About this item
The marriage of Florine Gilham and Bud Warner is a cause for celebration down on The Point, the Maine fishing village where they grew up. Yet even as the newlyweds begin their lives together, Florine is drawn back into the memory of her mother, Carlie, who vanished when Florine was twelve. As unexpected clues regarding her fate begin to surface, Florine and Bud face the challenges of trying to solve an old mystery while building a new marriage and raising a family. Morgan Callan Rogers's Written on My Heart will delight readers who love feisty, poignant characters and the beautiful, unforgettable Maine coast.
About the Author
Morgan Callan Rogers,a generations-back native Mainer, grew up in Bath, Maine, an historic shipbuilding city located on the mighty Kennebec River. A town of approximately 10,000 people, Bath is central to two of the most beautiful beaches in the world - Reid State Park in Georgetown, Maine, and Popham Beach in Phippsburg, Maine. During the summers, she and her family shared a small cottage along the New Meadows River in West Bath, where lobster boats chugged out every morning and came back in the early afternoon. This entire area is surrounded fishing villages strung out along points of rocky coasts and little islands. State parks abound. These places were the inspiration for the setting for her book, Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea.
Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is Morgan's first novel. Morgan's book is based on the imagined lives of a family living in a fictional village called The Point. The voices of her feisty main character, Florine, and of the other characters who live along The Point, are comprised of the voices Morgan heard growing up. They contain all of their humor, common sense, unsentimental kindness, dry wit, and timing. "This is kind of a love letter to those people I grew up with, and am still privileged to know," she says. "Without them, there would have been no story."
Morgan has a BA in English from the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine's Masters in Creating Writing program. Morgan has worked as an actress, a journalist, a librarian, an editor, a singer, a grocery clerk, a project assistant, and a house cleaner. All of these occupations contributed to her first book. She is grateful to have had such a variety of jobs and life experience.
"Each of them, in their own way, added to the flavor of this book," she says. "For instance, acting taught me about dialogue, timing, and motivation. Jobs like grocery clerking, house cleaning, and secretarial work taught me patience, humor, organization, and introduced me to all kind of people. Singing requires confidence. Being a librarian gave me access to all kinds of books, of course. Being a journalist and an editor gave me editing skills - a cold eye, as it were. These experiences were at the back of my mind as I wrote, and I think that everyone one of them contributed to it."
Morgan splits her time between her beloved Maine and western South Dakota's Black Hills. She shares space in South Dakota with Robert Clements, an artist and photographer. They share a wunder dog and three cats. Morgan is busy writing a second novel.
