The Story Behind the Story
This is Noordhoek Beach in Cape Town, South Africa. With its seven miles of golden sand stretching beneath a wide, endless sky, this is where I first imagined the village of Harbor Haven, nestled on the mountainside at the far end of the beach.
My Workspace
From this chair, in my former home in Tanzania, I wrote The Oak Alley Trilogy. It’s a simple white armchair with a pouf in front, but for me it became the place where stories were born. I need to sit with my feet up and the laptop on my lap to really get into the flow of writing. Every morning for three years, some days as early as 4 am, I curled up here and disappeared into another world.
In the beginning, I tried working at my desk, carefully planning the layout of the book. But after a month of getting nowhere, I realized what I truly needed was to relax and trust the process. Once I managed to let go, my body faded into the background, and the words began to flow effortlessly.
Writing became a way of pausing life, giving me space to untangle my thoughts and make sense of what was happening, both within me and around me.
When I in 2022 sat down to write, I had no idea I was beginning the long journey of creating a trilogy. By the time I finished Jack’s Faith, Emma’s story started to emerge on its own. Halfway through Emma’s Oath, I knew there was still one more story waiting to be told, Anna’s story, the very beginning of it all.
Inspiration
The trilogy began with Anna’s Letter to the Future, a short story my husband drafted many years ago. His words struck me so deeply that I tried to persuade him to finish it. But he had neither the time nor the interest. Instead, he encouraged me to use his idea as inspiration to write a story of my own.
At first, I tried to follow his path, but I struggled. It wasn’t until I let go and trusted my own writing process that the story truly came alive. That’s when Oak Alley Farm and Jack’s Faith emerged, and the journey branched off in its own direction, not at all what I had originally planned.
My brother, and his farm by the ocean, became another important source of inspiration. His deep knowledge of nature, and of our place within it, made me ask the big questions about life already at an early age. These questions, I’ve recently realized, have stayed with me ever since. They seem to form the backbone of everything I write, even when I try to write about something else.
Looking back and analyzing my own writing, I can now see how the life I’ve lived, the questions I’ve asked, my journeys, the people I’ve met, the books I’ve read, the documentaries I’ve watched, and the stories I’ve heard, whenever I found them meaningful or inspiring, they somehow slipped into my writing. The same happened when I wrote the trilogy.
In a way, I might say that some parts of the trilogy is inspired by true events. But they’ve been mixed up, transformed, simmered together into a kind of spicy soup, and then sprinkled across my imagined world. None of the stories belong to any one individual. Instead, they’ve become the shared story of a family living in the past, the present, and the future, all connected through Oak Alley Farm.
The longing to grow roots has also been a source of inspiration for my writing. I left home at the age of twenty and, ever since, I’ve traveled the world. It seems I was born with the urge to explore new cultures and meet new people.
All through these years, I often asked myself when the time would come to move home and put down roots. This year at the age of 64, I finally made that decision — I’m back home.
For the cover of the trilogy, I chose an oak with its roots, my favorite tree from home, as a symbol of longing, but also of connection: to family, to nature, and to the earth itself.
My First Short Story
My grandmother and I were very close, and I loved her dearly. When she passed away, my five-year-old son asked me if we would ever meet Grandma again. That simple but profound question inspired me to write my very first short story. It later became part of a small collection of five stories that I titled Darkness and Light. I’d love to share it with you here,even though it was never published anywhere other than on the website connected to my self-help book. Read more here.