New Tomorrows: Love – Courage – Hope follows two people with scars on their hearts who meet in the Appalachian Mountains and discover there is hope for love still. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The inspiration for this story was quite personal and related to my own experiences on the day of 9/11. On that morning, I was teaching 8^th grade remedial reading in a town less than 100 miles from Washington, D.C. We had students in the building whose parents worked at the Pentagon. I was also an actively running volunteer EMT. I had to let my students’ needs take first place ahead of my own emotional turmoil. Along with my fellow local first responders, my heart was with the men and women in New York going into that burning building, just as surely as if I had worked beside them on an ambulance call on a regular basis. The fire/EMS brotherhood goes beyond time and place. As a matter of fact, that sentiment is stated by Jon in my story when he tells Allie, “There are no geographical boundaries to the brotherhood.” Every year, as the anniversary approached, I saw and experienced the lasting impact that day had on many of my friends, as well as myself. While my personal trauma was in no way as shattering as that of Jon and Allie in the story, a large number of the people I know in the fire/EMS and health care world have been impacted in ways that changed their lives. It was on the 9^th anniversary in 2010, participating in some of the usual remembrance activities, that I began to ask myself the question that is always spinning around in the brain of a writer. “What if?” I began to expand that question and imagine a number of scenarios and finally landed on the question this story is based on. “What if a nurse from New York City and a medic from the greater Washington D.C. area, both struggling with life-altering events that stemmed from 9/11, meet by accident in a rural mountain community and discover a surprising and unexpected attraction between them?” The answer was this book.

The manuscript I started that day was lost, then accidentally rediscovered in 2023, but that is another story altogether.

Jon and Allie both struggle with the fallout of the tragic day of 9/11, leading them to shelter their hearts from others. What trials did you feel were important to highlight the characters’ development?

They both had to learn to trust, themselves and each other, before they could open their hearts to love. But it was going to require work to make that happen. They were at different stages in that process when they met. Allie had learned to reach out for help, in spite of her fiercely independent nature, when she found the original New Tomorrows shelter. Jon, on the other hand, had not willingly accepted the professional counseling offered by the hospital where he worked in New York. Even though they both were pursuing a career that involves caring for others, each had structured their everyday life to avoid close emotional entanglements. As the attraction grew stronger, they faced and overcame uncertainty and danger from Allie’s earlier abuser. The circle of friends that made up the Inner Circle were quietly teaching them, by example, what friendship and love are all about. Allie overcame her fear of both physical and emotional intimacy sooner than Jon faced his own unique demons. It was not until she backed off, forcing Jon to face the possibility of losing what they were building together, that he reached out to get the professional help he so desperately needed.  

What was one scene in the novel that you felt captured the morals and message you were trying to deliver to readers?

Without a doubt it is the scene at the closing of the New Tomorrows program launch where the three women – Allie, Wanda, and Louise – share their personal domestic abuse journeys to emphasize the healing power of love, courage, and hope, followed by the incident that made Jon realize he could fully embrace Allie’s career has a firefighter and open his heart to their love. That culminating scene, and the work of the Inner Circle group before that day, gave the reader a close look at the oft-hidden roots of domestic and sexual abuse and important insight into personal actions and attitudes that promote healthy relationships.  

I hope the series continues in other books. If so, where will the story take readers? 

This was my debut book as writer (published two months shy of my 80^th birthday), but there are definitely more to come. The series has already continued with the publication of my second book, Starting Over: A Father by Choice, this past February. I was delighted when that second novel received your Literary Titan Gold Book award! This book tells the story of Randy and Wanda, Allie and Jon’s good friends who were instrumental in the work of the community group creating the domestic abuse advocacy program and shelter. It is another closed-door romance with a bit of mystery sprinkled in and has a strong focus on the true bond that holds a family together – love, not DNA. The third book in the series is in the works with an anticipated publication date of late fall this year. It is tentatively named No Turning Back: A Mountain Woman’s Journey to Personal Freedom. I say tentatively because it has already been renamed twice since I started writing. It tells the story of Tillie, who played a significant role in the first two books. It traces her life from the early sixties when she was deeply involved in the Civil Rights Movement while away at college, up to current times, and contains journals that reveal the family saga of her forebears from the time they arrived in the mountains as Irish immigrants in the 1840s. Though there is a touch of romance, I would not classify it primarily as a romance novel, but rather as mainline historical fiction. After that, there are three other Hidden Valley stories, as well as a Holiday novella, waiting in line in my brain.

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