The maven of Mitford, author Jan Karon, told a sold-out crowd at the Virginia Festival of the Book luncheon at the Omni today that she created 700 characters in her most recent book, Home to Holly Springs, and sometimes found it hard to tell which voice she was hearing in her head.

Albemarle resident Karon created the wholesome Mitford series and published the first of nine books about Episcopalian priest Father Tim and his flock in 1994. “When I started writing the Mitford books, I thought he was a little boring,” she said.

Her relationship with the pudgy priest changed over the years, and in her most recent book, she leaves Mitford, set in her native North Carolina mountains, and follows Father Tim to his new fictional locale, Holly Springs, Mississippi. She compares the launch of the Father Tim series to “giving birth on Sunday and getting pregnant on Monday.”

And does she miss Mitford, the setting that sold more than 20 million books? “No,” she says firmly.

Karon also confesses that she writes as she drives, and warns, “Multiply that by the number of writers living in Albemarle County– and order your groceries in.”

Her faith is an integral part of her fiction. “What I write about is redemption,” she told the Book Fest crowd. “We need it, we’re starved for it. I write about God’s love.”

And while her novels are profanity free, she denied a popular impression that there’s no sex in her books, relating how she told a reader, “Horace, there’s plenty of sex in my books. You just don’t know where to find it.”

Then she read a sample steamer from These High, Green Hills: “She turned to him, smiling, in the dark.”

No word on whether Karon will be looking for inspiration for future works at the Book Fest’s upcoming seminar, Introduction to Tantric Sex.

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