MONCURE — Judy Hogan — writer, creative writing teacher and activist — first took up the pen at an early age.
“I was put to bed with rheumatic fever during World War II,” Hogan said. “Second grade, I spent in bed. My mother home-schooled me, basically. I started writing stories.”
She eventually recovered from the ailment, but the writing bug stuck.
She and a childhood friend began to write — individually, but cheering each other on during the process — what they called “long books.”
“I don’t think we called them novels,” she said, chuckling at the memory of her early formative years as an author. “Mine was about twins captured by pirates.”
At 82, Hogan’s imagination runs less to pirates these days and more to poetry and, over the last few years, penning a series of mystery novels featuring recurring protagonist Penny Weaver, the series set mostly in fictional Shagbark County, which local readers will recognize as a close mirroring of Chatham County. Hogan has called Chatham County home since moving to Moncure in the late Nineties.
By the time she settled into her Moncure residence, her writing credentials were firmly established. She’d published fiction and poetry and memoirs and had launched Carolina Wren Press, the small Durham-based publishing company she founded in 1976 and which continues, now under new ownership, to publish mostly poetry today.
But Chatham County — her newfound home — quickly provided fertile ground for the author, in ways she didn’t anticipate.
Aiming to establish roots within a reasonable distance of the literary hub of Chapel Hill and Durham, Hogan looked in the Saxapahaw area, hoping to settle there, but found a suitable property — the existing house was unfinished, still needing wiring and a new roof, but the price was right — in Moncure.
At the time, the Moncure community was being eyed as a potential location for a nuclear waste dump.
“When I moved here,” she said, “they were trying to stop a low-level nuclear waste dump. I only was involved in that for a short period of time. But I’m a writer, so I wrote letters.”
Other environmental issues captured her time and attention, including the looming possibility of fracking, the controversial process of injecting liquid at high pressure into subterranean rock for the extraction of natural gas, occurring near her home.
Hogan, no proponent of fracking, lent her energy to the cause of keeping fracking far from her home.
“We were really threatened here because of the gas under us and under the [Jordan] lake,” she said. “I went door-to-door trying to get signatures and leave signs if they would take them. I explained to people what fracking meant, how much water it uses, how all those chemicals are put in the drilling, and we really don’t know what all of those chemicals area. If they’d tried to frack here — and there wasn’t that much gas anyway — it would have ruined this part of Chatham County.”
The specter of fracking informs her latest novel, “Don’t Frack Here: The Twelfth Penny Weaver Mystery,” which will be published on February 1.
The mystery at the heart of the novel centers around the sudden death of a pro-fracking banker.
The book has already received some advance praise.
Diana Hales, Chatham County commissioner, provided the author with a blurb for the book: “There are questions to resolve and facts to be gathered while Penny Weaver and friends educate the community about what happens when the gas drilling rigs move in. ... Judy Hogan brings her knowledge of fracking and heart for preserving our rural community to this Penny Weaver mystery.”
To date, Hogan has published 24 books, including poetry and one cookbook. But for the last few years, Penny Weaver has captured a lot of her attention as an author.
Weaver, it turns out, is a lot like her creator.
“She’s my alter ego,” said Hogan. Naturally, they share some characteristics.
“She’s friendly,” Hogan notes of the similarity between author and protagonist. “And she likes people. And she has a developed inner-life. She gets intuitions, which I do, too.”
And they age at the same rate. But they aren’t identical. Weaver, for instance, is adept in karate (a necessity when confronting ruthless killers) where Hogan isn’t. But Weaver, who in her younger years could land a karate kick with skill, now — in her more advanced years — is more likely to end up “on her butt,” missing the kick, Hogan said.
Age has slowed Hogan down a bit, too; though not much.
A few months ago, while walking, she sustained a fall which left her bruised.
“I feel pretty lucky, actually,” she said, observing that the mishap, while leaving her with a black eye, also oddly cleared up a few other ailments.
“It seems to have knocked all the other small problems out of the way,” she said.
With the pending release of her newest Penny Weaver novel, she’s scaling back on readings and signings, though she is planning several, dates, times and locations to be determined.
She also continues to teach. She offers separate classes (taught at her home and, for those students too far to make the drive, by Skype) in poetry and prose and maintains a roster of three or four students at a time for each class.
“My heart’s good. My lungs are good. No prescription drugs. I’m not moving around as much as I used to, but I still enjoy writing and I enjoy teaching,” she said. “And I keep up with a certain amount of environmental stuff. I read a lot. I’m trying really hard not to over-work. This is my quiet period, just sitting her publishing books.”
She also has a couple more Penny Weaver novels completed, awaiting publication. One of them — true to Hogan’s established form of mixing mystery with real-world issues — tackles the issue of voter identification.
“I’m not in it for the money,” she said. “The books are my babies. I want them to get out there. And they do sell some.”
Randall Rigsbee can be reached at rigsbee@chathamnr.com.
Hogan
Hogan