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Along a Storied Trail by Ann Gabhart
Kentucky packhorse librarian Tansy Calhoun doesn’t mind the rough trails and long hours as she serves her Appalachian mountain community during the Great Depression. Yet she longs to find love like the heroines in her books. When a charming writer comes to town, she thinks she might have found it–or is the perfect man actually closer than she thinks?

Perdita Sweet has called these mountains home for so long she’s nearly as rocky as the soil around her small cabin. Long ago she thought she could love, but when the object of her affection up and married someone else, she stopped giving too much of herself away to others.

As is so often the case, it’s easier to see what’s best for others than to see what’s best for oneself, and Perdita knows who Tansy should choose. But why would anyone listen to the romantic advice of an old spinster?

Saddle up for a heartfelt story of love–love of family, love of place, and the love of a lifetime–from bestselling author Ann Gabhart.

Get your copy of Along a Storied Road by Ann Gabhart

Ann Gabhart caught the writing bug at the age of ten and has been writing ever since. An award winning author, she’s published many books for both adults and young adults. Her books cover several genres from historical to small town family stories to cozy mysteries (mysteries published with author name A.H. Gabhart). Her ideas are sparked by events in Kentucky history and by experiences in her own family. Her first Shaker novel, The Outsider, was a finalist for the ECPA Christian Fiction Book of the Year. Love Comes Home won the Selah Book of the Year award, and These Healing Hills was the Faith, Hope & Love Readers’ Choice Women’s Fiction Book of the Year. 

Ann lives on a Kentucky farm not far from where she was born. She and her husband have three children and nine grandchildren. Ann enjoys hiking on her farm with her grandkids and her dogs, Frankie and Marley. 

Visit Ann Gabhart’s website.

Transcript

Welcome to Christian Historical Fiction Talk. I’m your host, Author Liz Tolsma, and I’m so glad to have you here with us today. It’s always a pleasure to have you along. I hope you really enjoy today’s guest too, because I know I did. Before we get to her though, I just want to remind you that you can find all the information for today’s guest, all the details about her book, and a very handy link to purchase the book on my website, which is LizTolsma.com. So just stop over there and you’ll see all that information there, as well as a transcript from today’s recording. Be sure to check out Christian Historical Fiction Talk on social media. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and on Instagram. So check it out. See what’s happening over there every now and again. I’ll post some questions for you or a poll or something like that. Stop by and put your input in. Let’s have a chat over there. 

Okay, that brings us to today’s guest. She is a country girl, born and raised on a farm in the outer Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Her family grew tobacco and corn. They had some milk cows, hogs and sheep, and she grew up working on the farm, and loving the woods and the animals. So her roots go deep in the land. And she now lives on a farm, just a mile away from that farmhouse where she was born and raised. 

She started writing when she was 10 and has been writing ever since, including pieces in church periodicals. Her first historical romance about the settling of Kentucky was published in 1978. Since then, she’s published over 30 other novels for adults and young adults. She is married and blessed with three wonderful children and nine amazing grandchildren that she spoils every chance she gets. She likes walking in the fields and the woods, finding wildflowers, and spotting birds and wildlife. She has a brand-new dog in her house by the name of Frankie. He is a mix of crazy and sweet. 

Her latest book is Along A Storied Trail. So she’s going to tell us a little bit more about herself and about the book. So, please help me welcome Ann Gabhart to the show today. 

Liz: Welcome to the show and it’s so good to have you with us today. 

Ann: I’m glad to be here. It’s always fun to talk about books and writing and especially when I have a new release coming out, Along a Storied Trail. So I’m glad to be here to talk with you Liz. There’s nothing better that I love than talking a good book.

Liz: So why don’t you go ahead and start by introducing yourself to the listeners? 

Ann: Alright, I’m Ann H. Gabhart. I stick that little H in my name on my writers’ book. Along a Storied Trail is my 35th published book. It’s my 21st, I think, in the inspirational market. I had a number of books, published for young adults several years ago, plus a couple of historical romances and the feneral market. Since 2005, I’ve been publishing in the inspirational market. I love writing inspirational fiction. I enjoy being able to include a character’s faith journey along with the other adventures. I might follow them down there.

I’m a country girl. I live out in the country still, and grew up on a farm here in Kentucky, love dogs and my grandkids, and I’m not sure what else you need to know about me, but I’m sure there’s always something.

Liz: Well, sounds like a great life. I drove through the Kentucky, Sunday in fact. I always loved that drive. It’s so beautiful and so scenic and farms out there. What a great place to live by. 

Ann: I live on the edge of the bluegrass horse country more, in my areas, usually cattle farms or beef cattle farms. When I was a kid growing up, it was a lot of tobacco farms. Now it seems like you make money, the best way to make money on your farm is to sell it for people to build houses on it, but I still live on a farm. My husbands’ retired, but I still get to walk on the farm and enjoy all the outdoors.

Liz: Wonderful. So, your new release is Along a Storied Trail. Would you please tell the listeners a little bit about this new book? 

Ann: I had written a couple of books set in the Appalachian Mountains previously. They had history of the frontier, nursing service, These Healing and and An Appalachian Summer, and some of my readers, they sent me a message that about the packhorse librarians, and they said why don’t you write a book about that. So I began to do some research into the packhorse librarians, a work project during the Great Depression in the 1930s, and I thought that’s pretty good, interesting story. And so I began to consider how my book woman, my fictional book woman could deliver books to people in her neighborhood and introduce all the other characters to go with it. 

But the background history is the WPA projects during that time, especially the packhorse librarians, that they started for those communities in Eastern Kentucky, that they must have never had any library services, and a lot of them weren’t able to get to town if even, if there had been a library. So they came up with a program where these booked them in saddlebags and loaned them out to the people for a couple of weeks. And then in two weeks, they would make the return trip around to gather up those books and offer them some new books. So that was fun history to research. 

Liz: That really is. That sounds like an interesting occupation for young women, during that time. So they just took these books up to the hills? They did it summer winter, spring fall in any kind of weather? 

Ann: They did. It was sort of a thing that they felt they were bound to complete their journey through their routes. And they went through any kind of weather. One woman that I read about, one book woman on a mule. And she then went on her route on foot and carried the books to the people. So they have a lot of dedication. I think I make my heroin be a book lover, and I feel like probably most of the book women were book lovers who enjoyed taking the books up and providing this service for their neighbors and friends. Although they did, this wasn’t waiting for them to make some money. They didn’t make a lot, but they didn’t supply books, the government didn’t supply books. They only paid for the book women’s salary, a monthly salary. And so, the town that wanted to have one of these pack horse libraries, they had to come up with a place, a room or a little building, where they could have a library and in their local area. And then they got books through contributions. Sometimes big city libraries would be throwing away books that were about worn out, and they sent down to the packhorse libraries, and they would try to piece them back together and take them up and make books they could take out to the people. And the PTA people in Kentucky got into interested, and they collected pennies from the kids, gave pennies to buy books for these, of course, libraries. 

So it was, it was an interesting thing that everybody sort of jumped in and helped these people have books to look at while the dedication to libraries and to books. 

Liz: This just really amazing. I just, I don’t think you find that in young people today. So it’s really great to read about people who love books so much that they were willing to go on carrying books up in the mountains just so people can read. That’s amazing. 

Ann: Yeah, they are admired for their dedication. You know, I have a scene in my book about Tansy. That’s my heroine, the book woman in my book, going through a cold winter creek. And when she gets to the next house, she can’t get her feet out of the stirrups because they’re frozen to the stirrups, for she got wet in the creek. And that’s actually from some research that I actually read about that. They said sometimes their feet did freeze to the stirrups after they had to ford the creeks and ride the trails in the winter time. 

Liz: I loved that scene too. I was just kind of laughing, and it’s really cool to know that that actually happened in real life. Now, this book is about libraries and librarians and books and reading. When you were younger, when you were a kid, were you one of those that just sort of spent your entire summer in the library and came out carrying a stack of books that you read in no time at all? 

Ann: Well, I was a farmgirl, you remember. So I had plenty of chores and had to help my dad on the farm because he had three girls and no sons. So, we were out there on the farm whenever he needed help. So, I didn’t get to read all the time, but anytime I got a chance, I was ready to grab that book and do some reading. My mom took me to the library, took us to the library every week so that we could get new books to read. And I can still remember how nice it was just to lay down somewhere and sit down somewhere and just read and read without having any chores that day, for some reason or another. So it was always fun to have come back from the library with, as you say, a stack of books 

Liz: Exactly. Of the characters in Along a Storied Trail, especially you mentioned Tansy and Aunt Perdy. They’re really colorful interesting unique characters. How you go about drawing such wonderful characters like that? 

Ann: Likewise the mountain people there are certain individuals, but I think my characters come to life and in most of my stories or ahopefully all of my stories. I like for them to show some personality, and of course, I loved writing about Perdita. I’m not sure what that says about me, but I really enjoy that contrary old lady when I was able to write about her. You know, the people that start come to life for me while I’m writing their story, that’s good because I like for them to take on a life of their own and not necessarily just what I maybe thought they might be, but then they started to become their own people while the story gets written. 

Liz: Who is your favorite character in Along a Storied Trail to write? 

Ann: Well, that would have had to been Perdita Sweet because of her contrary nature. But she also had a real feel for the Lord, I thought, and she’s had some rough times and things hadn’t always gone her way and she was sort of just ready to shut out the world. But she gave Tansy a hard time too because tansy was related—second cousin or something. But she was definitely the one that was easiest for me when it was her point of view. Then the words just came really fast because I guess I was just right there with Perdita, being a crafty old woman maybe a whole bunch of fun. 

Liz: And funny how sometimes the quirkiest characters are the easiest to write. Do you find that’s the case? 

Ann: I think so. You know, I had several characters in this book. Tansy wasn’t hard to write, you know. She had that love of books and that, that dream of the romance that just wasn’t quite there for her. Most of the time, sometimes, a character is a little harder to come to life, but if I can get them talking to one another, then things go much better in my book. I like the dialog, writing dialog probably better than anything else that I write. 

Liz: When I’m writing a book, I have to agree with you that they are. I love writing dialogue. Like you said, getting the characters to start talking to each other. How did you go about getting your start in writing? What got you these words so many years ago? 

Liz: When I was a little girl, I liked to read of course. And I liked to read Hardy Boy mystery books. I thought it would be great fun if I could be like them and solve a mystery, and I didnt want to be a Hardy Boy. I wanted to be a Hardy girl, but I did want to solve that mystery. Now where I grew up out here in the country on the farm, it was unlikely that I was going to ever stumble across any mysteries to solve. So I decided to write my own mystery starring myself a much cuter, much less shy, and probably smarter girl that I actually was, but that’s the fun part of fiction. You can try to change things the way you want them to be. And I had my sister and my cousin as my sidekicks, and I would write a chapter. And then I traded and then I’d write another chapter and we had a lot of fun with the book. I never did finish it. I got a stuck in a cave, and I guess I didn’t know how to get us out. 

So I sort of put the book aside and got older and started writing teenage stories that nobody in their right mind would want to read now. But eventually, I got married very young, had two children by the time I was 19, but I never lost that desire to write, to write something that other people might read. But I took a correspondence course. I grew up out there, like I said, in the country. I had never known anybody who was a writer. I didn’t really know how to go about finding out about writing. About the Writer magazine which opened some doors to me. And then when I took this course, more doors were open, and I began to see how to improve my writing. 

The last lesson in the course was to write an outline for a novel. Well, I’ve never liked writing outlines, so I wrote the novel instead. And in the process, I discovered the that’s what I wanted to write. I had sold some short pieces to church magazines,previous to this. After I wrote that first novel, I knew that that was the kind of writing I wanted to do. And I’ve been writing novels ever since.

Liz: How much fun. I would love to read that little story that you started when you were a child, and I’d love to find out how they got out. I think you have to get them out of the cave. 

Ann: I’m not sure that I do still have that somewhere. I’m sure because you know writers well there are two kinds of writers. There’s a kind like me that think they can never throw away a story. And then I read about other writers that get so discouraged that they completely destroy their, all their stories. But so far, I just have mine off stuck on the shelf somewhere.

Liz: And what is it about writing that you enjoy the most? 

Ann: Well, I read that some writers say having written cuz sometimes writing can be really difficult, sort of like grabbing, if you know what grabbing is. You take a big heavy hoe away and your grabble fruits or rocks or something out of your garden patch. But sometimes it feels like that when I’m writing, you know, that I’m having to grow up all the words that work really hard to come up with the story because, even though a lot of people think writing is simple and easy, that’s when they tried, they find out it’s not always that easy. 

But I do like having a story come to life. And my best part is when I finish it and get to read it over and find out oh, you know, that story worked after all. And then I get to edit. I don’t mind the editing if it’s my idea to edit. I like tightening the story and making it the best I can make it. But I just like having the story come together, I guess. 

Liz: Yeah, it’s always nice when that happens, isn’t it? 

Ann: It is. 

Liz: Now, you mentioned being a reader and a reading fan. What’s the favorite book that you’ve ever read?

Ann: I get that question asked sometimes. It’s always difficult for me to answer because of, like, so many different books. I’m a person that can read a lot of different kinds of books. I don’t necessarily have to always read mysteries or always read romances or historical. I sort of like a mixture. 

I think one of the books that awakened me to certain kinds of writing was, and I’m probably not going to say his name, right, But Chaim Potok, The Chosen. It’s about two Jewish boys. There are two of them. I’m not remembering all the time right this minute. But when I read that book, he really made those characters come to life for me, and I wanted to make my characters come to life like that. 

But there’s been other books too, when I was, say, 14 on one long Thanksgiving weekend, I read Gone with the Wind from first sentence to last sentence. So that was all, that was exciting for me at the time. So it’s always fun to have books like that that you can remember the fun of reading. 

Liz: It sure is, and that’s quite a feat to read Gone with the Wind in one weekend. So kudos to you, 

Ann: I suppose there wasn’t many chores that we can pretty much read and read. Always fun to have a weekend like that where you can just read.

Liz: So what’s up next for you?

Ann: I actually wrote the end on last Friday, I think. Now going back and cutting out the words that are not necessary in the book. I have it titled, a working title, When the Matter Balloons, and it’s a little different for me. It’s set in a rural area about a man who was badly burned in a fire when he was 20-21, and he lost his love at the time. And he’s sort of been a recluse ever since. Then his brother’s wife—his brother dies, and his brother’s wife and two daughters are having struggles. And they have, he finds out that he has to do his duty to rescue them from their bad situation and bring them to his farm. And this story is about how his heart is awakened again and these girls teaching how to love again. 

Liz: It sounds like a beautiful story. We’ll definitely be looking forward to that when that comes out. If readers would like to connect with you, where can they go to learn more about you and connect with you? 

Ann: I have a website, www.annhgebhart.com. It has links to my blogs. I have a couple of blogs where I post on twice a week and the other one I post on occasionally, It’s, the second one is sort of a fun blog that I started because of my books, Heart of the Holly Hill books, where I have a young character Josie, who’s 14, in those books, and she’s one of the viewpoint characters. So I let her write a blog occasionally, and I used to do it more regularly, but time, and things got a lot busier for me, I guess. But also, you can connect with me on Facebook. I have a BookBub, but they will let you know about my book sales or my new book when it comes out. So if you’re on BookBub, you could follow me there. There’s the different ways you can read all about my books. On my website, there’s always a little sample of the books to go along with, how to buy them, buy links and so forth. 

Liz: Sounds like it’s easy to find you and easy to find out more about you. Do you have any last words? 

Ann: Well, I do. Hope all the readers look at my book and they’ll try. And if they don’t like that one, you know, I’ve written some mysteries too, so. My mysteries are actually under A.H. Gabhart. Cozy Mysteries. I’ve written books about the Shakers, I’ve written some family books that are based on my mom’s memories and growing up during the Depression. They have the Rosie Corner books, I have a lot of variety, so you might not like one, but you might like the next one. 

Liz: Sure. It sounds like you have a wide variety to choose from a little bit of something for everybody. 

Ann: I have some really great fans that have read a lot of my books and when I did the Hidden Springs mysteries, that was sort of a departure for me, but I had to some great readers who said, you know, I don’t normally read mysteries, but I’ll try that one. So it’s fun to have readers that are willing to dip into something new and give your books a try.

Liz: Sure thing. And it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you and getting to hear a little bit more about Along a Storied Trail. 

Ann: Well, thank you for having me, Liz. I have enjoyed being here and talking with you. 

Liz: Thank you for being with us, and it was a pleasure to have you. We enjoyed learning a little bit more about you and about your book, what great fun it was. And please come back and see us again very soon. 

Remember, as I said at the beginning of the show, if you’d like to find out more about an or about her book Along the Storied Trail or find a link to the book, you can do so at my website which is liztolsma.com. All the show notes are over there. So please be sure to stop by and check those out. 

Well, aren’t you ready for our guest for next week? I’m super excited about this guest because I am super excited about her book. We are going to be having you Susie Finkbeiner on with us, and she’s going to be talking about her new book, The Nature of Small Birds. No]w technically, this is historical because part of it is set in 1975. Some of it is set a little bit later there, but it takes a look at the air lift of thousands of children out of Vietnam in 1975 as Saigon was falling and the American troops were leaving Vietnam. Her book revisits the effects of Operation Babylift on one family through three compelling timelines. I’ve read the book. As the mother of a child who is adopted from Vietnam, it just intrigued me, and I was so taken in by the book. You’re going to love it. You’re going to love Susie. 

So please be sure that you are subscribed to Christian Historical Fiction Talk on your favorite podcasting platform so that you can hear my interview with Susie Finkbeiner. That will be coming out next week. Thank you so much for listening to Christian Historical Fiction Talk. I do appreciate you. I appreciate your time, and we will see you next time.