Calling all book lovers
**Summer reading special edition**: Podcast with author Joy Callaway; Beach read recommendations from Charlotte's library; Book-ish events happening around town
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Today, we’re all about the books 📚
Editor’s note: With July just around the corner and beachside relaxing in full swing, we’re making this morning’s Charlotte Ledger (mostly) all about books. From a Q&A and podcast episode with local author Joy Callaway (who recently added two books to her repertoire) to reading recommendations and event suggestions, we’ve got you covered for all your bookish cravings. Happy reading! 📚
Q&A: Local novelist Joy Callaway on the joys of researching historical fiction, taking inspiration from places she loves and how she cranked out two books in less than a year
Joy Callaway recently wrote two books set in North Carolina: a historical fiction novel set in Charlotte called “The Star of Camp Greene” and her first romance book, “Sing Me Home to Carolina,” which includes nods to the town of Matthews. (Photos courtesy of Joy Callaway)
As a kid, Joy Callaway’s parents restricted her TV watching to 30 minutes per week, so she entertained herself with stories — reading books and writing plays and magazines and selling them door-to-door in her neighborhood.
After college, she chose a sensible career path as a marketing director, and the summer after she got married, she found herself pulled back into stories by reading every book she could get her hands on. That’s when she realized it was time to try to write one of her own.
Now, Callaway is a mom of two kids, ages 9 and 11, and she has seven books to her name — six that are historical fiction, and one that’s a contemporary romance. Two of the seven have come out in just the last two months.
Callaway sets her novels in places that are dear to her heart, including the Grove Park Inn in Asheville and the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
One of her latest books, “The Star of Camp Greene,” is set during World War I at Camp Greene, which was a military camp that occupied 7,000 acres from west Charlotte into Gaston County from 1917 to 1919.
Her other new book, “Sing Me Home to Carolina,” is her first contemporary romance novel. It’s set in a fictional South Carolina town and in writing it, she drew from some elements of her own life in Charlotte, like Renfrow Hardware, which has been in downtown Matthews for more than 100 years. (She wrote about Renfrow and that inspiration in a recent article in Garden & Gun magazine.)
Callaway sat down with The Ledger’s Cristina Bolling recently to talk about the writing process, how she researches historical fiction and how she manages to write two books in one year for big-time publishing houses HarperCollins and Penguin Random House.
This excerpt of the conversation has been lightly edited for brevity. For the full conversation, check out The Charlotte Ledger Podcast:
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Q. I want to hear first about how you got into writing. I read that you were a marketing director for a wealth management company in your past career. How do you go from a career like that into writing novels?
I was exposed to the journalism school at Marshall University and fell in love with it. I was a print journalism major, and then I had a professor who told me, “I just want to be really honest with you about what your lifestyle will be like if you go into print journalism: You’ll have to move a lot to rise up the ranks of newspapers.” And at the time, I was like, “I don’t know about that.”
I ended up switching over to public relations, because of the creativity behind public relations and pitching different products or companies to media. I didn’t even consider being an author.
I got married out of graduate school, and that summer after I got married, I just read an exorbitant amount of books. I was looking at my bookshelves one day, and I was like, “I think I’d like to try to write a book.” It was just this random thought.
The next week, I sat down and kind of mapped out an outline for a novel that did not become my debut novel, but that was where the first idea to become an author started. It was definitely not a straight line. I don’t know what it was about me, or why I forgot that I loved to write stories, but I did. I’m glad I came back to it.
Q. Historical fiction is really your genre, and it seems like places are so key to your novels, with “What the Mountains Remember” set at the Grove Park Inn, and “The Grand Design” is set at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, just to name a few. And then one of your most recent ones, “The Star of Camp Greene,” which came out this spring, is set here in Charlotte. I'm wondering, when you are conceptualizing a novel, how do you choose these locations? Or do they choose you?
They kind of choose me. For some of my author friends, it comes to them from a person first, like a character first. I don’t know what it is about me and why a lot of times, it comes from a setting. I don’t know if it’s because when I stand in certain places, or when I’m exposed to certain places, I can feel the stories around me, or I’m interested in who lived there before, or what that would have been like to experience it. And you can do that through a story.
So sometimes, if I get interested in a setting or a place and the people who lived there before, the best way for my nerdy brain to get to experience that is by writing a story about it. So they definitely kind of choose me. I’ll end up somewhere, and I think to myself, “I want to spend more time here. This is interesting.” And then I end up writing a story about it.
Q. A lot of work goes into that, too, at the same time, right? You must spend a lot of hours in libraries.
It’s really important to me to get a comprehensive idea of what a place that I'm writing about would have been like. I like to have a really good sense of place whenever I’m dropping a character into a world. So (in the case of “The Star of Camp Greene”) I went to the [Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library] and asked them, “Do you have any other maps? Because I see this one that’s been in a book, called ‘The Echo of the Bugle Call.’” I got to see that one in real life. It’s massive.
Q. How does a place like Camp Greene even come to you as the setting for a novel?
I didn’t know about it at all until about 10 years ago. I was on a panel discussion with Tommy Tomlinson and Sarah Crosland, both local authors. And Sarah had just put out a book called “Secret Charlotte,” and I was reading it and realized there was a lot about my hometown I didn’t know a lot about. And so Camp Greene was one of those locations that was just a surprise to me.
I was interested in writing a book set at Camp Greene from that very moment that I read about it, but I didn’t know who the main character was going to be. I do that a lot, where I’ll be interested in a setting, a location or a time period, and I’ll stick it in a drawer until a main character comes to me. And so the minute that Calla Connolly [the protagonist, who is a Broadway star who’s come to entertain the troops] came to me, I pulled it out of the drawer.
Q. I just read a piece that you wrote recently for Garden and Gun magazine that talked about Renfrow hardware, and putting that very real place as a character, almost, in that book. What’s that process like as a writer, in terms of picking out a place to root a book and fictionalizing it?
Writing a book, no matter what, whether it’s historical or my new rom-com, it’s a collage. It’s taking inspiration from things you love — hopefully, things you love, because when writers write what they love, it comes out the truest, I believe.
My main character [in “Sing Me Home to Carolina”] is navigating the competing affections of her first love, this MLB standout who’s back in town after a career-ending injury, and then the mysterious owner of the local hardware store — a hardware store like Renfrow, basically. I love old hardware stores. When you walk into Renfrow, you know it’s the heartbeat of the town. And I wanted that experience in my fictional town, because I felt like that was so important.
Q. Do you ever work on two projects at the same time? You just had these two books come out so closely together. Was there any overlap in writing them?
No, actually, because when I’m in a character’s head, I’m in their head. And these characters are so different, especially with the historical novels. Of course, I’m not living back in 1918 the whole day — I have a family of kids to hang out with — so I’m not fully immersed in that.
But when I’m writing, I am, and I’m in that character’s head space, and I’m living in that era, and so if I was to then switch over and write something contemporary, the voice would not be as authentic. I focus solely on one project, and then I’ll get done with that, or temporarily done with that, and then focus on the other project.
So what happened with these two books was I did a bunch of research in the summertime for “Star of Camp Greene,” and I started writing in late August, and I wrote that book from August through December, and then I had a draft done. And then over the holidays, I switched gears. I gave myself about a two-week break and kind of cleared my brain out. And then I switched over to “Sing Me Home to Carolina,” and I wrote that from January through April.
Q. You are promoting these two books now, right? I always love to ask authors about good tales from the book tours. Do any good ones stand out from this tour or others?
I did Costco signings for my first book. It was in Costcos nationwide, and during one signing, someone came up to me and said that they had seen mermaids and that they were real, and they told me they were going to write a book about it, and if I stole their idea, they were going to sue me.
And then, probably about 30 minutes later, someone came up to me and told me their UFO stories and said they were going to write those. And also, I can’t take their idea.
Sometimes the book tour is really fun because you get things that are unexpected, or you run into places that inspire you. I just wrote an article for People magazine about the inspiration for “Sing Me Home to Carolina” that happened on a book tour. [Callaway was invited last-minute to a small West Virginia town’s barn party.]
It was a great community feel, and we left, and I was like, I want to live there. Like, can I go there every night? And so in “Sing Me Home to Carolina,” the barn parties in that book were definitely inspired by that night. On tour, sometimes they’ll surprise you, and you end up with these really fun experiences that inspire future stories.
🎧 Listen to the full conversation on The Charlotte Ledger Podcast.
Cristina Bolling is the former managing editor of The Charlotte Ledger. Reach her at cristinabollingwrites@gmail.com.
Today’s supporting sponsor is Landon A. Dunn, attorney-at-law in Matthews:
🏖️ Looking for a book this summer? Here are 10 beach reads, recommended by Charlotte Mecklenburg Library staff
It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless: What book should I pretend to read while I’m sitting on the beach or by the pool this summer?
The Ledger asked Charlotte Mecklenburg Library for beach read recommendations, and with these suggestions, you might actually find yourself reading more than just 10 pages on your vacation.
This list was compiled by library staff members Joyce Ramos, Jack Goff, Anne Mavian and Meg Elliot, who are all members of the library’s “Find Your Next Read” team.
📘 “Funny Story” by Emily Henry (Romance/Contemporary Fiction): When a children’s librarian gets dumped by her fiancé and moves in with his ex’s ex, their platonic pact starts to unravel in hilarious and heartfelt ways. Charming, emotionally rich rom-com about identity, grief and second chances.
📗 “The Spellshop” by Sarah Beth Durst (Fantasy/Cozy Fantasy): A rare-books librarian flees a crumbling empire with illegal magical texts and opens a secret spell shop on a quiet island. Warm, witty and delightfully escapist, this is the perfect blend of whimsy, danger and found-family feels.
📕 “Murder in the Family” by Cara Hunter (Mystery/Thriller): Told entirely through emails, interviews and transcripts, this twisty whodunit unravels the decades-old murder of a famous film director — reopened by a true-crime TV show. Tightly plotted mystery with a “true crime” documentary feel.
📙 “The Wishing Game” by Meg Shaffer (Contemporary Fiction/Magical Realism): A reclusive author invites a group of fans to compete for the only copy of his long-awaited new book—if they can pass a series of magical tests. This heartwarming, bookish fairy tale is a love letter to stories, dreams and second chances.
📘 “A Caribbean Heiress in Paris” by Adriana Herrera (Historical Romance/Diverse Fiction): A Dominican rum heiress heads to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and finds unexpected love—and danger—in the City of Light. A blend of high-stakes drama, lush setting and romance.
📗 “The Unhoneymooners” by Christina Lauren (Contemporary Romance): When Olive and her nemesis Ethan are the only two not poisoned at a wedding, they take the all-expenses-paid honeymoon meant for the bride and groom, pretending to be newlyweds. A hilarious, sun-soaked enemies-to-lovers romance with plenty of chemistry and charm.
📕 “Wild Dark Shore” by Charlotte McConaghy (Mystery/Thriller): Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island for researchers not far from Antarctica. During the worst storm the island has ever seen, a mystery woman washes up on shore. Can they trust her? Intricately plotted, emotionally charged and atmospheric.
📙 “Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend” by M.J. Wassmer (Apocalyptic Fiction/Satire): Dan is an average guy hoping for a nice vacation in paradise with his girlfriend, Mara. Unfortunately, the universe has other plans. When the sun explodes and the world goes dark, tensions at the resort rise, and Dan will have to choose between standing up and running away. Social commentary and satire made irresistibly readable by dark humor and a relatable, reluctant hero.
📘 “This Summer Will Be Different” by Carley Fortune (Contemporary Romance): Lucy is the tourist vacationing at a beach house on Prince Edward Island. Felix is the local who shows her a very good time. The only problem: Lucy doesn't know he's her best friend's younger brother. An emotionally charged forbidden romance and a sun-soaked summer escape.
—Compiled by Lindsey Banks
Booked and busy: Check out these bookful events happening around Charlotte this summer
Keeping in the spirit of today’s not-so-coincidental book-themed newsletter, here are some local book-ish events happening over the next few months, gathered from local bookstores and the library:
Book trivia at Room Service CLT: In partnership with That’s Novel Books, test your book knowledge at one of the themed book trivia nights this summer at Room Service CLT at Camp North End. The next trivia night is Wednesday, June 25, at 7 p.m., and it’s all about “The Hunger Games.” July 30 will feature trivia on rom-com author Emily Henry’s bookverse, and Aug. 27 will be all about author Taylor Jenkins Reid. It’s $5 to register.
Book Buyers’ Friday Book Quiz: Every Friday, used bookstore Book Buyers, located in the Monroe Road Corridor, posts a book trivia question on Instagram. The first correct answer in the comment section wins a $15 Book Buyers gift certificate.
Author signings at Park Road Books: Park Road Books hosts author signing events every month. On June 28, meet author Jenna Michael at a signing for her new book, “Let’s Choose Less,” starting at 2 p.m. It’s a lifestyle manual for moms seeking “practical solutions for reducing chaos and fostering a more intentional, peaceful life.” The book costs $20 at Park Road Books.
An honorable mention…
Book binding classes with Trope Bookshop: This month’s class is already sold out, but romance-only Trope Bookshop in Plaza Midwood hosts book-binding classes frequently. Follow the shop’s Instagram to get updates on events. For the book-binding classes today and next Monday, participants will learn to bind either “Lights Out” by Navessa Allen or “Throne of Glass” by Sarah J. Maas. It’s $60 for both classes, and supplies are included.
And of course, what would a book-ish event list be without some local book club meetings:
“Banned Book Club” at Park Road Books: On July 1, this book club will meet at Park Road Books at the Park Road Shopping Center to discuss “Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History” by Art Spiegelman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel. It’s free to attend.
“Steele Creek Readers Book Club” with Charlotte Mecklenburg Library: On the second Tuesday of every month, book club members pack their lunches and meet up at the Steele Creek library branch to discuss that month’s book club pick. On July 8, the club will discuss “The Wide Wide Sea” by Hampton Sides. It’s free, and members can also join the meeting via Zoom.
“Oh, You’re Reading Again Book Club” with That’s Novel Books: This month’s book pick is “Giovanni’s Room” by James Baldwin. The meeting is on June 26, both in-person at Camp North End and over Zoom, so it might be too late to read the book for this meeting, but check the bookstore’s website and social media for next month’s book club announcement. It’s free to join.
“Main Pages Book Club” in Plaza Midwood with Charlotte Mecklenburg Library: This club meets on the second Tuesday of every month at 5:30 p.m. at the Plaza Midwood library branch. On July 9, the club will discuss “Verity” by Colleen Hoover. Free to join.
“Troop Trope Book Club” with Trope Bookshop: July’s book pick is “Older” by Jennifer Hartmann. The meeting will be in person at Resident Culture in South End. It’s $5 to attend.
“Silent Book Club” with That’s Novel Books in Camp North End: This club met yesterday, but check out the bookstore’s Instagram for an announcement on the next meeting. Members read books of their choosing for an hour silently, and then conversations and book-browsing open up. The Silent Book Club typically meets on Sunday mornings. Free to join.
Check out the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s book club page to find a book club near you!
—Compiled by Lindsey Banks
🎥 WATCH: Hugh McColl dances to a symphony quintet at the opening of McColl Park on Saturday in uptown
Former Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr., age 90, took to the stage Saturday at the new McColl Park at Trade and Tryon streets uptown.
You might be interested in these (non-book-related) Charlotte events
Events submitted by readers to The Ledger’s events board:
TUESDAY: “Coffee with the Chamber,” 8:30-9:30 a.m., at Steele Creek Community Place, 13501 South Tryon St. Join the Charlotte Area Chamber of Commerce for an invigorating morning event that brings together coffee lovers and business professionals from across the Charlotte area. Whether you're a startup founder, a seasoned executive or just a morning person, this event is the perfect opportunity to brew new connections and spark innovative conversations. Registration required. Free.
WEDNESDAY: “Power Up Charlotte,” 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., at Per Scholas Charlotte, 129 W Trade St., Suite 1210. The Power Up Series is a no-cost event series hosted by Per Scholas in collaboration with Urban Institute, Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC), and CareerEquity, created to bring together leaders across the energy and utility sectors to explore the powerful intersection of technology, innovation, and workforce development. Registration requested. Free.
SATURDAY: “Carolina Farm Feast,” 6-9 p.m., at CFT Market, 511 S. Hoskins Rd., Charlotte. A unique farm-to-table event featuring regional North and South Carolina produce. Friends, supporters, partners, and foodies will come together for one of the most unifying human experiences: a meal. $100.
JULY 25: “24 Hours of Booty,” 7 a.m. to -7 p.m., at Queens University of Charlotte, 1900 Selwyn Ave. Join 24 Foundation in celebrating 24 years of changing the course of cancer. Come ride, walk, or volunteer at the 24 Hours of Booty charity non-competitive cycling and walking event in Charlotte’s Myers Park neighborhood. Funds raised support organizations dedicated to cancer navigation and survivorship. $75 for ages 12+, $50 for 11 and younger. Fundraising minimums are also required. Virtual experiences/prices available.
➡️ List your event on the Ledger events board.
In brief:
Home prices fall amid ‘cooling’ market: The median sales price of houses in Mecklenburg County in May fell by 1.7% compared with a year earlier, to $450,000, the first year-over-year drop in 18 months. The number of closings fell nearly 5%, according to the Canopy Realtor Association. The association’s president said in a press release that the housing market is “cooling yet steady.”
NoDa street vendor permitting: The Charlotte City Council is expected to approve a new permitting program on Monday for street vendors in NoDa, which would require vendors to obtain permits or face fines up to $500—drawing mixed reactions from sellers who say the plan could either support or hinder local entrepreneurship. (WFAE)
Governor vetoes bills on guns and immigration: Democratic N.C. Gov. Josh Stein issued his first vetoes Friday, blocking three Republican-backed bills that would have allowed permitless concealed handgun carry and expanded state and local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Stein cited concerns over public safety and constitutional issues. (Associated Press)
New job for former business chief: Former Charlotte Regional Business Alliance CEO Janet LaBar has taken a new job as executive director of the Women’s Impact Fund of Charlotte, a philanthropic organization that empowers women to pool their resources, learn about community needs and collectively award grants to nonprofits. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
Checkers stay alive in hockey championship: The Charlotte Checkers forced a Game 6 in the best-of-seven minor-league hockey championship series against the Abbotsford Canucks with an overtime victory Saturday in Canada. The Checkers are down three games to two and play tonight at Bojangles Coliseum at 7 p.m.
Model T found in Lake Lure: As Lake Lure’s water levels reached historic lows during ongoing repairs from last year’s flooding, crews discovered a sunken 32-foot boat and what appears to be a Model T Ford in the lakebed, along with other long-submerged objects. (WBTV)