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Talking Location With author Andrea Thome – Tennessee and Colorado

8th August 2018

#TalkingLocationWith… author Andrea Thome, who set her Hesse Creek Trilogy in the Great Smoky Mountains (Tennessee) and Aspen Colorado.

author Andrea Thome

“The mountains are calling and I must go.”  ~John Muir

I often tell people that I’ve taken the long way around to my second career as a writer.  I’m a journalist by trade, and spent my early twenties working as a sports and news anchor, before temporarily retiring to enjoy being a full time mother and wife.  My husband played professional baseball for twenty-two seasons, so we never let much grass grow under our feet while his career sent us from Cleveland to Philadelphia to Chicago and beyond.  Fortunately I was born with a true Sagittarius spirit and blessed with a willing husband.  If we sat still too long in our off-seasons, wanderlust would start to creep in and we’d find ourselves stuffing a couple of suitcases full of stuff and setting off for the great beyond out of the sheer desire to know new places.

Inevitably, travelers connect more deeply with certain places that are more memorable for us than others.  These are the spots we choose to return to, again and again, despite having infinite choices of new destinations to choose from. A dozen or so years ago, we stumbled on a gem in East Tennessee called Blackberry Farm.  I’d read an article about it in one of the travel magazines that arrive in our mailbox each month, and thought it would be a place that would check each of our collective boxes.  With over four-thousand acres of land nestled in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains, we loved the fly fishing and hiking by day, followed by incredible dinners in the James Beard award-winning restaurant at night. All of that, before  walking back under a star-filled sky to arrive at our luxurious accommodations to learn that a crackling fire had been set in our absence, with warm cookies and cold milk waiting to seal the deal.

author Andrea Thome

There are innumerable reasons to love Blackberry Farm, so it didn’t surprise me that it organically became the main character when I started writing my first novel, Walland.  Walland is the name of the town in Tennessee where the ‘real’ Blackberry Farm operates.  I tell people that the places I write about are as much personalities in my books as the actual characters.  My Hesse Creek Series centers around the idea that we have a family that we’re born into, and one that we create for ourselves as we settle into the pocket of our lives a little more.  For some reason, the importance of family seems very alive to me in small mountain towns.

My second novel, Seeds of Intention, starts out in the Smoky Mountains, but in an unforeseen twist as I was writing, it ends up rooted in a different mountain range altogether.  Despite being one of my very favorite places on earth, Aspen, Colorado took me by surprise this time.

“He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year; coming home to a place he’d never been before.”  ~John Denver

Seeds of Intention eventually ends with the characters starting a new life in the swanky but unspoiled silver mining town along the Roaring Fork River, so naturally that’s where the third and final book in my series picks up.  In House of Belonging, I was able to scratch another itch;  my love and appreciation of food as art, and the talented and inspired chefs that are as creative as any painter or sculptor with their chosen medium.  As luck would have it, while I was writing House of Belonging, we enjoyed a scheduled trip to the Aspen Food and Wine Classic.  It was incredibly inspirational to see the way the town transformed on those warm June afternoons, as thousands of foodies traipsed from tent to tent, sampling both food and wine worthy of a thousand great stories.  After that trip, the rest of the book told itself.  My hands were just the vehicle.

“I hit the highway in a pink RV with stars on the ceiling…lived like a gypsy.”  ~Dixie Chicks

I cannot wait to share what I’m working on next.  It’s a story rooted in the Pacific Northwest, but there are ties to Nashville, too.  Who knew I had such a connection with that part of the country?  I guess that’s what travel teaches;  it surprises us again and again with each place we visit, showing us a little more about who we really are at our core.

Andrea  Thome is a former broadcast journalist, having covered both sports and news during her career. Her award-winning Hesse Creek Series includes Walland, Seeds of Intention and her latest release– House of Belonging. Andrea spends her spare time traveling, pursuing her passion for writing and photography.  She lives with her husband Jim, a retired baseball player who was recently inducted into the MLB Hall of Fame, and their two children in the suburbs of Chicago.  See a gallery of Andrea’s photography, including her own cover images, and connect with her via her website.  Do check out her books on this link and do follow her on Twitter and Facebook

author Andrea Thome

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