[A photo of Dot Jackson is attached to this document. Please visit www.unctv.org/pressroom for more information and images.] 

In Refuge, a young Charleston society matron named Mary Seneca Steele goes to bed while considering what to wear for her suicide. Suddenly seized by an otherworldly fiddle tune playing in her head, she arises, steals her children and her husband’s new Auburn Phaeton, and sets out on a journey of enlightenment in the year 1929, which begins with learning to drive. Before she makes this impetuous exit from the proper South, Mary Sen’s worst transgression has been going out in public without her hat. But there will be no returning to her old life once she abandons it.

In this episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch, premiering Friday, September 29, at 9:30 PM, author Dot Jackson discusses Mary Sen’s great escape to Appalachia, along with its guilt and raptures, and in the process, the former prize-winning reporter at the Charlotte Observer shares her debut novel’s story of hard-won redemption.

“I started this book in the mid 1960s…it came from a scandal that really did happen in our family; and it’s one of those things where, if you have a southern mother, you know that she may tell you things, especially as she gets older; but when she does tell you about a family scandal, it’s with a disclaimer, ‘don’t you breath a word of this as long as you live!,’” muses Jackson. “Of course, when she was telling me those things, all I could think was: book, book, book! I had never cared about writing a book in my life before this and I have never cared about it since.”

During her many years at the at the Charlotte Observer, Jackson remained hard at work expanding on the framework of this family scandal—collecting a wealth of Appalachian stories and folklore and weaving them into a polished novel. Now Refuge, a mountain ballad written decades ago but published only recently, with its lead character Mary, like the intrepid hero Inman in Cold Mountain, who leaves the gentility of Charleston for life in the North Carolina mountains, returns readers to the sweet air of Appalachia and beyond the mountain stereotypes of the past.

“It used to be that publishers had the opinion that mountain people were all so ignorant. It took a gentleman like Inman, who turns up in Cold Mountain, to convince a publisher otherwise—coincidentally, the same publisher who rejected my book 20 years before,” says Jackson.

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s all-new interview with Dot Jackson on North Carolina Bookwatch, Friday, September 29, at 9:30 PM, with an encore episode airing Sunday, October 1, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During this season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests also include: Will Blythe (To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever), John Hart (The King of Lies), Sarah Dessen (Just Listen), Kristin Henderson (While They’re at War), David Payne (Back to Wando Passo), John Hope Franklin (Mirror to America), Leah Stewart (The Myth of You and Me), Andrew Britton (The American), Allan Gurganus (New Stories of the South), Tom Carlson (Hatteras Blues), Bill Smith (Seasoned in the South), William Leuchtenburg (The White House Looks South), Art Chansky (Blue Blood), Mark Ethridge (Grievances),  Paul Leonard (Music of a Thousand Hammers), and Angela Davis-Gardner (Plum Wine).

For more information about additional series guests and airdates, plus, the all-new Bookwatch blog and online book club, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other local productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.

—UNC-TV—