Many people have asked …
Many people have asked what inspired me to write BLEST BE THE TIES, since I certainly had no expertise on the subject nor a prior obsession to study it. I told them that, initially, it was falling in love with Virginia’s beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains. And then, since I have school-age grandchildren living in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley, I became interested in the history that surrounded them and began reading. I started with Jeff Shaara’s two masterful novels, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, that bookend his father Michael’s The Killer Angels, documenting the decisive battle at Gettysburg. Ronald Maxwell provided the powerful visual images in film, though the medium necessarily limited the full story telling. The soundtracks of Gods and Generals and Gettysburg were a great inspiration as I wrote the story, particularly Mary Fahl’s haunting song “Going Home” which plays through the opening credits of Gods and Generals. (Listen to it on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.)
The inspiration for the story itself came to me as I was driving north through the Shenandoah Valley considering the challenges many pastors would have faced during that time of political, social, cultural, and spiritual conflict, especially in that part of Virginia where there were many unionist among the majority of secessionists. How could a church survive those years intact? That was the question that prompted me to dig into the lives of those who struggled with issues of conscience and patriotism, and I read several biographies of primary leaders in the drama— Jackson, Lee, Stuart, Lincoln, Robert Dabney, and Charles Hodge. I was also greatly inspired as I visited the battlefields and walked the streets of Winchester, Lexington, Staunton, Harpers Ferry, Sharpsburg, Frederick, and Boonsboro. The more I read, the more I wrote— and the more my heart broke at the results of such a war on the lives of those who lived it. My hope is that the trilogy BLEST BE THE TIES will affect the readers as I was affected in writing it.
The Weight of Stories 