Publication Day!! A rare event in any writer’s life, as all of us--no matter how prolific-- have only a finite number of books in us. The Home Guard began with an idea shortly after I arrived in Beaufort in 2005. That idea percolated over the next several years as I learned more about this luxurious, tide-happy corner of the planet. A Major influence on my book turned out to be one published before I got here: The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Volume 1, 1514-186

On Three Pines, the cotton plantation adjoining the hunting lodge which becomes Carter’s and Missma’s retreat, a family of slaves must decide what to do in the wake of their new freedom. Grace and Polk and their twin daughters, Sparrow and Lark, have lived and worked on the plantation for years. As mentioned in prior blogs, the Battle of Port Royal Sound caused an exodus of Beaufort’s white population, which became known as the “Great Skedaddle.” The exact number of slaves fr

Carter Barnwell, the protagonist in The Home Guard, is twelve years old when his world is turned on its head on November 7, 1861. As the Prologue states, “he knew best the streams and marshes of the Lowcountry. Winds and tides were as much a part of him as his fingerprints.” As with children in all wars, he is a victim of the inability of adults, those he loves and looks up to, to settle their differences peacefully. On the morning of November 7, 1861, he awakes in his bedroo

I’m so pleased with the blurbs that will accompany the publication of The Home Guard on March 4, 2019. Here is one from the incomparable Margaret Evans, the editor of Lowcountry Weekly: “With a large cast of unforgettable characters – both historical and fictional – and a backdrop of indelible splendor, John Warley has spun a tale of adventure, romance, and reckoning set during a pivotal moment in our nation’s fraught history that reverberates profoundly, even today.” But wha

As discussed in the previous blog, The Home Guard opens when Carter Barnwell and his grandmother “Missma” escape to the family hunting lodge on November 7, 1861, the day of the “big gun shoot.” Missma, confident the Confederate forts on Hilton Head and Bay Point will be no match for Union firepower, had weeks to reach her decision to remain in Beaufort whereas Anna Barnwell, Carter’s mother and Missma’s daughter-in-law, has all of one hour to decide. When describing Anna’s de

A central character in The Home Guard is Martha “Missma” Gibbes Barnwell, Carter Barnwell’s eighty year old grandmother. It is, after all, she who refuses to leave Beaufort during the Great Skedaddle and insists that Carter stay with her in the family hunting lodge, an idea his mother Anna calls “insane.” In modern America, the fates and lifestyles of octogenarians are in great flux. Medicine is prolonging life and often improving the quality of that life beyond what could ha

In last week’s blog I described the literary summit of three dead writers (Faulkner, Proust and Nabokov) and one very much alive writer, Pat Conroy. Today I want to tell you about the day Pat became an editor. A restaurant in Beaufort, South Carolina called Griffin Market specializes in Italian cuisine from the Piedmont region of Italy. Pat’s time in Rome made him passionate for the food, so that the opening of this restaurant by Chef Laura and Sommelier Riccardo was a bit li

A Southern Girl (ASG) began as a short novel, by word count almost a novella. It began with the infant’s abandonment as the U.S. family, the Carters, debated the wisdom of adoption. It ended with the resolution of the conflicts on both sides of the world (hey, it’s a novel, it has to resolve conflicts). But then that question set in again: what if? What if the infant thrives and something happens that devastates the family unit? That led to what would have been my third novel