Come to the Orange County Public Library in Hillsborough next Saturday to meet almost two dozen local authors including today’s featured author, Nancy Learned Haines!
Tell us about your latest work.
Hillsborough has such a rich history. I am very interested in Quaker history and my first two books are about Quakers. Many of the settlers in the 1750s were Quakers from Pennsylvania, and our house sits on land originally owned by one of these early families, the Finchers. I have found information about who migrated here, when, and what land they settled, but that is just data. I am doing research to tease out their stories: why they left their homes and moved to Hillsborough, how they conducted their daily lives, and why the Quaker community all but disappeared in the early nineteenth century.
Who did you dedicate your first book to and why?
My husband David has a significant collection of books and materials about Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends.) A bookseller in New England offered us a collection of letters from World War I that had “Quaker content.” David sorted the letters between a young man who went to France with the Quakers to work for refugees and his girlfriend, a political activist, back home. He became enthralled by the work they were doing and even more by the growing love for each other that was evident in their letters. I dedicated the book to him for finding the story in their correspondence and for encouraging me to write this book.
What one sentence bit of advice about writing do you most wish you’d listened to before launching into your first book?
I spent almost fifteen years off and on researching and writing my book about pacifist work in World War I. Cheryl Strayed said, “You have to surrender to your mediocrity and just write. Because it is hard to write even a crappy book. But it is better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.” It’s more than one sentence, but a great push to just sit down and write.
Please visit my website at https://nancyhaines.wordpress.com/
