Amy Hill Hearth

The note was attached to the front page of our morning newspaper. “Dear customer,” it read, “I am taking over my daughter’s route for the next few weeks. Getting up very early to drive the route is too hard for her at this time. She is expecting a baby in the next few  Read More 

On the day I met centenarians Sadie and Bessie Delany, the first thing I did when I got home was to call my sister Helen.

You would not believe these two women – these two sisters – that I met today,” I told her. “They are 100 and 102 and still having the same squabbles they had when  Read More 

I just completed a 48-hour writing and self-editing marathon in which I read my new manuscript from beginning to end with as few breaks as possible.

This requires some serious discipline. No television, no reading, no Internet. No ice cream, no meal preparation. Just snacks, water, and coffee. And, occasional stretching exercises and power  Read More 

One of the interesting aspects of writing a novel set in the early 1960s is that many of the people who read my book lived through the era.

I’ve heard from many women (my own mother included) who remember having feelings similar to Jackie Hart, my lead character in Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women’s Literary Society. A middle-aged wife and mother of three, Jackie is restless and feels more than a bit unappreciated but she lives at a time when women’s options were far more limited. Read More 

All the kids coming home from college and starting summer jobs have brought back memories of the summer I managed to get what was considered a plum job: I was hired to be a “salad girl” (a type of waitressing job) at a famous, Colonial-era, New England inn.

As one might expect, the job  Read More