Writing has always been a way for me to situate my place in the world. I think this is because I learned most of the important things in life through stories. But it took me a little longer than many writers to find my way to books and the lessons they held.
After a difficult childhood and adolescence, I dropped out of high school and went to work at a grocery store within walking distance of my mother’s south Atlanta home. It didn’t take very long for me to recognize that the life of a Winn-Dixie clerk wasn’t the second-best thing to heaven, and I started a course of self-guided reading to try to make up for some of the things I knew I lacked. I could have been smarter and sought out a librarian, but instead I set aside a portion of my weekly paycheck for books; I consistently went to the shopping mall Walden’s Books and picked out one book from the classics section each week. I didn’t know my Faulkner from my Fitzgerald, so it seemed like a reasonable way to head in the right direction. Looking back, I think I needed an actual transaction to take place for it to count in my mind. Cost has a way of making things feel more real.
But, like a religious convert, I was overthrown. I was a drunk, a junkie, for words. Because I wasn’t a natural or experienced reader, I worried over sentences differently. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was teaching myself to read as a writer. I was learning so many new words and ways of arranging them that I had to slow down and pay attention to the smallest details. The sounds of syllables, the shapes of paragraphs, the many lovely little ways to make the noise of life into the crisp signal of art.
When I was seventeen, I ran across the novel Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe. It lit my brain on fire. It was exactly the kind of chest-thumping Romantic coming-of-age novel I needed to confirm what I was beginning to sense about myself—that I needed to write to be happy. So I did. I started hammering out terrible stories on the electric typewriter I bought from Sears. I liked its metallic crashing because it made the effort of my imagination feel like tangible work. It sounded like I was getting things done.
At eighteen, I moved to Asheville, North Carolina, where Wolfe grew up and where he gained much of the inspiration for his four massive autobiographical novels. It felt necessary to move there, to wager my future by putting myself fully into the writing game. That theme of cost creeping in again. A strange little economy of profit and loss, underwritten by the desire to have a great big life.
I went out and had adventures. Got lucky a few times and unlucky just as many. But writing pulled me through all of it. It was the ghost in the house. It wanted a way to get out and make itself real. And who doesn’t like a good ghost story?
So I’ve tried to write these ghost stories down and share them with readers. There might not be a single specter or phantom in any of them, but if I know anything to be true, it’s that what comes from the mind is the result of being haunted. Four novels, a story collection, and a book of personal essays. I’ve won a few awards, but the best compliment you can ever get as a writer is hearing from someone who has closely read your work and connects to it. They’ve seen the ghost too, and it has moved them.
I’m excited for readers to share my latest possession. The World Itself is peopled with hauntings of all kinds, but ultimately it is about how we can come to understand we are all part of a mystery that can never be conclusively solved—how to live.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Charles Dodd White’s The World Itself in the summer of 2027.
