Plans for Emma: The People

As I promised last week, I want to share with you some of the people and the places you’ll read about in Plans for Emma. 

I’ve mentioned many times in The Stories that the people of the mountain inspire me.  They are a strong, God-fearing people that haves thrived through adversity most of us would run from.  I admire my people and I long to share them with a world that has only mocked and disdained them.

Plans for Emma springs from the story my Great Grandfather told of how he met his wife.  It’s a 2 minute story – and how I wish I had a video clip of him telling it!  He remembered the prettiest girl he’d ever seen walking along with a herd of sheep.  He decided right then and there that he’d marry her.

My stories are about my people.  The people of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau and the stories that survive about them inspire me- after all, these memories are the reason I started writing Tennessee Mountain Stories and they are the root of each of my novels.   Plans for Emma is no different.

In this book you’ll meet Emma England.  She’s so typical of so many of us.  Her family has several children but no living sons over the age of 3. So she works.  She works in the house beside her mother.  She works with the livestock beside her father.  She carries water and wood, harnesses and drives a horse, weeds and picks a garden, she bakes a better cake than her mother and creates quilts that will warm her family as well as decorate her home.  And she trusts an all-powerful God who loves her individually so much that he has a particular plan for her life.