I couldn’t be more excited to share with you that my latest book has been published and is now available for purchase on Amazon. (You can find the reason for the title in Chapter Five.)

Isn’t the cover gorgeous?! The Gnome is responsible for that.

Here’s the Amazon description for Blackberries and Biscuits: Life and Times of a Smoky Mountain Girl (also known as my one-minute ‘elevator speech.’)

In this love story to her mom and the mountains she called home, Carole Coates gives the reader a glimpse into early twentieth century life in rural southwestern North Carolina where her mother was born and raised. The life journey of Pam Dillard Coates takes us through the Great Depression, the New Deal era, the Secret City of World War II, and on into the twenty-first century. The story follows her adventures as a farm girl, wife, war worker, mother, librarian, entrepreneur, and more. Part memoir, part genealogy, part history, Blackberries and Biscuits is a tale of childhood escapades, wartime secrecy, family life, and personal loss, but mostly love. The narrative weaves a tapestry of people, time, and place too rapidly disappearing from our cultural landscape.

Writing this story was a huge, multi-year project requiring lots of research, travel, and informational tooth-pulling. I loved (almost) every minute of it. I learned so many new things along the way, especially about my mother, but also about such disparate things as the Oleo Wars, the history of birth control in the US, half-dimes, and Civil War widows’ pensions. 

But I also felt a tremendous time pressure. Since this is a story about my mother and for my  mother, I really wanted her to be able to see it. And I’ve been promising it to her for so long she probably decided the whole thing was a hoax. Mother just celebrated her ninety-sixth birthday—so you can understand that there have been times I was frantic that I wouldn’t be able to make good on my promise.

We surprise-delivered Mom’s copy to her last week—just as soon as the big box of beautiful books showed up on our doorstep. To say she was thrilled would be an understatement. Her first words on seeing the book? “Okay, y’all can go home now. I have reading to do.”

Mom’s first look at ‘her’ book.

I am one very happy camper.

I would be thrilled if you choose to read it. While my purpose was to present a very personal gift to Mother and to preserve her story for our family members, it became much more than that, encompassing important historical periods in our nation’s history from a personal standpoint.

The Gnome has spent a couple of very dedicated weeks working on an e-book version, which, because of all the photographs (it’s chock full of pictures) and other formatting issues, took a whole lot longer than we’d imagined. But it, too, is finally available on Amazon. I strongly recommend the print version precisely because of the photos—they’re a big part of the story and the electronic layout just don’t quite do justice to them. But for those with vision problems or who are really into e-reading or who prefer saving a few bucks (hey, I totally get that), by all means go for the e-book. (By the way, the two versions aren’t yet linked on Amazon, so they don’t show up together, but if you do a search for the title, you should see one below the other in a list.)

Now, time for me to take a really deep, long breath. Except for blogging and a small genealogy writing project I’ve also been working on for a while, I plan to take a little writing break. I’ve got a couple of years’ worth of dusting to catch up on!