Nancy Werking Poling, Author
Intrigued by a family story, Black Mountain author Nancy Werking Poling wrote an essay, “Leander’s Lies,” that won North Carolina Literary Review’s 2018 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize. Even after penning the essay, Poling was left with questions and so she researched further, eventually deciding she had enough material for a historical novel.
Set in Western North Carolina in the late 19th century, Leander’s Lies tells the story of a poor but ambitious tenant farmer who feels trapped by circumstances that deny him the life of a gentleman of ideas and literature.
The title character mirrors the life of Poling’s husband’s storied ancestor. Her mother-in-law, as long as she lived, believed that her father had been a US Congressman from NC, had hunted with Theodore Roosevelt and was a widower when he married her mother. “On Ancestry, I discovered that in fact, he had two living wives and five children when he married my husband’s grandmother,” Poling says. “I smelled a compelling story.”
Her research involved a lot of reading and communication with a buggy-building expert and a Church of the Brethren archivist. She was searching, too, for a reason for Leander’s mendacious ways. “When the Panic of 1893 shook the country’s economy, many men escaped debt by deserting their families,” she says. “It’s plausible that’s why Leander left his first family.”
She learned the names of the real-life Leander’s wives and children. “But facts aren’t the same as Truth,” Poling says. “I began the project outraged that he would leave two wives and five children. But as I became more familiar with the historical period, as I considered what life was like for a man of books and ideas to be stuck in rural North and South Carolina, my heart softened. A little.”
Leander’s Lies, December, 2025, historical novel, paperback, $19.99, by Nancy Werking Poling, and published by April Gloaming Publishing, Nashville, TN. Learn more at NancyPoling.com.
