|
 Janice
Daugharty
Even working in
microcosm, Janice Daugharty is an author who thinks big.
--
The
New York Times Book Review
Since 1994 Janice Staten Daugharty has
published a volume of short fiction, six novels, and
numerous short stories and essays. She has built a national
reputation as a chronicler of life and people in south
Georgia and is one of the state's most popular and prolific
contemporary authors.
She married her high school sweetheart, Seward Daugharty, in
1963. She attended Valdosta State College (later Valdosta
State University) for two years, performed the duties of a
devoted wife and mother until her children were grown, and
at the age of thirty-nine began to write. She credits Joyce
Carol Oates, whom she calls her "fairy godmother," with her
initial success in the publishing world. Oates bought the
first short story Daugharty sold, and Oates and her husband,
Ray Smith, published a collection of Daugharty's short
stories, Going Through the Change, in 1994 under the
Ontario Review Press imprint. In the same year Baskerville
Publishers printed a hardback edition of the novel Dark
of the Moon and HarperCollins issued the paperback
edition. In the following five years HarperCollins published
both hardback and paperback copies of five other Daugharty
novels: Necessary Lies (1995), Pawpaw Patch
(1996), Earl in the Yellow Shirt (1997), Whistle
(1998), and Like a Sister (1999).
Daugharty uses the fictional community of
Cornerville, a typical south Georgia town, as the setting
for most of her works. She models her characters after
people in Echols County, where she has lived all her life.
Most characters are composites of people she has known, but
some are fictional recreations of specific people. Daugharty
says she based Alamand in Earl in the Yellow Shirt on
her late brother and Willa in Like a Sister on her
mother. She claims that she patterned the dead woman who
appears at the beginning of Whistle after herself.
Daugharty published her first historical
fiction in 2004. That novel, Just Doll, is a romance
set on a plantation in the wiregrass region of southeast
Georgia in the 1880s. It is the first of what Daugharty
plans as "the Stanton Bay trilogy."
Though Daugharty writes primarily to
entertain, she often deals with such social issues as
religious hypocrisy, rigid class structure, and racial
prejudice. She explains, "I look around me at all the evil
and ignorance and feel that niggling to preach again, to try
to make us all look inside at who we are and what we are in
danger of becoming."
The theme of art and its redemptive power
underlies much of Daugharty's writing. Her fictional artists
include musicians (Merdie in Dark of the Moon) and
visual artists (Alamand in Earl in the Yellow Shirt).
Other characters are lovers of the written word—for example,
Archie Wall, the small-town attorney who appears in several
works, and Loujean in Earl in the Yellow Shirt. Often
misunderstood and isolated, these characters find happiness
in art and come to terms with reality through the creative
process.
Janice Daugharty claims that she "can't quit
writing." She is currently artist-in-residence at Abraham
Agriculture College, Tifton, Georgia.
You can visit her website at
http://www.janicedaugharty.com/.
Her Books From BelleBooks:
The Little Known |
