Dale Neal
I love a book where I just lose myself in the characters and the story. Dale Neal's latest novel, Kings of Coweetsee, certainly fits the bill. You'll get to meet Birdie, Shawanda, Roy and a host of other very interesting people, and oh, the secrets you will find out about them.
One of my favorite lines from the book, "You live any time on this earth, and you know moments come that you don't get back, cracks in the flow of your days, like time shudders to a halt and then lurches forward into the future. Moments that make you the man you will become."
"Kings of Coweetsee is a tale of power and intrigue with an ache at its heart as old as love itself. Dale Neal writes with the penetrating vision of an archaeologist unearthing the dark ironies of a thorny past. He’s a born story-teller — his prose is graceful and his eye is keen." Kathryn Schwille, author of
What Luck, This Life
"Simply one of the most natural storytellers writing novels today."
Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor
Now let's hear from the author himself:
Kings of Coweetsee is my fourth novel, again set in the contemporary culture of the
ancient Southern Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. Coweetsee is a
fictional mountain county so remote the residents like to consider themselves keepers of a
lost kingdom that comes with its own curse – that nothing ever changes in Coweetsee.
Novels, of course, are all about change, for characters and landscapes. Birdie Barker
Price comes home to find a strange package on her front porch – a wood ballot box from
a stolen election years ago. Lifting the lid on this Pandora’s Box, Birdie and her friends
uncover hidden histories of old crimes, vote-buying corruption, coverups, and guilty
secrets of power and passion.
Tell me about where you live and why you love it so much.
I’m a lifelong Tar Heel, a native North Carolinian born in Charlotte, raised in Winston-Salem, and I’ve made my home in Asheville since 1983, working for 34 years for the Asheville Citizen-Times.
I’ve loved Asheville since I was 15 and first read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It’s hard for me to imagine living anywhere I don’t have these familiar mountains looking over my shoulder. I had grown up going regularly up to the mountains. My grandparents had a 24-acre farm on the other side of Boone, in a little community named Beaverdam, where my grandfather had a tobacco allotment and a plow horse, but never a tractor.
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| Beaverdam Township |
I used to roam the Frozenhead mountain that loomed behind the white farmhouse, losing myself in the hemlocks, the massive, moss-covered granite boulders. I’ve always found myself at home in the hills.
Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?
We lived on Lomond Street in Winston-Salem. I remember a white little house with a carport, kitchen and living room, a den, two bedrooms and a bathroom for me, my parents, and my little sister. I remember walking up a hill and four or five blocks of little bungalows by myself to attend first and second grade at the South Park Elementary, (No resemblance to the cartoon).
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| 9-year-old Neal |
I still marveled at the play of Sound of Music that the imaginably big kids (fifth graders) put on. I was a somewhat dreamy kind of kid. I still remember planting my face into the trunk of an oak tree I walked right into, lost in my own thoughts. Then rubbing the bruise on my head, walking dutifully home.
Is there a book that changed your life.
Wolfe, of course. Prior to that, I had read comic books and devoured Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars series.
Is there a book that changed your life.
Wolfe, of course. Prior to that, I had read comic books and devoured Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan and John Carter of Mars series.
But Look Homeward, Angel showed that you could write about real things, your own life, and its mysteries, the longings that you didn’t dare express to anyone. 
From that day on, I wanted to write, to be a writer. I would go into journalism after college, figuring that was the only steady job that would pay you to write.
Do you have a favorite children’s book.
Aside from the usual Bible stories, I remember a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.
The Cat was kind of naughty, but the striped Hat was pretty cool. I could see wearing that.
What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
Sorry, unlike all the stereotypical Southern writers who sat on front porches and listened to
relatives beat their ears bloody with remember-when tales, I come from a kindly but quiet
people. We don’t talk out of turn, especially about each other. So I had to make up own stories, imagine all the histories no one would say out loud. Reflecting on those early school years, I remember an assignment from Mrs. Brown in second grade. We had just read a little story about circus clowns and we had to go home and write a story ourselves. I was crying in tears and terror when I reached our Lomond Street kitchen. I didn’t know what in the world to write about clowns. My mother comforted me with a radical insight. “Why don’t you write about whatever you want?” You mean, I could that? What a relief. I was given permission to imagine, and not expected to know everything.
How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?
Cynthia and I met at a gathering of mutual friends. She was a fifth-grade school teacher, and I was a lonely journalist. We started talking and agreed to go on a bike ride. So we headed up toward the Blue Ridge Parkway and rode up to an overlook.
While we rested in the grass, we both saw a flash of green in the trees. A honest-to-god parrot sitting on a branch, likely some pet that had flown its cage down in Asheville.
Now there’s a sign.
And birds continue in our story. As we began to date, Cynthia called me up one day and asked coyly, “what do you think of Woody Woodpecker?” I liked him. She was working up the nerve to tell me she had dyed her naturally curly hair red. And from that day on, she became the Redhead to me. We’ve been married now 36 years this spring.
From that day on, I wanted to write, to be a writer. I would go into journalism after college, figuring that was the only steady job that would pay you to write.
Do you have a favorite children’s book.
Aside from the usual Bible stories, I remember a copy of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat.
The Cat was kind of naughty, but the striped Hat was pretty cool. I could see wearing that.
What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
Sorry, unlike all the stereotypical Southern writers who sat on front porches and listened to
relatives beat their ears bloody with remember-when tales, I come from a kindly but quiet
people. We don’t talk out of turn, especially about each other. So I had to make up own stories, imagine all the histories no one would say out loud. Reflecting on those early school years, I remember an assignment from Mrs. Brown in second grade. We had just read a little story about circus clowns and we had to go home and write a story ourselves. I was crying in tears and terror when I reached our Lomond Street kitchen. I didn’t know what in the world to write about clowns. My mother comforted me with a radical insight. “Why don’t you write about whatever you want?” You mean, I could that? What a relief. I was given permission to imagine, and not expected to know everything.
How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?
Cynthia and I met at a gathering of mutual friends. She was a fifth-grade school teacher, and I was a lonely journalist. We started talking and agreed to go on a bike ride. So we headed up toward the Blue Ridge Parkway and rode up to an overlook.
While we rested in the grass, we both saw a flash of green in the trees. A honest-to-god parrot sitting on a branch, likely some pet that had flown its cage down in Asheville.
Now there’s a sign.
And birds continue in our story. As we began to date, Cynthia called me up one day and asked coyly, “what do you think of Woody Woodpecker?” I liked him. She was working up the nerve to tell me she had dyed her naturally curly hair red. And from that day on, she became the Redhead to me. We’ve been married now 36 years this spring.
She’s let her hair turn now a more natural and graceful silver, but she remained always my Redhead.
Is there a song or singer you listen to when you’re down.
When I’m melancholy, I’ll pull the playlist of Johnny Cash’s late covers produced by Rick
Ruben. The Man in Black and his sad, strong voice on “Hurt,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AHCfZTRGiI also
How are you different now than when you were in your twenties?
I quit drinking. I had wanted to be a writer so badly, I thought I had to mimic all my literary
heroes from Faulkner to Kerouac, Fitzgerald to Hemingway, all alcoholics, and bad role models for how to live happy lives. Romanticizing the dissolute writer is a dangerous myth I had to discard for myself. When I sobered up, I found other writers who had done the same and gone on to write beautiful books, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Denis Johnson.
Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?
I am an Eagle Scout. I was a gung-ho Boy Scout as a teen and learned to love the outdoors
with our monthly camping trips with my troop. I worked several summers at the Raven Knob Boy Scout Camp in Surry County as an archery instructor, and danced in the Order of the Arrow Indian ceremonies we performed weekly for campers and their parents. I’m still a Boy Scout at heart, trying to be trustworthy, loyal and brave.
I have to look at these as simple courtesies, smiles, etc. that folks can still give even in these stressful times of social media outbursts, traffic, politics, changing weather, what can feel like End Times with the zombies already on the march. A woman the other day at the Fresh Market grocery gave me a box of fresh croissants. She had gotten several free boxes with a special order of meat. She just gave the box to me. When I got home, the Redhead and I bit into their buttery goodness. There is kindness and goodness every day when I look for it, which goes to your next question, Jon.
What is your biggest joy and hardest challenge?
Aside from my marriage to the Redhead, and walking our sweet pups, Merlin the Poodle and Opie the Chihuahua, when I think of joy, I think of writing, that simultaneous sense of losing myself and finding myself. And yes, it’s the hardest challenge as well. Being patient when I can’t see where a book is going on a particular day, when I feel the Muse has moved, left town, left no forwarding address, when the rejections still come.
How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?
I can’t imagine a world without them. I love going into a storefront with all those shiny
covers beckoning from behind the glass. And independents bring out readers who actually want to talk to me and ask about my books. I love talking about books in their natural environment, in the company of books I have read and loved, and the ones to come.
And now the famous time travel question:
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME
to any period from before recorded history to yesterday,
be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice,
actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,
meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.
When would you go?
Where would you go?
Who would you want to meet?
And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?
Cool question, Jon! Which brings out the nerdy, Tom Swift, comic book guy in me.
Where would I go? Ancient Rome with gladiators, or the Holy Land to check out all those Bible accounts for myself. How about London and the Court of George III? I did spend a semester in college at Wake Forest University’s Worrell House in the North of London, and I loved roaming Dickens’ old haunts. I time-travel in my next novel The Woman With the Stone Knife, coming this fall, telling the story of a Cherokee woman exiled to England for 20 years during the American Revolution, and her encounters with Samuel Johnson. But that’s another story, isn’t it?
I suppose if I’m truthful here, time travel isn’t an exercise in escaping to a distant era. I
suppose I want to explore the mysteries of my own childhood. Like Proust dipping his madeleine cookie into his tea, and reliving memories and conversations he had conveniently forgotten, or Thomas Wolfe trying to get to that buried life, that stone, that leaf, that unfound door.
I was time traveling whenever I visited my grandparent’s farm in Beaverdam. They lived so
differently, another time, another century. They had lived before TV and radio, indoor plumbing and electricity. They had used kerosine lanterns to walk up the dirt road to visit Uncle Frank a mile or so away, to sit and visit and talk, and listening to the rush of the creek and the night noises of the mountains. Just imagine. And I have spent years doing just that. What would it feel like to be alive then?
I remember roaming the woods on a winter’s day. My sister tagging along, if I remember
correctly. My grandmother worried mightily when I was gone too long, which I liked to do. But it began to snow. We weren’t far from the house, but my sister and I ducked under the low hanging branches of a hemlock, a cozy little place out of the gathering snowfall. And soon we heard voices calling our names, my grandfather and my father sent to look for us, to bring us safely home.
And how warm that made me feel then as a child, safe and beloved.
That exact same emotion I saw verified by James Agee years later when I read the wonderful prologue to his novel A Death in the Family.
The summer evening in Knoxville when the young Agee is lying on the quilt spread on the lawn along with his family.
“After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her; and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home, but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”
The reading, the writing are not separate from the life. And if I am writing, I am still
discovering who I was, who I am, who I will be, in time.
Thank you Dale, not just for writing such a wonderful book but also for opening your heart to us all.
Readers, pick up Dale's new book at your local independent bookstore.
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