Kaitlyn
Henson

There is something about writing the place you grew up that feels like both a love letter and a reckoning.

I grew up in Bardstown, Kentucky. The kind of small town where you walked from school to downtown on Tuesday afternoons to get ice cream at Hurst Drug Store, or woke up early enough on weekend mornings to go to Hadorn's for donuts before the rest of the town was awake. It is the kind of place that gets into you before you know it's happening.

I spent a long time trying to leave. And I did leave, almost ten years ago now, following my husband and the Army to wherever they send us. But every time I come back, it still feels like home in a way nowhere else quite does. The exit off the highway gives you away before you even get there. The smell of bourbon barrels hits you first, not the brewing, but the aging, this deep warm smell that means you're back, that means Kentucky, that means something specific I still haven't found the words for.

Bardstown doesn't appear much in Stepping Stones, that story belongs to Bowling Green and Western Kentucky University, the place I went when I finally left. But Bardstown is coming. Invisible Strings, the second book in this series, is Quinn's story, and Quinn never really left. The Christmas parade that runs through the center of town, Hurst Drug Store, Pat's Place, if you grew up there you'll recognize all of it. Writing those scenes felt like finally saying the thing I'd been carrying around for ten years.

I spent so much of my life wanting to be somewhere else. Now I just want to go back. I think that's what this series is really about, the places and the people that stay home inside you even when you're a thousand miles away. The invisible strings that keep pulling you back to where you started.

Bardstown, Kentucky. I'm writing my way home.