Q: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
A: Not consciously, but I was always writing something. I wrote mini-books made from construction paper on topics ranging from horses, to stories about my stuffed animals, to what the neighborhood college students did in a day. For many years I also enjoyed writing narratives of what went on in my family household. When I was 13 I began researching and writing the first draft of the Beneath Old Glory series, and soon after began to dream of having it published one day.
Q: Where do you usually do your writing?
A: Pretty well anywhere around the house, but my favorite location for writing in the summertime is in my backyard under the apple tree.
Q: Where did you get the idea for Beneath Old Glory?
A: Several different things helped inspire the setting for the story. One inspiration came from a true story in a horse magazine about a Native American woman who had trained horses for an army fort in the nineteenth century. Then, I also had had a dream of being held in a log stockade with a boy of the same age, and I was going to go on trial before a military judge for some unknown misdemeanor. Those things helped to develop the setting for the story, but once I began writing, all the different pieces flowed in from various places or I just found them unfolding as the story progressed, sometimes to my own surprise!
Q: What do you want readers to know about your books?
A: I want readers to know that many themes, the characters’ personal development, and various threads of the story are woven throughout the entire series. Some issues are not resolved until the later books, and I hope that readers will follow the characters through to the end of the story in order to really understand them and be able to appreciate their lives as a whole.
Q: What do you think readers will like most about the series?
A: I hope that readers will enjoy both the historical aspects as well as the human side of the story and be able to apply both to their daily lives, in their understanding of our country’s history and the choices they make in their personal lives. The characters in Beneath Old Glory don’t always have easy lives and our country’s past isn’t always pretty, but I hope that readers will appreciate the values that are woven throughout the books and that they will learn and grow along with the developing viewpoints, perspectives, insights, and passions of the characters as the series unfolds.
Q: Who are some of your favorite authors?
A: My top favorite author is Lucy Maud Montgomery, for the insights into human character and the magic of the ordinary that she weaves into all of her books. I also greatly enjoy James Fenimore Cooper, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Will James, and Elizabeth George Speare. Norwood by Henry Ward Beecher, and The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter are also two of my favorite books.