Not only have I lived in the Old Dominion for most of my life, but also several previous centuries in the sense that my family were among the earliest settlers of the Shenandoah Valley (1730’s/1740’s). My Scots-Irish forebears settled Augusta County in the southern valley with names like Houston, Patterson, Finley, Moffett and McLeod. These clannish people frequently intermarried, so I can tie in with many other early families depending on how I swing through the ancestral tree. Virginia is the site of the earliest successful English colony and rich in history. We’re steeped in it, especially in the Shenandoah Valley. How could I not be drawn to this wealth of stories? If the earth could speak what tales it would tell, some of them horrific; Virginia is also the site of more battles than any other state in the union, encompassing the Indian Wars, the Revolution and that most uncivil of wars, the Civil War. One account I came across in my studies of the early Scots-Irish influenced my writing more than any other, the tragic story of a captive woman who fell in love with the son of a chief. As the result of a treaty, she was taken from her warrior husband and forced back to her white family where she gave birth to a girl. Then the young woman’s husband did the unthinkable and left the tribe to go live among the whites, but such was their hatred of Indians that before he reached his beloved her brothers intercepted and killed him. Inconsolable and weak from the birth, she grieved herself to death. Heart wrenching, it haunts me to this day. And I wondered…was there some way those young lovers could have been spared such anguish; what happened to their infant daughter when she grew up? I couldn’t let this happen to my hero and heroine, but how could I spare them. I schemed and dreamed and hatched more stories in the fertile ground of Virginia. Light paranormal/historical romance Daughter of the Wind sprang from this account which also had a strong influence on my Native American historical romance Red Bird’s Song. Daughter of the Wind is set among the clannish Scots-Irish in the mist-shrouded Alleghenies, a tale of the clash between peoples and young lovers caught in the middle. Ever influenced by my regard for Eastern Woodland Indians, I interwove mystical, Native American elements with ‘Daughter.’
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