Wayne Caldwell was born in Asheville, NC in the middle of the last century. He grew up in the Sand Hill section of the Enka community, where he remembers the Goat Man, the Beacon Restaurant, and Elson’s Drug Store. As a boy, he set up duck pins at the American Enka bowling alley, fished in Enka Lake, and took his first paying job at the Enka Lake Club, making ninety cents an hour.
He first became passionate about literature in Miss Laura Douglass Harrell’s English classes at Enka High School. She introduced him to Thomas Wolfe, among others, and joked with him about writing the Great American Novel. And occasionally threw an eraser at him.
He has three degrees in English, from UNC-Chapel Hill, Appalachian State, and Duke. In a former life he taught composition and literature at North Carolina Central and Union College (Schenectady NY).
He has been busy since Cataloochee and Requiem by Fire. He contributed a chapter to a collaborative novel, Naked Came the Leaf Peeper, by Brian Lee Knopp and eleven others (BurningBush Press, 2011). Hilarity in Asheville and surrounding areas. Not for the squeamish. He also wrote a short story, “Rattlesnakes,” published in 27 Views of Asheville, edited by Rob Neufeld (Eno Publishers, 2012). This story speaks fictionally of an ill-advised downtown mall proposal a very real Asheville struggled with in the early eighties.
He has finished a third novel. The working title is Memoirs of an Unambitious Lawyer, and the gentle reader can look for that to be published in 2013. By whom is yet a mystery. It’s the story of James Erastus (“Rass”) Carter, who left Cataloochee and “made a lawyer.” Set in Cataloochee, Europe, and Asheville, it is the story of a good man finally finding his life’s love.
He is working on a fourth novel, working title Shadow Family, which has to do with adoption.
A new short story, “Donation Jar,” is at the online journal Drafthorse, published at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate TN.
In his spare time he works up firewood.
Wayne Caldwell 