Today we’d like to introduce you to Jim Hartsell.
Hi Jim, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Like most of us, there are many descriptors that apply to me: husband, father, grandfather, voracious reader, and average hammer dulcimer player are a few of them. I also write, concentrating on Southern fiction and children’s books.
I have deep roots in this area. During my seven decades I have lived in a total of three counties, all in East Tennessee, and all contiguous; in one of those counties is the farm that’s been in our family for five generations. My immediate family consists of my wife of 40+ years, my two children, their spouses, and, at the moment, a total of six grandchildren. I have been assured that six is it, but I remain skeptical. My wife and I share our home on House Mountain with a cat and two shelter dogs.
My professional career was spent in education, working with teens in various treatment centers, locked units, residential facilities, and public school alternative classrooms. These decades spent with teens who were characterized as losers at best and dangerous at worst taught me much about resilience, strength, and bravery, and helped form the concept of the main character in the Boone series. It has been said that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they aren’t true, but that they are incomplete. Certainly this is the case with the young people I spent so much time with, who are more like the rest of us than not.
I have a beautiful family, all the necessities of life plus a few luxuries, a fine circle of friends, and time to write books, play music, and enjoy the moments as they present themselves one by one. By any measure that matters to me, I am a very wealthy man.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Like my writing, my life has been shaped by forces and events both expected and unexpected, both fulfilling and challenging. Finding my life partner in my wife Suzanne, learning as I went (and making more mistakes than I care to remember) as we built our home one paycheck at a time, creating and building a family together, my career in education working with teens on the fringes of society, living through (and still marked by) the shooting at my church, meeting my grandchildren and watching them begin their journey, dealing with my son’s serious illness and then his daughter’s leukemia, all of these things have led me to where I am now.
My writing has been, I think, strongly influenced by my career and the arrival of my grandchildren. The former led directly to the creation of the Boone Series, a coming of age in Appalachia six book series, and the latter to my collection of children’s books. There are six, and the fact that I also have six grandchildren is not a coincidence.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My writing falls into two categories. Southern fiction, most notably the Boone Series, and children’s books. I’m working on a middle grade trilogy to fill in the gap between books for the very young and books for mid-teens and up; more on that later.
In my career I worked primarily with the labeled children: socially maladjusted, conduct disorders, chemically dependent, sexual predators, and so on. Over the three decades I taught (and learned from) them I came to realize that their lives were as rich and layered and complex as the lives of the rest of us, and I thought their story deserved to be heard. Boone, the protagonist of the series, is a distillation of the young men I worked with over the years. My approach to writing is more Bradbury than Grisham, so I had no idea the series would grow into six books and address as many themes as it did. Coming of age in Appalachia, survival of an abusive childhood, the issue of prejudice in many different forms (societal, economic, sexual, racial, disability), and I’m still hearing from readers about things I didn’t know were there. When I hired a voice actor to produce audiobook versions of the books in the series, I heard things I didn’t expect to, because of Tim’s delivery, pauses, emphasis, and all the other subtleties that go into an audio performance. Collaboration is a powerful thing.
This concept showed up again in my children’s books, which are written for beginning readers or for very young children and their grownups to read together. Each of the six, which are all stand alone books, covers a different theme: friendship, generosity, thankfulness, curiosity, paying attention, and how children view the world. When I found Alex, my illustrator, the first book we worked on together was Father and Sister Radish, and I thought I knew what the visuals should be. Her ideas were better. Every page. I learned early to get out of her way and let her work, and, like with Tim’s audio skills, she finds things I didn’t know were there. For a long time my children’s books were available in English only. In a conversation with some friends who moved up from Mexico 20 or 25 years ago I discovered that Maria had used children’s stories to teach her child English, since they already knew them in Spanish. I thought, what a great idea that is, and she agreed to do the translation. Now all six are available in both languages. I am a great believer in collaboration, largely because I’ve seen its power. I also believe that diversity makes us stronger, and I think the experiences I’ve outlined here support that.
My middle grade trilogy is a work in progress. Alex has the first book now, working on the interior and cover. I had tried to write in this genre several times, and it was clumsy, forced, and uninteresting. Having a ten year old granddaughter as a consultant has made a huge difference, and I think I’ve found the rhythm of the genre. Time will tell; I hope to release the trilogy by the end of this year.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
I talked about collaboration, and how critically important it is, in the previous response. For me, some of the best support comes from conversations with people who have read my works. I do eight or ten festivals a year in the greater Knoxville area, and having fans drop by is both a pleasure and a chance to hear their thoughts about the characters and stories in detail. Several fans of the Boone series were upset with me because I capped the series at six books. The fact that they were so invested in Boone and his story that they wanted it to go on was music to my ears. I have also had parents tell me how much they and their child enjoyed the children’s stories I created along with Alex.
Book reviews are a good way to provide feedback and help guide potential new readers, but without a doubt the best review of the Boone series I have ever received was one the reading public never saw. It came from a teacher at a juvenile detention center. I had donated the series to the school there and she told me that one of the young men who, by his own admission, had never finished a book, had read and enjoyed the entire six book series and thought Boone was a realistic character. Best review ever.
Pricing:
- Children’s books – $10
- Boone Series and other fiction – $15 at shows, $18 retail
- Middle grade series – TBD
Contact Info:
- Website: https://housemountainviews.com
