Love’s Journey
Where falling in love is just the beginning
Serena B. Miller was born in Portsmouth, Ohio, the youngest of four girls. Much of her childhood was spent playing on relatives’ front porches while listening to stories about the past.
She married a home town boy studying to be a minister. They raised three sons while serving churches in various states.
During those early years, she worked a series of part-time jobs. In Tennessee, she worked as a clerk at Vanderbilt Hospital’s ER. In Kentucky, she worked as a secretary for a small concrete business. In Michigan she became a court reporter for Detroit’s Friend of the Court system.
Eventually, she and her family came back home to Ohio where her husband was hired to preach for the country church she had attended as a child.
“It was a good choice for us. The congregation flourished and the echoes of those old- time family story tellers began coming back to me. I started typing out my own stories with the hope of getting them published someday. My son, Caleb, was a great encourager. Every afternoon when he came home from school, he wanted to read what I’d written that morning. I figured if I could hold a twelve-year-old’s interest there might be hope for me as a writer.”
Raising a family on a country preacher’s salary did not allow much wriggle-room to pay for the writer’s workshops and conferences she needed, so she found part-time work stocking greeting cards for Hallmark. It was the perfect job for a wanna-be writer.
“The hours were flexible, the pay decent, and I enjoyed interacting with people who needed help choosing the right card,” she remembers.
Her husband and sons were pleased when she published her first book, Love Finds You In Sugarcreek in 2010, and thrilled when a Hollywood producer read the novel three years later and made it into an award-winning TV movie.
“I was as astonished as everyone else in my life,” she says. “I was a small-town preacher’s wife who was getting to attend a red carpet event in Hollywood. Finding something to wear was a challenge. The only thing in my closet were T-shirts, jeans, and flowered church dresses.”
Since then, she has published many more books and won numerous awards, including Romance Writer’s of America RITA award for The Measure of Katie Calloway, American Christian Fiction Writer’s CAROL award for A Promise To Love, and her Under A Blackberry Moon was a finalist in the CHRISTY awards.
Her most recent exciting moment was learning that one of her Amish books, An Uncommon Grace, had been chosen as the basis for a movie for the Hallmark Movies and Mysteries channel.
“It feels like I’ve come full circle,” Serena says. “When I was stocking greeting cards, I used to daydream about writing a book that was good enough to be chosen for a Hallmark movie. Fifteen years and a ton of hard work later—that dream became a reality.”
