John Pennington Knows That Writers Write

By Leonard Shapiro

John Pennington still remembers the day he came home from the University of Virginia and told his mother he was going to major in English. A child of the Depression, she’d hoped he and his four siblings would find a profession safe from the vagaries of the economy, and she was a bit skeptical about her son’s course of study.

“My mom always pushed us hard,” Pennington said. “She’d always say ‘if you don’t do your homework, you won’t amount to a hill of beans.’ When I told her about majoring in English, she’d say ‘if you do, you’ll wind up digging ditches the rest of your life.’”

In a sense, her words were somewhat prophetic. Pennington grew up and still lives in the Warrenton area and is the founder and owner of Monomoy Farm Services in Marshall. His thriving company specializes in heavy equipment excavation—from pond and road construction to building polo fields to providing home and office building foundations, among many other tasks.

Pennington has 27 employees and also operates his own farm, with 30 head of cattle roaming his pastures. Oh yes, he’s a former college wrestler and still a highly-skilledtennis player who often competes in local, state and regional competitions.

And one of these days, he’s going to put that UVa English degree to full use. Inside 

that athlete-farmer-businessman-father-of-two-husband also beats the dreamy heart of a writer. He first got hooked at Fauquier High School when a tenth-grade English teacher read one of his poems out loud in her classroom. 

At Virginia, Pennington studied under some of the finest novelists and short story-tellers ever collected on a single university campus, and several of his own short stories were published and honored with prestigious university awards.

Among the professors who taught classes and judged his work were the late Peter Taylor, a short story writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist; John Casey, a National Book Award honoree for his novel, Spartina; James MacPherson, the first African-American novelist to win a Pulitzer, and Ann Beattie, also a prize-winning writer with several novels adapted for the movies.

Taylor headed up the creative writing program when Pennington was in school in the late 1970s and invited him to join his elite advanced writing class. He also wanted him to come to his Tennesseefarm one summer to work on his writing. Pennington politely declined, mostly because “I had a lot of other things going on in my life at the time.”

When he graduated in 1979, Pennington taught English at Blue Ridge School in St. George, Va. where he’d spent his last two years of high school. He lived on campus and helped coach football and wrestling. 

Coupled with his teaching load and dorm, cafeteria and chapel duty, there was little time to write, and eventually he moved away from the literary life and headed out to the real world.

Pennington married young and ended 

up managing his own leased property and his former wife’s family farm, more than 1,000 acres in all. He’d always had a fondness for machines and equipment, driving a tractor as a youngster when he could barely reach the pedals. An old back hoe on the farm got him started installing environmental practices for himself and others. In 1989, he bought a new back hoe and started Monomoy.

These days, there’s another talented writer in the family—his wife, Penny McCann Pennington, author of the novel “It Burns a Lovely Light.” They were married in 2003 and Pennington described her as “a very bravewoman. When she lived in Pittsburgh, she decided she wanted to be in the movie business, and she did. Then she said she wanted to do some writing, and she does it the way it should be done. She’s more structured than I am, very disciplined. I’m very proud of her.

“Writing was tougher for me, almost scary. When I was writing in college, I didn’t know how I did it. It was stay up all night, get into this trance and just write, write, write.”

Still, he said, he’d love to try again, perhaps sooner than later.

“I do think about writing again,” he said. “I also feel responsible for all the people who work for us. But at some point, I’d like to simplify my life and get back to it. I think I know a lot more about it now, and there are definitely some stories I’d like to tell.”

Writers write. And in John Pennington’s dreamy writer’s heart, he knows it’s only a matter of time until that creative trance returns.