Ann H. Gabhart joins us for a chat about book recommendations, balancing writing with family life, mission schools, historical research, and her latest release The Song of Sourwood Mountain. Don’t forget to enter to win a copy of this great book! 

For previous interviews with Ann, follow these links: Episode 15: Guest Ann H. Gabhart & a Book Review of Faith’s Mountain Home and Episode 29: Guest Ann H. Gabhart & a Review of Long Way Home

Ann H. Gabhart is the bestselling author of many novels, including In the Shadow of the River, When the Meadow Blooms, Along a Storied Trail, An Appalachian Summer, River to Redemption, These Healing Hills, and Angel Sister. She and her husband live on a farm a mile from where she was born in rural Kentucky. Ann enjoys discovering the everyday wonders of nature while hiking in her farm’s fields and woods with her grandchildren and her dogs, Frankie and Marley.

Let’s start with something fun.

1. 
   
2. If you were a color, which one would you be? (Which color captures your personality and why?)
   
3. After writing more than 30 novels across 45 years, do you have a steady system for your writing or does each book take its own path to come to life?
   
4. What novel do you recommend to people more than any other, and why?
   
5. Is there anything especially interesting that you haven’t covered in other interviews that you could share with us or perhaps there is something God has laid on your heart that you would like to share with your readers? 
   

Though the twentieth century dawned with such promise, it is just 1910 when Mira Dean’s hopes of being a wife and mother are dashed to pieces. Her fiancé is dead from tuberculosis and Mira must resign herself to being a spinster schoolteacher. But then Gordon Covington shows up and the doors that once seemed shut forever begin to open—even if only a crack.

No longer the boy she knew from school, Gordon is now a preacher who is full of surprises. First, he asks Mira to come to Sourwood in eastern Kentucky to teach at his mission school. Second, he asks her to marry him. Just like that.

Though the prospect of stepping onto a new path is scary, Mira takes a leap of faith and lands in a life she never imagined. In this place filled with its own special challenges, the people she serves just might end up becoming the family she always yearned for.

A mission school in rural Kentucky is going to be a tough place to build a real marriage out of what starts as a marriage of convenience! Great for us readers, not so nice to your characters, haha.

1. 
   
2. What makes Mira accept such a challenging offer?
   

I read a book called Miracle in the Hills about a couple of married doctors at a mission in North Carolina, and of course everyone is familiar with Christy and her mission school in Cutter Gap. It was no picnic for these people who were often raised in privilege to move into much more primitive settings and try to build trust with often very suspicious people. 

2. 
   
3. Did you run across any little-known historical facts as you researched for your mission school in East Kentucky?
   
4. Gordon seems like a practical man who knows what he wants and takes a direct approach to getting it. How did he end up as a missionary?
   
5. What’s next for your writing?
   

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