Featured Interview With Donna W. Hill
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley in the shadow of the old Bethlehem Steel during the great prosperity of the 1950s when manufacturing was booming. My father worked on the railroad post office and my mother was an inspector at a local factory called Magnetic Windings. I’ve stayed in Pennsylvania throughout my life, attending college in East Stroudsburg, the gateway to the Poconos and then living in the Philadelphia area for 20 years.
Most of my career was spent as a singer-songwriter, and I have three albums out, including The Last Straw, as Donna Hill, on iTunes & CDBaby. I presented school assemblies on diversity, full inclusion of visually impaired people and American history. I had a boat-load of age-appropriate songs to inspire people to go for their dreams, and I received honors for songs for special occasions from the National Park Service, WWII Submarine Veterans, Glenside Chamber of Congress, Pennsylvania Legislature and the Fellowship of the USS Olympia.
We’re now in the Endless Mountains, on 17 acres with a pond full of frogs, a Labrador retriever named Hunter and a strawberry-blonde rescued male tabby name Goofus. My novel has received recommendations from professionals in the fields of education, rehabilitation and the arts as a classroom resource for diversity-inclusivity and anti-bullying initiatives in junior high through college.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I don’t remember ever not liking books. My first published work was a 4-line poem about Thanksgiving in our elementary school’s monthly newspaper. That first taste of public recognition was all I needed to get the bug.
I always loved books and was usually writing something in my head — a song, story or poem. By 6th grade, I knew I wanted to write a novel that also included something about songwriting and music.
I was inspired by a teacher who shared musicals every Friday afternoon. I received my first real record player that year for Christmas and bought an LP of My Fair Lady. I was astonished to read how many people were credited! The book and lyrics were written by Alan Jay Lerner; the music by Frederick Loewe. Furthermore, the whole thing was based upon George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Three people to write one musical? I was determined to do it all myself, which might explain why it took me all this time.
Abigail, the heroine of The Heart of Applebutter Hill, is a shy songwriter, and the lyrics to several songs come together as the plot unfolds. The songs are real and have melodies, and I hope to record Abigail’s songs someday soon. I’d like to have a contest with young musicians submitting their own versions.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I think of my inspirations as a long string of authors and songwriters whose work kept me from going over the edge. There are so many, but the authors start with Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling. The musical influences go from Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joni Mitchell, Pete Seeger and the Beatles to Dire Straits, David Mallet, Kate Rusby, Richard Shindell, James Keelaghan, Passenger and Jake Bug.
My current favorite authors include Janet Evanovich, David Baldacci, Jerry Whittle and I’m reading Jeffery Martini for the first time. I am always late to the party. I tend to jump around from nonfiction to crime mysteries, fantasy and general fiction. Some of my greatest inspirations for The Heart of Applebutter Hill came from the pages of Discover magazine.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The Heart of Applebutter Hill is my first (though I hope not my last) novel. I call it an adventure-mystery with excursions into fantasy for general audiences. You’ll see it listed some places as a YA or fantasy novel, though I feel that these categorizations are either misleading or limiting. Take this with a grain of salt; I’m also the songwriter who had a hard time getting used to being classified as a folk singer.
I wrote this over the course of 20 years; it was a side project as I pursued my music career. Finishing it was the reason I finally broke down and learned to use a computer. My brother used to nag me about getting one.
“If I’m going to sit down,” I replied, “I’m going to do it at a piano keyboard.”
And, now, here I am standing at my computer. I’m not sure what any of this means.
If you have an interest in dogs and cats, songwriting, progressive/private schools, books with unobtrusive references to classical mythology, world religion and literature, nature, humor, arts and a mystery that brings danger to two 14-year-old refugees, who are on the verge of young love, you’ll probably find something in this book that will hold your interest.
Abigail, Baggy and their friends attend the Plumkettle Learning Center. It’s a sprawling, mish-mash of a campus where students grow and make their own food and have regular chores. They study whatever they like — if, that is, they can demonstrate a general knowledge sufficient to get out of ordinary classes. Baggy, who is good at almost everything, gets to divide most of his time between the photography department, the auto center and the carpentry workshop.
He’s not pleased when he finds out that Survival 101, a practical math and science class, is a required course for anyone who enrolls at Plumkettle after third grade. He’s even more disturbed about his adviser forcing him to take Writers’ Roundtable with everybody’s least favorite teacher, Eli Thornhammer, who has a list of banned four-letter words and is the only Plumkettle teacher who insists upon being called “Professor.”
Fortunately for Baggy, he gets to share these experiences with his best friend Abigail, a shy songwriter. Abigail, who leads a weekly sing-along for the kindergarten, is invited to write music for the summer puppet theater. She accepts, of course, but not without some angst about being pigeonholed as a writer of children’s music.
Whether it’s the young children going through traffic exercises at Pedal town, or the most talented older students in the precision driving team, everyone at Plumkettle studies driving. And, everyone means everyone, even the blind kids.
But, The heart of Applebutter Hill isn’t all about school. When Abigail’s guardian leaves town for a month, Abigail stays with the Blusterbuff’s, an eccentric couple who live next to Baggy and his guardian Captain Sodpeg in the mountains. Exploring Elfin Pond, they find a camouflage ship they call the Cloud Scooper, and they end up in the innermost courtyard of the Castle of Bar Gundoom, where they learn a dangerous secret.
The castle’s art director, Yuki, helps them escape and sends them to Satori Green to seek advice from Shushidwyn and Anbata, the Lady of the Desert Well. Some of the help they get isn’t much help at all. They are determined to locate the mysterious Heartstone of Arden-Goth and stop whoever it is that is trying to steal it. Complicating matters is a far less glamorous situation regarding their troubled friend Christopher, a handful of not-so-nice upperclassmen and the school cat. Abigail’s service dog, Curly Connor, helps them solve the mystery, but will headmaster Ashton Cinderbin believe them?
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