<body><div>The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.If you were living in Charlotte several years ago, you might’ve looked out your window to see Joy Callaway driving past your house as if she were casing the area. The international best-selling author was searching for remnants of Camp Greene, a World War I Army training center on 8,000 acres in northwest Charlotte and the setting for her next novel.A native Charlottean, Callaway first heard of Camp Greene at a 2018 literary panel featuring local writer Sarah Crosland, who wrote about the camp in her book Secret Charlotte.Callaway studied journalism at Marshall University in West Virginia before switching to public relations and earning a graduate degree from the University of South Carolina. She later returned to Charlotte to work in the field.“I never thought about writing,” she says. “And then one summer, my husband was playing in a softball league two or three nights a week, and I was reading a lot. I remember standing up and looking at my bookshelf and thinking, Why did I stop writing?”<div style="position:relative;width:100%; height:0; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JTmbNi2cqp8?si=HEMOgOMTm4kGIO98" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" style="width:100%; height:100%;top:0; left:0; position:absolute"></iframe></div>Callaway picked up her pen again. She wrote a romance that couldn’t find an agent. That was followed by a science fiction novel, but still no luck. It wasn’t until she looked closer to home that she hit her literary stride.“Over Christmas, we visited my grandmother in West Virginia,” she says. “She was our family historian, and she would tell stories about her ancestors as though they were right in the room with us. She told us about her aunts, who were all artists in New York in the late 19th century.”After the holidays, Callaway came home to North Carolina and began writing a novel based on her family.“I thought, This is the book,” she says. “It was the truest, most authentic thing I’d written to that point.”In 2016, Callaway published her debut novel, The Fifth Avenue Artists Society. It follows four sisters who long to become artists in Gilded Age New York. Over the next seven years, Callaway published four novels, all preparing her for the kind of research that would be required to tackle her project on Camp Greene.She spent the better part of a decade studying the records of enlisted men and the letters they sent to sweethearts back home. She searched for ruins of camp buildings and trenches. She also spent hours in Uptown, old photographs in hand, struggling to find a WWI-era city that had been lost to time and progress.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=288eNy_1GznsLBx00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=288eNy_1GznsLBx00" width="1140" height="1228" ><figcaption>illustration by Andrea Cheung</figcaption></figure>But one important structure remains. The circa-1879 Dowd House is one of the main reasons Camp Greene was constructed in the city’s northwest corner. The property’s farmhouses sat atop small hills overlooking the sprawling acreage, making the existing buildings perfect for military offices.“When I went inside the home, the owner showed me a uniform that had been preserved from Camp Greene,” she says. “The uniform had been so cared for that it literally felt like it had been made yesterday.”The same thoughtful preservation is found in the setting of Callaway’s 2025 novel, The Star of Camp Greene. During her years of research, Callaway became fascinated by the role this disappeared place played in building what would become contemporary Charlotte.“I was struck by how much Charlotteans’ hospitality impacted the soldiers’ experience,” she says. “It was such a catalyst for bringing more people to settle in Charlotte after the war. It really started the boom.”In researching and writing historical fiction, Callaway has uncovered the history of the places that she and her family have called home — and has found her own story in the process.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=4b8SJI_1GznsLBx00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=4b8SJI_1GznsLBx00" width="600" height="807" ><figcaption>photograph by Matt Hulsman</figcaption></figure><h2>In Love &amp; War</h2>In the opening pages of Joy Callaway’s The Star of Camp Greene, celebrated Broadway singer Calla Connolly collapses onstage while performing for soldiers stationed in Charlotte. She awakens in the camp’s hospital to learn that she’s been diagnosed with the Spanish flu. Calla also uncovers something perhaps even more deadly: top-secret intelligence about troop movements in Europe. When her knowledge is discovered, she’s barred from leaving Camp Greene for fear of compromising the mission. All Calla wants is to reach the front line to lift the hearts of young soldiers with her voice. During her time at Camp Greene under the watchful eye of Col. Jesse Erickson, though, it’s Calla’s own heart that might be lifted as she confronts a difficult past in the hopes of discovering a future that might heal both her and the nation.</div></body>

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The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

Our State Book Club Presents: Joy Callaway

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The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. List

Our State Book Club Presents: Joy Callaway

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