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Clark, Pat Conroy author event coming up Thursday

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Altamont Alumni Author Series Presents:

The Headmaster’s Darlings: A Mountain Brook Novel by Katherine Clark, Altamont Class of 1980

Space is limited. To make a reservation and for shuttle information, visit altamontschool.org/alumniauthorseries or call 874-3506.

Norman Laney is a morbidly obese English teacher. Like the Altamont teacher who inspired this character, he influenced countless future writers and artists. Katherine Clark will tell you he’s the center of her new satirical novel, and Pat Conroy will tell you the book’s setting acts as its second most important character. 

Clark grew up in Mountain Brook and graduated from The Altamont School in 1980. From her Florida home, she has recreated the Mountain Brook of her high school years and the man she thanks for her direction in life in The Headmaster’s Darlings, which debuts this month through Conroy’s Story River Books, a fiction imprint with the University of South Carolina Press.

Altamont teacher and later headmaster Carl Martin Hames was an influential figure to Clark even in the years before she took one of his classes. 

“He was physically such a large presence and intellectually such a large presence in the school,” she said. “His office was right near the library, so he was always walking around the library looking at what students were doing. He would comment on the book they were reading and engage them about it. He would comment on your doodling. He made himself known and he made himself felt.”

And when Clark did have him in class later, she said the experience was “like nothing I have ever had before or since.” He not only taught painting, history and philosophy, but he also emphasized what art could do to individual lives, an influence Clark credits to how many of his students have gone on to become artists and writers. Fannie Flagg and Mountain Brook writer Lanier Isom were both his students as well.

“He made literature and art seem like the highest calling a person could answer to,” Clark said. “He instilled in so many of us a sense that if you wanted to live life to the fullest that art was the best answer. Pursuing a career in the arts is very difficult, but he gave us the courage to go out on that limb or at least give it a try. The passion that he brought to teaching his favorite writers fires me up still today.”

The Headmaster’s Darlings was Clark’s way of bringing Hames, who died in 2002, back to life. She changed some facts and details to better fit the plot, but others are true. For instance, on Clark’s college tour with Altamont, Hames stopped their bus on the side of a busy street in New York City for 45 minutes to go inside and speak with Diane McWhorter, who was writing what would become Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution at the time. To Clark, the stop demonstrated how important Hames believed McWhorter’s work was.

Hames, like the fictional Laney, grew up in Pratt City, and Clark chose to use his perspective as an “outsider” to Mountain Brook to provide a viewpoint distinct from the one she grew up with as a resident of the community. 

Clark’s critique of Mountain Brook within her fictional “satirical comedy of manners” might seem harsh to local readers, but the author, who still has family in Mountain Brook, emphasized why she depicts things as she does. She purposely set the first book in the early 1980s to show how the viewpoints of the characters change through the late ’90s, when the final book in the series is set, as more students leave following high school and exert influence on the community either by coming back or just by visiting and remaining a part of their families’ lives.

 “I wanted to show the evolution of the Southern community and how things can and do change,” she said. “When I was growing up, I felt like there was a lot of racism in the air in Birmingham and in Mountain Book. There still is, just like there is in the South and the rest of the country, but it is so much less that way now than when I was growing up. I know that schools and teachers are a part of the reason for that.” 

Author Pat Conroy edited The Headmaster’s Darlings as well as other novels in the Mountain Brook novel series, all set at a school based on Altamont. All the Governor’s Men is scheduled to come out in the spring of 2016 and The Harvard Bridge in the fall of 2016, with the fourth in late spring 2017. 

“I hope readers will go along for the ride for the whole series, because I do want to show an evolution for the whole community,” Clark said.

For now, though, Clark is taking a break from the novels to work on an oral biography of Pat Conroy — a genre in which she already has two books under her belt. 

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