older women from a stifling boarding house in Pennsylvania to a sagging farmhouse in the WNC mountains.

The ladies decide to renovate the farmhouse together, and in the process wind up renovating their own lives. They become deeply involved in their rural community while developing a relationship of mutual support that is the envy of many Medlicott fans.

“Every single day there is a letter thanking me,” the author says. She attributes it to a basic “longing for connection” in today’s world.

Since the first book, The Ladies of Covington Send Their Love (St. Martin’s Press, 2000), at least 700,000 Covington novels have been sold. And so many people have asked Medlicott how to create their own shared-housing situation that she is now working with local co-housing proponent and author Diana Leafe Christian to develop a book about alternative housing. (The two will speak on the topic at the Women Living in Community Conference, July 28 and 29, at UNCA’s Center for Creative Retirement.)

And recently that powerhouse of all-things-aging, AARP, sent reporters to interview Medlicott for a companion article to their own focus on alternative/communal housing. The two pieces will appear in the upcoming edition of AARP The Magazine, due out at the end of May.

Medlicott, a bit of a gentle fatalist, sees it all as “meant to be.” Born in St. Thomas “when it was paradise,” she had an earlier career as director of the Division of Beautification for the Virgin Islands government. Divorce and remarriage moved her to Boca Raton, Fla., and work in a senior center where she developed a program similar, she says, to UNCA’s Center for Creative Retirement.

But Florida was flat. She missed the hills of her native countryside, and a move to the Asheville area gave her mountains plus accessibility to her East Coast children. It also gave her a writing career. And after all, she muses, “I look at it and I think—how could I have written Ladies of Covington in Boca Raton, Florida?”

How, indeed. Because Madison County has offered Medlicott the strong sense of place that guides the emotional grist of her work, while providing a social backdrop that magnifies the contemporary topics and dilemmas she explores.

She does not shy away, for example, from the sexuality of her over-60 ladies, the death from AIDS of a gay son’s partner, the dangers of Internet predators to children, the social and ecological upheaval of mountain-slope development. And that’s actually the reason she’s been able to produce so many books about the ladies, she says. “They’re in present time. There’s always something to write about.”

The newest book tackles domestic violence, but it also explores “making a family,” says the author. In it, her character Amelia—a widow whose only child died young—is surprised at the farmhouse by a woman claiming to be the illicit daughter of Amelia’s late husband. She and her young daughter are running away from her abusive husband.

And as the situation unfolds, the book ultimately continues Medlicott’s underlying theme of transformation, which she feels all her books, and their success, are really about: “Hope and possibilities—it doesn’t matter how old you are.”

Joan Medlicott will hold a book signing at Accent on Books (854 Merrimon Ave.) on Friday, April 27, at 4 p.m.; call 252-6255 for information. She will also appear at a daylong Words by Women celebration on Saturday, May 12, at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville (1 Edwin Place, 689-2988), and at the Western North Carolina Bookfest in Hendersonville on Saturday, May 19 (891-2712).