Carol Heilman didn't set out to be a writer.

She set out to survive a boring afternoon near Asheville while her husband sat through another medical conference. Wandered into a bookstore. Picked up something about free writing. Went back to the hotel room and tried it.

Something cracked open that day that never quite closed.

That was her 50s. She's got five books behind her now.

But if you want to know where the writing actually comes from, you have to go back further. A lot further.

Bell County, Kentucky. Late 40s, early 50s. Coal camps tucked up in the hollows where the signal couldn't find you and the mountains kept everything close and quiet. Her daddy went underground every day. Her mother ran the company store with the kind of authority that didn't require a title. Carol and her sister had the apple orchard, the creek, and the whole side of a mountain to grow up on.

No supervision. No schedules. Just be home by supper.

She absorbed all of it. The camp life. The commissary. The men coming up out of the earth at shift's end. The way a community pulls together when it doesn't have much choice.

Writers store things up for years before they know that's what they're doing.

Her latest novel is Becoming Hattie Mae: Becoming Hattie Mae: A Hardscrabble Life in an Appalachian Holler. Set in those same coalfields. A young girl navigating a hard father and a harder world, with a gypsy passing through to shake things loose.

Carol will tell you it's not her story. Not her circumstances.

But it's her world. Every detail of it earned.

The book is out in hardback now. Audio too. Her publisher likes where it's headed. She's already under contract for the sequel, trying to get the bones of it down before deadline finds her.

by Carol Guthrie Heilman (Author) Purchase here: Becoming Hattie Mae

There's a moment she describes from those camp years that tells you everything about where her instincts as a writer come from.

Somebody in the camp got a television. Small thing. Black and white. Useless at the bottom of a Kentucky holler with no signal to speak of.

So the men carried it up the mountain on Saturday nights. Flashlights bobbing up the dark path to the mouth of the mine, where they could tap the power source and maybe pull in a picture. Carol and her sister watched from the porch.

Eventually someone ran a cable down from the ridge. Set the TV on the meat counter inside the commissary. The whole community packed in. Fuzzy picture. Black and white. Sometimes an animal would disturb the line up on the ridge and somebody would climb back up in the dark to find the trouble while everybody waited.

The signal always came back.

Carol's mother sold sandwiches over the counter while they watched.

That image alone. A whole community gathered around a flickering screen on top of a meat counter in the Kentucky mountains, because somebody believed it was worth the climb.

That's the coalfields. And that's what shaped her.

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