Something I love about writing a novel set in another era is that I get to mentally return to a simpler time. This doesn’t mean a perfect time, but only that the time was less complex in nature. Let’s take, for example, social media. Do you ever wonder what we did before social media? Oh, […]
Beth Bettencourt–The Idea
I discovered this painting (left) while working on my manuscript, working title: Beth Bettencourt. (I added the name next to it.) The book is set in 1962, during our time of Camelot, in my fictional Southern town of Bynum, Georgia. Bynum is not a real town but is based on my hometown of Sylvania, Georgia. […]
Most Mornings
Most mornings I wake at 6:30. Not because I want to, but because I set an alarm and that’s when it goes off. Stupid alarm. Sometimes I hit snooze. Okay. Most times I hit snooze. Five minutes. I just need five more minutes. By 6:40, I’m up, the coffee is grinding, and I’m preparing my […]
Lessons Learned in Ireland: Day One–Tipperary
I went to Ireland for the first time in 2019 and left with a plan to return two years later. Of course, that didn’t happen, COVID being what it was . . . But when world returned to something akin to normal, a plan was hatched. Before I get into the second trip, let me […]
The Story Behind the Picture: Tel Hazor, Israel
by Eva Marie Everson On a crisp September morning in 2001, I stood beside my husband in the middle of 5th Avenue, New York City, as a plume of smoke rose to the south. We were both in shock; the morning’s events were beyond anything we could have imagined would happen to us during our […]
A Single Act of Kindness
Eva Marie Everson My friend Michelle and I went to Park Avenue recently. “Park Ave” as the locals call it, is a lovely brick-street section of Winter Park, Florida with specialty shops and restaurants predominately on one side and a park on the other. The shops have enticing window displays with front doors shaded by […]
The Four Teenagers; A Childhood Memory
Eva Marie Everson There were four of them. Two girls and two boys. They were teenagers, my father told my mother over the phone, and he didn’t want the girls to have a record that would follow them into adulthood. It was okay, he said—not okay, but not as bad—if the boys had […]
What Fear?
Years ago, my employer, in speaking of his wife, said, “I don’t think she’s afraid of the devil himself.” I knew this woman. Little rattled her cage. She was a tiny thing. Pretty as a picture. She spoke with a demure voice. But if she thought something was coming after those she loved . . […]