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

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

William Faulkner famously said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We in the South may have a greater appreciation for that than most, and it is no accident that the quote comes from someone as steeped in Southern history as was Faulkner. For proof of this aphorism, we need look no further than the current controversy surrounding Confederate monuments. Getting rid the them, as some would like to do, does not purge the past of what they represent, and we would do we

In my prior blog, I wrote about inspiration. Today, the subject is plot. The Home Guard, a Novel of the Civil War, is a coming-of-age story that begins on the day the war arrives in Beaufort: November 7, 1861. On that day, an armada of Union warships overwhelmed the two Confederate forts guarding the town, rendering Beaufort defenseless. When news of the battle’s outcome reached the town, the white population fled in what became known to history as the Great Skedaddle. But Ma

Remember a few blogs back when I talked about writers compulsively asking themselves, “What if . . .?” Beaufort’s Civil War history so engaged me that I became obsessed. “What if,” I asked myself, “one--no two--people stayed behind when all the whites fled? And what if one of them was an old woman, and the other a young boy, her grandson, only twelve years old? And what if they had to hunt and fish to stay alive? And suppose the Rebels recruited the boy to spy for them? And w