Today we’d like to introduce you to Henry Mitchell.
Hi Henry, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born and lived most of my life in upstate South Carolina. Six years ago, my wife and I moved just across the border to Saluda, NC. It is a great place to be a writer, a story mine, full of eccentric characters and amazing landscapes.
I worked for fifty years as a painter and sculptor. Around age seventy, I noticed I was having trouble sorting colors, and was subsequently diagnosed with macular degeneration. I told my wife, “I don’t want to leave a record of my slow decline. I want to spend my last chapter doing something I can get better at.” She said, “I’ve been telling you for years you ought to write something.” I knew no better, so I wrote a novel. I sent out over two hundred queries before it found a publisher in the UK.
Six novels and two short story collections later, I’m still writing fiction. My latest novel, Among the Fallen, will be out in February from Creative James Media.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I never planned to be a writer. My training was in the visual arts, and I was totally immersed in painting and sculpture until interrupted at age seventy by macular degeneration. That’s when I began writing stories. I had no notion at all of how difficult it is to get published. I sent out literally hundreds of queries for my first novel before it was accepted by a small press that had just started in the UK, Alfie Dog Fiction. Eventually, they published three of my novels and two collections of short stories. Ros Kind, my editor there, really taught me to write.
My current publisher is Creative James Media here in the U. S. They will release my second novel with them in February 2023.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I write fairy tales for adults. Jean Lowd, my publisher, tells me I write magical realism, but I don’t think my tales can be confined to any particular genre. They are populated with ghosts and dragons and all sorts of fantastic creatures and entities, but they are really about people, their quest for their true selves and real friendships, and the wounds and healing they experience along the way.
My recent novels and short stories are mostly set in and around a fictitious small southern Appalachian town called Drovers Gap. It is a made-up place, but if you could find your away around Drovers Gap, you wouldn’t get lost in Saluda, North Carolina, where I live.
I guess you could call me a “place writer.” Where we are goes a long way toward determining who we are. That sense of connection with our personal landscape is often lost in our contemporary culture. In my writing, I try to restore some of that elusive belonging. We are not just tourists on this Earth. It is our only home, whatever we make of it.
What makes you happy?
At eighty-two, it makes me happy just to be alive in a place where I am known and accepted with all my peculiarities, where I can wake and spend each day with the love of my life while I still have a brain to write with.
It makes me happy that my stories and tales have been read and enjoyed by so many people I’ve never met face to face. Sometimes I hear from some of them, that the story I’ve written has resonated with the story they are living.
That makes me happy, that soul connection that is real, whether we are aware of it or not. There is just One Story, really, and each of us is a thread in the cosmic Narrative.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://henrymitchellbooks.com
- Other: Blog: http://droversgap.com
