Interview with LeAnne Hardy

Today we join Beth Goddard as she
interviews author LeAnne Hardy.
LeAnne has had several children's books
published, as well as the historical novel,
Glastonbury Tor.

Tell us about your life, where you grew up, your travels, etc.

I was born in Minnesota and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, the daughter of a medical doctor and a nurse who had wanted to be missionaries. For health reasons they weren’t able to make missions their career, but they never lost their vision. When I was thirteen, they took my brother, sister and me out of school to go to India and Pakistan for three months to help a couple of doctor friends. This was way before home schooling, and we were pretty much on our own to keep up with our classes back in Indiana. It was a life changing experience. I had always wanted to be a missionary, but now I knew first hand how exciting it was to serve God in another culture.

My husband is a consultant for non-Western theological schools with SIM (Serving in Mission). I have a masters degree in library and information science. We have lived in Brazil, Ethiopia, Mozambique, England and South Africa as well as four US states. I made a quilt of squares with embroidered maps of all the places we have lived. My husband collects countries in which he has eaten pizza—77 to date. In every place we have gone we have been involved in leadership training for the church of Jesus Christ. I like to think of my fiction as a different approach to training Christians to think biblically.


Tell us about your life in South Africa.

We lived here from 1993 to 1996, at the time of the first democratic elections. At that time, the church played a major role in the peaceful transition of power. We came back in 2005 so that I could focus on writing for children affected by HIV. My first HIV story, Beads and Braids, was published this year by a local educational publisher. I am working on a novel with the working title of Keeping Secrets about the impact of HIV on an affluent Johannesburg family who thought AIDS only happened to other people. I’m building relationships with local libraries. I do story hours at an orphanage and a couple after-school care centers in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Most of the children are either infected with HIV themselves or have someone in their family who is. It is not uncommon to have young teens raising younger siblings on their own. The literature calls those ‘child-headed households.’

Despite continued economic disparity, South Africa has come a long way in building relationships between the races, but we still struggle to come to terms with the AIDS epidemic.

How did you get started writing and how long after you started would you say it took to get published?

I began writing when a story character popped into my head, and I became obsessed with him. That was about 1994. For a while I wondered if I were going nuts. Later I found out that all writers are a bit obsessive-compulsive. Ben Bradley’s story started as a day dream that got out of hand, and I had to write things down to keep it straight. Only later did I learn that was called a ‘story outline’. In spare moments I scrawled profiles of the characters, not knowing that character studies are basic pre-writing. Eventually, I got up the courage to show my teenage daughters my outline. One of them said, “Mom, this sounds like a real book. You should write it.”




Someone loaned me a book on how to write and publish Christian fiction. (That was when I found out I wasn’t going crazy after all.) I did the exercises, changing them to work with the characters I already had in my head. Eventually I took a correspondence course while we were living in England. By that time I knew that I had way too much material about Ben to be one book. I set it aside and wrote Between Two Worlds (about a missionary kid born in Brazil like my daughters) and The Wooden Ox (about a fictional family kidnapped by rebels during our years in the Mozambican civil war.)

Kregel eventually offered me a contract for The Wooden Ox which was released in 2002, so that is eight years. I had a few articles published in there and wrote a column for our church newsletter, but no published fiction.

What ever happened to your original, learn-to-write story?

After I finished Glastonbury Tor, I got out my ten-year-old notes on Ben Bradley, chose one tiny piece with a beginning, middle and end, and pulled together the manuscript in two months. That seems fast after spending nearly four years on Glastonbury Tor, but you have to remember the story had already been simmering in the back of my head for ten years. My agent is currently trying to place it. Someday it may be a series.

Who has influenced you most as a writer and why?

Gladys Hunt, author of ‘the Honey books’ (Honey for a Child’s Heart, Honey for a Teen’s Heart and Honey for a Woman’s Heart) has been a great cheerleader, keeping me from giving up. My critique group in Indianapolis during the seven years we were based there had a tremendous impact on my writing. These six ladies insisted that I break up my complicated Pauline sentences and forced me to write about faith in a way that communicated authentically to the unbelieving members.

What is your favorite book?

The Chronicles of Narnia were undoubtedly my favorites growing up. Mary Stewart’s Arthurian saga beginning with The Crystal Cave grabbed my attention as a teen. I was committing myself to serve a King even greater than Arthur.



What is your favorite movie?

Definitely the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have the expanded DVD version with hours of added features to consume.

Tell us about your book, Glastonbury Tor.

Glastonbury Tor is partly an historical novel of sixteenth century England (the time of Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries) and partly a fantasy of the Holy Grail. Colin flees his abusive father and takes refuge at Glastonbury Abbey at a time when King Henry is closing down (or ‘dissolving’) the monasteries. Of course, Colin can’t hide from his problems in a monastery, but there he finds an ancient olive wood cup that behaves mysteriously at times when characters are in need
of the assurance of God’s presence.

How did you come to write Glastonbury Tor?

Please join us tomorrow for the answer to this
question and more in part two of Beth Goddard's
interview with LeAnne Hardy.

Don't forget to leave a comment if you would like
a chance to win a copy of Glastonbury Tor.