Ann Gabhart

I'm so excited to have Ann visiting with us today. Please leave a comment for a chance to win a book from Ann.


Ann, thanks for joining us on Backporch!

Thank you so much for inviting me over to your back porch, Jackie, to visit with you and your friends for a while. Porches often make an appearance in my books. Even in my new book, Words Spoken True, set in the middle of Louisville, I make use of the back stoop for my character, Adriane, to go out and gather in some sunshine and make friends with an old alley dog.

But since I’m new to your back porch, maybe I ought to take a minute to introduce myself. I’m a Kentucky girl who grew up on a farm over in Anderson County. I’m just a country girl who has been trying to write down stories ever since I was about ten years old. When I began to seriously work toward publication, I took a writer’s course by correspondence, and the last assignment was to write an outline for a novel. I hate writing outlines and so I wrote the book instead. I’ve never looked back. I like making up book length stories. Now I’ve had over twenty books published, some for adults and some for young people. My last ten books have been for the inspirational market with the first one, The Scent of Lilacs, published in 2005. I really enjoy writing these stories. I like being able to include the faith journey of my characters. What a person believes can make such a difference in his or her life, don’t you think?

Even in the inspirational market, I’ve written a lot of different types of stories. My Hollyhill books are about a preacher and his family in small town America. That background was pulled straight from my own. Lawrenceburg, where I’ve lived all my life, is definitely a small town although it’s growing these days. But the Hollyhill books are set in the Sixties, a time when things were changing but at the same time we were still leaning on a lot of old-fashioned values. Then I have my Shaker books, all set in my fictional Shaker village of Harmony Hill, but the physical setting and a lot of the history in the books comes from my research of the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Mercer County, Kentucky. The Shakers were interesting people, but writing romances in a Shaker setting is not the easiest thing to do since Shakers believed romantic love was a sin to be avoided. My fifth Shaker novel, The Gifted, will be out in July, and I did sneak that romance in there. One of my favorite books that I’ve written is Angel Sister, a family story set during the Great Depression. I based a lot of the background for that novel on the stories my mother and her sisters told me about growing up in those years. The storyline is completely fictional, but the echo of my mother’s childhood sounds in many of the scenes.

My new book, Words Spoken True, is the most romantic book I’ve written since coming over to the inspirational market. The story is set in 1855 Louisville and has some dramatic history and a thread of suspense, but it’s the love story that takes center stage in this book. Adriane Darcy lives in 1855 Louisville, a time when women didn’t have as many choices as they do in the modern days. Her father wants her to marry Stanley, the only son of a socially prominent man, but Adriane can’t bear the thought of what life will be like with Stanley. He’ll expect her to confine her writing to flowery bits of poetry or letters to friends. No more news stories for her father’s newspaper. No rush to find the stories and get out the news. On top of that, she knows she will never really love Stanley. Not the way she has always hoped for love.

Then she meets Blake Garrett. While the attraction is immediate and mutual, Adriane knows her father would forbid her to even so much as speak to him. Blake is the enemy, the editor of a competing paper that is threatening to woo readers away from her father’s paper and take over the position as top newspaper in Louisville. In one tragic, riot filled night, Adriane’s life is turned upside down, but love gives her the strength and courage to make the decisions she must.

Thanks for sitting and visiting with me on Jackie’s back porch. You know, a porch is a great place to settle down with a good book when the spring sunshine begins blessing us with beautiful warmth. I hope you’ll consider choosing one of my books. You can check out more about those books at my website, www.annhgabhart.com. I also post about my writing and what’s going on down here on the farm on One Writer’s Journal, www.annhgabhart.blogspot.com. I have a Facebook author’s page and you can follow me on Twitter with a user name of AnnHGabhart. Words Spoken True is available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Words-Spoken-True-Ann-Gabhart/dp/0800720458, or Christianbook.com, http://www.christianbook.com/words-spoken-true-ann-gabhart/9780800720452/pd/720452, or at your favorite book store.

Happy reading!