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Joyanne and her husband had traveled all over the country before settling in Holmes County, Ohio. Soon, they began driving a van for the Amish and became close friends with several Old Order families. One night as we were discussing our mutual respect for the Plain community, Joyanne said, “I am convinced that Amish children are the happiest children in the world.” I had to agree. From what I had seen, Amish children were the happiest, most contented, most competent, and the most cheerfully obedient children I’d ever seen and I wanted to know why. Was it merely the lack of television and video games that made them so content, or did the reasons go deeper? My editor, a young mother raising two daughters in New York City, also wanted to know why. That desire to find out the secret behind the admirable behavior of Amish children led to me to many discussions with the Amish about their methods of parenting, which eventually culminated in a non-fiction Amish parenting book titled More Than Happy: The Wisdom of Amish Parenting. I discovered many things during these interviews, but the most profound lesson came from a conversation I had with an Amish minister.  We had […]

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Picture a hungry writer sitting in an unheated attic, wearing a ragged head scarf and moth-eaten sweater over shabby clothes. She’s blowing on her fingers, warming them just enough to dip the pen into the ink well again. Then she scribbles a final sentence “the end” on a page of cheap paper, lays it reverently atop a pile of similar paper, and sighs, knowing she has written a book of aching genius that will make her fortune.   At least that’s the romantic image I grew up with.  Most of my young life I envisioned myself being like Louisa Mae Alcott’s heroine, “Jo.” A writer suffering for her art. Being a writer in America in the 21st Century is nothing like that.     The glut of manuscripts, thanks to the ease with which one can churn out thousands of words a day on a computer—readable or not–has made publishers very suspicious of unsolicited manuscripts. Slush piles grow to towering stacks. Endless on-line submissions queue up in an editor’s in-box. Few editors have the time or manpower to skim through all of them. For those of us who first published during the days of hoping to be picked up by […]

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Years ago, while fishing on Ice Lake on Manitoulin Island in Canada, my family and I discovered the ruins of a huge, mysterious-looking stone house overlooking the lake. There wasn’t much left standing except a few portions of the old stone walls.   Later, we met a man in Michigan who had grown up in that house. He had a photo of it hanging on his nursing home wall and he told us stories of how their family had built the house with rocks that they dragged from the earth with horses.   Soon after that we heard the good news that the house, which the islanders called ‘Stoney Castle’ had been purchased by an outsider who was having it rebuilt. The difficult restoration project was tackled by Sheppard Bros. Construction, a company known on the island for the quality of their work. The next time we went, the house had been restored to its former glory. The new owner was kind enough to allow us to make a video to take home to show our nursing home friend.   In showing us the house, the new owner said that master stone masons were rare, and he had worried about […]

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