Miriam Ilgenfritz lives on a farm established before the Revolutionary War, on one side of a mountain in Dornsife, Pennsylvania. Her house is 170 years old and sometimes living in it feels that way. She and her husband Mark have raised 16 kids in this house, but since this is Amish country she doesn’t stand out all that much at the grocery store. The kids turned out pretty well, considering that they didn’t have rooms of their own or expensive summer camps, and most have now gone off to do interesting things with their lives. Miriam began writing while the kids were young as a way of ignoring them and discovered that it also makes her happy. She plans to continue and is working on both a sequel to her historical novel, Letters to Emily, and a memoir about her childhood in Congo with her missionary parents. She gently tends her greenhouse plants and her irises, and when her kids come back home, they make Celtic music together, with Miriam on the flute. She wishes she played the cello and has gone so far as to own one. She raises basset hounds, and because she is a woman who writes she has a cat to supervise her work.