Many 2024 Southern Voices authors developed love for books at early age

As a retired reading teacher, Hoover resident Beth Ching was thrilled to hear how several of the authors at the 2024 Southern Voices Festival this past weekend got interested in writing.

“I loved that so many of them said, ‘I was read to as a child,’” Ching said. “I think that’s so important for all kids.”

It was neat to hear so many of these authors say that’s what started them on their path, she said.

Kate Quinn, a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of historical fiction, told the audience at the Hoover Public Library that she grew up with books, was fascinated with history and had penned her first story at 7 years old.

Even at such a young age, she already had been fed a steady diet of historical fiction by her librarian mother, she said. The first story she wrote followed suit and was about the assassination of King Edward II of England. It wasn’t G-rated either. It had an evil queen, adultery, a love triangle and power struggles resulting in a pool of blood, she said.

Quinn wrote her first novel (121 pages) at age 10. It was horrible, she said, but it kindled that desire for writing in her. She wrote two more novels by age 13 and during high school wrote a massive historically-based fantasy trilogy on the reign of Catherine the Great of Russia.

She learned a lot of things by writing those books, mainly that a story needs a beginning, middle and end, characters who change throughout the course of the book and a storyline that doesn’t necessarily involve a heroine the same age as herself with a heavy dose of wish fulfillment that was similar to her own, she said.

Quinn initially sought to be an opera singer professionally and was writing on the side, but the writing eventually won out. She had eight years of rejection letters from book agents but finally found one who appreciated her work, which led to getting one of her earlier novels, “Mistress of Rome,” published.

She now has written five novels in the Empress of Rome series, two books from the Italian Renaissance, three anthologies and seven stand-alone novels.

Kristin Harmel, another New York Times bestselling author with more than a dozen novels, also got a young start at reading and writing, with her mother and grandmother reading to her.

She made her first attempt at writing her own book at age 6. She was a fan of the Bobbsey Twins, and her book — complete with chapters and illustrations — was about the twins going to Ohio in search of her father’s missing solid gold tuxedo.

“I was hooked,” Harmel said. “I was 6 years old with absolutely no power in the world, but when I sat down with a piece of paper and a pencil, … I could create an entire universe on the page. That realization changed everything for me.”

She knew she wanted to write books, but she decided to become a sports journalist to support herself until she could figure out to how to make it as a novelist, she said.

At age 16, she studied how to become a magazine writer and sent a story suggestion to the Tampa Bay All Sports magazine for a story about an instructional league for minor league prospects. The editor, thinking she was an adult, assigned her the story, and after she completed it, gave her other stories that sent her to locker rooms for Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Hockey League. After three months, he was stunned to learn she was only 16 but let her keep working for him, she said.

By age 21, she was working for People Magazine and got to cover four Super Bowls, the MTV Movie Awards and an NBA All-Star Game, as well as do numerous personality profiles and interviews with stars such as Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Justin Timberlake, Gene Hackman, Bruce Willis and Patrick Dempsey.

But her favorite stories were always the tales of ordinary people who did extraordinary things to make the world a better place, Harmel said. And that’s what she likes to write about now as a novelist, she said.

She was 23 when she started writing her first novel that would be published and 24 when it was sold to a publisher in 2004. So now she’s been writing novels for 20 years, including novels set around World War II for the past 14 years.

“History teaches us that we’re all stronger than we realize,” Harmel said. “It teaches us that in our darkest hours, we find the greatest strength. It teaches us to stand up for what we believe in and to think critically about things, to learn as much as we can about the world around us and the nuances of conflict so that we can make our own decisions about where we stand and why. And perhaps most of all, it teaches us that we have a responsibility to each other as fellow human beings and that historically, the most destructive conflicts begin when we stop having respect for the basic humanity of our fellow man.”

Not all the authors at Saturday’s conference loved books as a child.

Kenan Orhan, who grew up as the grandson of Turkish immigrants in Kansas, said he hated stories as a child.

“I hated reading. I hated writing,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to read when you could pick up a Game Boy and play Pokemon. That world was so magical. It was so colorful, so vibrant, and reading was very slow for me.”

So it was kind of ironic that he would go to college and study history and become a writer of short stories.

Other writers featured Saturday included Daniel Nayeri, Yasmin Angoe, former Hoover resident Kim Cross and al.com opinion columnist and reporter John Archibald.

Bob Greene, a Birmingham resident who was in the audience Saturday, said he has attended about 10 Southern Voices authors conferences and felt this one was one of the best.

“I enjoyed all the authors, some of them I had already read and some of them I had never read and now I’m going to have to read,” Greene said.

He was impressed with the writers’ discipline and the amount of research they have to do, especially those who write historical novels. He had heard Archibald speak a number of times, and “he gets better every time you hear him, and he says important things,” Greene said.

Archibald, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his journalism, talked about his book, ““Shaking the Gates of Hell: A Search for Family and Truth in the Wake of the Civil Rights Revolution,” which was named one of NPR's "books we love" of 2021.

He said he wrote the book in an effort to try to make sense of how so many people, especially white clergy, remained silent in the face of so much injustice in that era.

That topic particularly hit home for him because his father and a long line of other family members were Methodist ministers. He never asked his father about what he said from the pulpit during that time because his father had taught him about fairness and equality and “I assumed that we were the good ones,” he said.

After his father died in 2013, he found some of his father’s sermons from that era and was disappointed that his father was part of a “conspiracy of silence” by ministers and other people who didn’t speak up against civil rights injustices, he said.

There was enormous pressure for people — not just ministers — to stay silent, including potential consequences of ostracism, losing the ability to support your family and terroristic activity such as burning crosses and bombs, Archibald said.

“Those bombs were real. I think the atmosphere of terrorism was way more than we can imagine now,” he said. “The Klan was a powerful force.”

Still, Archibald said the reasons given for people’s silence didn’t make him feel any better, and he hopes his book will encourage people to talk freely about societal issues instead of hiding them under the rug.

“For me, it is a story about us and all of us and our decision every day in every place to decide who we’re going to be,” he said. “What I would have wanted people to do throughout that part of history, when we talk about that silence, is to simply have the ability or the will to look at something that they think is injust and say, ‘I think that’s wrong’ … without fear of regret or retribution.”

The 250-seat Hoover Library Theatre venue for the 2024 Southern Voices Festival sold out within 10 minutes when tickets went on sale Jan. 11 and prompted library officials to open up the Library Plaza as a second seating venue and have each author speak in both locations at different times. The 110 or so seats in the Plaza also sold out within about a week, festival Chairwoman Carrie Steinmehl said.

Ching said she thought the conference was great but wished the city had a venue where all the audience could be in the same room together.