The Story Behind A Thousand Voices

The Story Behind "A Thousand Voices "

While writing Tending Roses six years ago, I never imagined the story as part of a series. When the book was published, readers began to send letters, asking what happened to the characters after the story ended. Because I never know what will happen in a story until it's written, the only way to answer those questions was to write another story. In the Tending Roses series, each story generated another story. As the series progressed, Dell was slowly growing up, discovering the world outside her tiny house on Mulberry Creek, learning to believe in herself and in the love of a new family.

Dell's childhood is a parallel to the childhood of my grandmother, whose stories inspired the creation of Grandma Rose, in Tending Roses. My grandmother, like many who had survived the Depression, didn't often talk about the difficulties she had faced during childhood. She “married up”, as folks used to call it, and felt she'd risen above a childhood stigmatized by poverty, alcoholism, and family mental illness. She was critical, as is Grandma Rose in Tending Roses, of others who couldn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps and find success in life.

As Grandma Rose became involved with Dell in Tending Roses, she was forced to confront her own past and was reminded of how it felt to be a child living in a hopeless situation. In opening herself to Dell, in becoming determined to change Dell's existence for the better, Grandma Rose found a purpose for the last months of her life. She created a legacy in Dell that lived on. Dell was, in many ways, the catalyst for change in Grandma Rose's family, and in turn, she was changed by Grandma Rose's family. It seemed only fitting that the series not end until Dell had found her way to adulthood and become the woman Grandma Rose believed she could be.