Cynthia Ruchti is an author and speaker who tells stories of Hope-that-glows-in-the-dark through her novels, nonfiction, women’s events, and outlets related to the Heartbeat of the Home radio broadcast she wrote and produced for thirty-three years. She and her plot-tweaking husband live in the heart of Wisconsin, not far from their three children and five joy-giving grandchildren.

Her latest book is the Christian fiction, When the Morning Glory Blooms.

You can learn more about Cynthia and her writing and speaking at www.cynthiaruchti.com.

Connect with Cynthia:

 TWITTER | FACEBOOK

About the Book:

Becky rocks a baby that rocked her world. Sixty years earlier, with her fiancé Drew in the middle of the Korean Conflict, Ivy throws herself into her work at a nursing home to keep her sanity and provide for the child Drew doesn’t know is coming. Ivy cares for Anna, an elderly patient who taxes Ivy’s listening ear until the day she suspects Anna’s tall tales are not just idle ramblings. They’re Anna’s disjointed memories of a remarkable life.

Finding a faint thread of hope she can’t resist tugging, Ivy records Anna’s memoir, scribbling furiously after hours to keep up with the woman’s emotion-packed, grace-hemmed stories. Is Ivy’s answer buried in Anna’s past? And what connects them to Becky?

Becky, Ivy, Anna—three women fight a tangled vine of deception in search of the blossoming simplicity of truth.

Purchase your copy:

AMAZON | BARNES & NOBLE

Where Did That Come From? (Author Guest Post)

Conducting research for a book is both intentional and organic, both genetic and environmental. We authors write what we know, what we wish we knew, what we don’t want to know but can’t resist because it makes us better people.

As a child, I visited my uncle’s farm on a day when it was time to take the squawking chickens from feathered to freezer. I was the cousin old enough to help Mom and my aunt with the process on a day I wished I could have shaved a few years off rather than be drafted to pluck feathers. Nothing about the process was a pleasant memory for me. But it was a strong enough memory—sounds, textures, smells—that it instantly came to mind when I reached the scene in Anna’s 1890s story in When the Morning Glory Blooms. A freshly dead (interesting oxymoron) chicken arrived on her back stoop. A love gift. And it was up to Anna to divest it of its feathers.

I knew what that smelled and felt like because a corner of my mind held those memories intact until I needed them fifty years later.

I researched adoption laws the intentional way, not the organic chicken way.

And when it came time to write the 1950s scene of a young woman in a maternity ward, my fingers flew over the keys on the keyboard, creating a scene I could again see and smell and feel not from a conscious memory or from Internet research, but from story. I knew that scene because my mom gave birth to me in a maternity ward like that—an open room with ten beds, five along each of two opposite walls, feet out.

Mom told me what the atmosphere was like. I learned more of the story when going through a journal entry she wrote shortly before she died. The journal noted that she’d gotten to the hospital about 11:30 that night, in active labor. As a nurse, she knew all the signs and recognized the stages of each of the other nine women laboring in beds near her in that ward. I read in her journal that the nurses would come to the ward once an hour to check on the ten women, then leave them on their own. At that time no husbands were allowed in the room, no birth coaches, no friend or parents or sister. The women labored alone.

Mom wrote that between arriving at 11:30 and the time I was born at 7:30 in the morning, she’d gotten out of her bed to deliver two other women’s babies! The babies insisted on being born, even though the nurses and doctors were otherwise engaged.

I can picture my mother—a chicken-plucking tough woman—climbing out of her own bed, clutching her belly through a contraction, then encouraging the laboring moms to “Push!”

She wrote in the journal, in a voice my siblings would all recognize, “And neither one of those women named their child after me.”

I wonder how those boys would have felt living with a name like Dorothy.

The stories we authors write are from tangled collections of intertwined thoughts and memories, from research we discover on the Internet this morning and from the smell of singed feathers that lingers in our nostrils for decades.

What’s the story your memories tell?

Spread the love

Tweet