Where are you from? 
All over Western North Carolina.  My father was a minister in the Methodist Church and when I was young it was the custom of the Methodist Conference to move pastors from church to church on an average of every four years.  So while I was born at Clyde in Haywood County, we moved away before I was a year old and I have no memory of that town.  Until I left to go to college I had lived in Lowell, Oakley, Fletcher, Greensboro and Shelby.  So I always say I never had a home, except for the whole of the mountain region.  The closest thing I had to an actual home was my grandparents’ farm in Clay County, in the far southwestern part of the state, where we often visited.  It’s a beautiful spot and I love it.  My first four novels are set there.
         But in another sense you could say I’m from everywhere I’ve ever been where I felt I belonged—all the spots that gave me a sense of place and the past and let my imagination soar.  That would include certain parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado; the Civil War battlefields of Northern Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania; and parts of England, France—especially Southern France—and Italy.  I suppose it would also have to include Washington, D.C., where I worked for 19 years, although I was very unhappy there for much of that time.  But Washington’s replete in history and on many occasions I did find joy and inspiration there too. 

Tell us your latest news. 
My new novel Nor the Battle to the Strong is to be released in the summer of 2008 by Frederic C. Beil Publisher of Savannah, GA.  I’m also working on a sequel called The Sunshine of Better Fortune.  Also, my wife Ruth and I have co-written a four-act play, which we call Sunset, about the last years of the old-time Western lawman Wyatt Earp.

When and why did you begin writing? 
It’s hard to say.  It happened very early—so early I have no clear memory of it.  I do remember that I started out wanting to draw, to be an artist.  But at some point the desire to tell a story in words rather than in pictures came over me.  My first efforts at writing were pretty bad.  I loved cowboy movies and Western stories and had drawn some comic books with Western themes in my drawing days, so that’s what I started writing about.  Pretty soon, though, my interests broadened and I became increasingly interested in writing about other periods of the past.  I enjoyed imagining what it might have been like to be an ordinary person in a past time.

When did you first consider yourself a writer? 
In high school or college, I guess.  That’s the first time I began to believe I could eventually be a writer if I worked at it hard and long enough.

What inspired you to write your first book? 
I suppose you mean my first published book.  There were many others—30 or so years of them—that weren’t any good.   My first novel to be published was Hiwassee, a little book about the Civil War in Western North Carolina.  I wrote it during my last two years in Washington, when I was emotionally detaching myself from my life there and getting back in touch with my mountain roots and the heritage of the Southern Appalachians.  Once during a car trip down to visit my ailing parents in Clay County I was suddenly struck by the beauty of the mountain landscape, and some visual images came to me which later emerged as the opening scenes of Hiwassee.

Who first influenced your writing? 
My mother was a wonderful inspiration….  She had a boundless faith in me—believed I could accomplish anything I set my mind to.  And she was a great reader and lover of books, especially books about the mountains, and had a deep appreciation of beauty, especially the natural beauty of the Appalachians.  She passed all that on to me.  I regret she died before she could see my first book.  I think it would’ve made her very proud.  But then she was always proud of me no matter what I did.

How has your…upbringing affected your writing? 
There’s no denying I’ve also been affected by growing up in the home of a minister.  Religious faith and religious observance were integral parts of my early life.  I’m steeped in scripture and I love the stories in the Bible, especially the stories of Jesus, which continue to be incredibly compelling to me.  While I’m no longer conventionally religious, I do have a strong spiritual life, and spiritual themes are important in all my books so far.  In each one there are characters who meditate on spiritual questions—the nature of God and His will, whether He intervenes in human life, the uses of prayer, why He permits evil.  These are the greatest questions of all, I think.

Do you have a specific writing style? 
That’s a good question.  I did develop a special style for my first four books, which were all set in the Southern Appalachians.  It’s simple and direct; the idiom and vernacular of mountain talk is in it.  The best things ever about my writing have been told me by mountain folk who say, “You write like we talk.”  That’s a better compliment that a New York Times rave review.  I use a somewhat different style for my Revolutionary War books, which I hope reflects the speech of the characters of that day.  …I suppose my style changes to reflect what my books are about.  But I like to think there’s always a fundamental similarity, a characteristic tone, so that somebody can read one of my books, regardless of its setting in time and place, and think, That’s Charles Price.

What historical period are you most comfortable writing about? 
That’s hard to say; I seem to be able to adjust pretty comfortably to whatever period I’m exploring.

How do you come up with titles? 
Only two of my four published novels came out bearing the titles I gave them, and I had to go to the mat with the publisher to insist on one of those.  The other two were retitled by publishers because they thought my working titles were clunky or didn’t work somehow.  So perhaps I’m not that good with titles. I do like the one I gave my forthcoming book—Nor the Battle to the Strong.  It’s from the Bible; you know, “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong”—from the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  I thought it fitted the amazing story of how the hungry, dirty, undermanned, ill-equipped, badly-clothed Continental soldiers and a bunch of part-time militia beat the British Army, the finest professional military force of the 18^th-century world.  Evidently this publisher agreed with me.  The title of the sequel, The Sunshine of Better Fortune, is taken from General Nathanael Greene’s farewell address to the Southern Continental Army at the end of the Revolutionary War:  “We have trod the paths of adversity together, and have felt the sun-shine of better fortune.”  I’ll have to find a publisher for it and see if they like it.

What writers have influenced you most? 
Shakespeare, the Bible, William Faulkner, Karen Blixen, T.E, Lawrence, Cormac McCarthy, Ron Hansen and Gabriel García Márquez for use of language.  John Ehle, Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stegner, Norman Mailer and Peter Taylor for purity and elegance of style.  Eudora Welty and Isabel Zuber for heart and compassion for characters.  A couple of old-time writers of genre Westerns, Alan LeMay and Ernest Haycox for powerful storytelling, and Haycox especially for his vivid writing about place. For historical fiction my mentors are Patrick O’Brian and Zoé Oldenbourg.   Pam Durban is someone I admire for just superior all-around fine fiction writing.   John Buchanan is one of my favorite serious historians; others are Amy Kelly and Vita Sackville-West. I’m no poet but I love good poetry, particularly Ron Rash’s, Kathryn Stripling Byer’s and Isabel Zuber’s.  I could go on and on.  Everything I read that’s good influences me; I take something from it—learn from it.

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor? 
The first person I ever knew who I thought led a literary life was a journalist and columnist named Hunter James who worked on the Greensboro newspaper where I took my first job as a cub reporter in 1962.  ....He lit the fire in me to be a writer.  …..But after Hunter and I drifted apart, there was a period there between the early seventies and the mid-nineties when no one mentored me.  So I’m largely self-taught.  All the writers I just listed in answer to your last question—their books were my teachers. 

Do you see writing as a career? 
It’s become my career.  I don’t mean to imply it’s making a living for me; it isn’t.  But it’s what I do full-time.  It’s what I am now.

If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book? 
Oh, yes.  But that’s true of every novel I’ve written.  You always learn something after a manuscript is out of your hands that you wish you’d put in, or left out, or said differently, or something.  It’s inevitable.  But you can’t go back.  You have to live with what you wrote, flaws and all.

What drew you to historical fiction? 
I suppose the foremost influence has been my sense of the past and the powerful obligation I feel to make the past accessible.  I’ve chosen to write historical fiction because it’s a way of making the past live, not just for its own sake, not just so the reader can escape into another time, but to show that the past has relevance to the present.  Our schools have done us a tremendous disservice in the way they teach history as a dull, dead subject—it’s the subject most of us say we hated most.  That’s because it’s never taught as something that happened to real people like ourselves or that it was both different from and very much like our own time.  I feel the past ought to be recalled on its own terms, in all its complexity and ambiguity, driven by its own values.  For me it’s worthy of respect; it has rights; the lives lived in it deserve to be offered up honestly.  For a writer to tamper with those lives by catering to the tastes of a later age, to “clean it up” with political correctness, is, for me, an impermissible censorship.  If we don’t understand the past as it was, how can we learn from it and apply those lessons to the problems of our own time?   Finally, misunderstanding or distorting the past cheats the reader, who deserves to receive what he or she has sought by purchasing a historical novel—a sense of the reality of the past.

Do you have to travel much concerning your books? 
if you mean traveling to promote the books, yes, quite a bit.  That depends partly on how much the publisher wants to spend for book tours and also how much time and effort I as an individual want to put in, on top of that.  Usually there’s a period of four to five months after a book’s release when I do traveling—a lot in the first month or so, then gradually less as time passes.  I also travel to do research.  Researching the Appalachian books didn’t require much travel because I live in the middle of the region, but for my so-far unpublished Westerns I’ve made several trips to the Southwest, and for my also yet-to-be-published medieval book, to England and France.

What was the hardest part of writing your book? 
If you mean the forthcoming Revolutionary War novel and its sequel, the research was the most difficult part of the project.  I wasn’t familiar at all with the 18^th century or the American Revolution, and had to do a tremendous amount of reading and consulting of experts to bone up on it.  It took more than two years of hard work, because I was determined to get the details of the time and place right.  I loved it, but it was quite a challenge.

Do you learn anything from writing your books and, if so, what is it? 
There’s a whole school of literary thought that says writers write books more to explain things to themselves than to explain them to readers.  I guess I’d subscribe to that notion.  My writing feels to me like an act of discovery—and maybe part of that is self-discovery.  I’m learning more and more about myself and how I see life and this world.  Then, if I do a good enough job of learning, I can share that with my readers; and we can learn together.  So each new book is a new voyage, a new expedition, for writer and reader both.

Do you have any advice for other writers? 
Never give up.

Do you have anything specific that you want to say to your readers? 
Read, read, read.  Never stop reading.  We live in an age where reading stands in great peril because of the competition and distractions of technology.  Read and keep the love of reading alive.

Who do you relate to more:  Your living family or your long-dead ancestors? 
No matter how real my characters may become to me, and no matter how much I may care for them, the living people are the ones who matter.  Any writer who thinks the imaginary people in his or her work are more important than living ones is a mighty scary creature to me.  I think we must love those around us.  We must have compassion and understanding and affection and the ability to understand and identify with how others feel.  That’s what my preacher dad taught me and it’s what I still believe, and always will believe.