Carter Taylor Seaton

July 18, 2006

Discipline, persistence, and patience were the ingredients that went into the writing of her first book, says Carter Taylor Seaton. "I was up at 5:30 every morning," she told Putnam Rotarians today. "I wrote before I went to work, and then in the evening I edited what I had written."

Her maternal grandfather had serious business troubles in Depression-era Huntington but the family would never talk about the problems.

Now that those generations have pased from the scene for the most part, Seaton wanted to find what had happened those long years ago.

She took a class in "life writing" taught by John Patrick Grace of Huntington's Publisher's Place.

"If you want to write, you have to read," says Seaton. And read she did.

She read family letters, and used those letters to carry much of the story in the dual-time history. She poured over a vast collection of papers from grandfather's business which were stored in the West Virginia Archives. She read magazines and newspapers from the Depression years.

"I wanted to know what they were talking about at the breakfast table," she said.

In her research, she entered the historical context for another time. "People thought differently about things," Seaton told the group.

"I wanted to find that grandfather was innocent, but I learned that that was not so."

She found instead a story of a man's dramatic rise to riches and then, as happened so often in the Depression years, a fall to proverty, disgrace and prison.

"I looked in the book at Moundsville where they record the names of prisoners when they die," Seaton said. "And he was there in that huge book with a wood binding."

She was unable to reverse the verdict of the court, but she found the human dimensions of a family she had not known. And she found a heroic struggle to persevere in the face of adversity and loss.

"Father's Troubles," the book which sets out the hidden secrets of that difficult time, was published in October, 2003, and it was picked that year as a finalist in ForeWord magazine's Book-of-the-Year award for historical fiction.

Will Seaton continue to write? "Well, I have another set of grandpartents," she laughed.

But in her next book she wants to study the "back-to-the-land" movement in the '60s and '70s.

Many of the people at that time were drawn to rural West Virginia. They have a grand story of accomplishment and achievement -- and the story has never been told.

At least not with the skill and insight as it might be told by Carter Seaton.