Headline News Meets Mountain Heart

by Georgia Curtis Ling @GeorgiaCLing

Every morning, I climb out of one dream only to crawl into another—trading the velvet drip of sleep for the blue glow of my computer screen, where I spend my days dreaming up a story for my next novel. The surrounding bluegrass countryside is peaceful outside my window when I begin, coaxing storylines out of the silence, squeezing out a few thousand words even when each one has to be pried loose like a limestone from the cold ground.

I’m grateful to have made this choice—to write. Most of the people who inspired my Appalachian fiction are gone now, but my office still echoes with their voices. I find my daydreams returning often to a flour-dusted kitchen, the dark mouth of a backwoods holler, the cryptic creatures that keep children from wandering too far in the woods, or a white clapboard church pressed into the foot of a mountain like a child into its mother’s side. Over the years, my non-fiction writings appeared in magazines, newspaper columns, and devotionals—but it was always the reflections on returning home to Appalachia that readers loved most. Fiction, it turned out, was just another road back—to the mountains, to my people, to the places I knew well. Faith, small-town charm, and the rich tapestry of Appalachian culture wove themselves naturally into my stories. I’ve long admired the worlds created by Southern women writers, particularly the incomparable work of Sharyn McCrumb, whose writings celebrate the history and culture of Appalachia with a reverence I recognize in my bones. To one day be mentioned in the same breath as her is perhaps too bold a dream—but I dream it anyway.

Real-life people and events have always found their way into my writing—a headline clipped from the newspaper, a tragedy half-remembered, a ballad passed down through generations older than anyone left alive to remember its origins. I wrap a story around what I find there, threading in the folklore and mountain traditions I know by heart. The headlines are where the “What if…” questions begin. The initial spark for But There Were Signs came from a newspaper clipping of a murder trial in 1994—one that has never quite let me go. It’s been tucked away in my office files for decades, occasionally joined by another tragedy I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, but this particular clipping was different. Murder headlines have a way of staying at arm’s length until one of the victims is one of your own. She wasn’t family, but she was a pastor’s wife I knew personally—and that made her one of us. I carried the title “Pastor’s Wife” for over twenty years myself. There are more than 500,000 pastors serving in Christian churches across the United States, which means there are at least that many of us standing beside them.

For over a decade, I wrestled with whether to write this story—but the story had other plans. My hesitation had nothing to do with legal concerns—my work draws only from life itself, though I know well enough that real-world events require careful handling. It was something closer to reverence, and to fear. I didn’t want to cast more shadow over an institution I love, or fan the flames of stories about wrongdoing in the ministry—and I certainly didn’t want to darken the reputations of the faithful women who give their lives to it. What I wanted, and what I hope I’ve managed, was to honor them—to let this book stand as a testament to women’s faith in action, and perhaps move readers toward the causes and ministries that make a lasting difference.

A woman who has given her life to the Lord and to ministry is the last person anyone expects to lose to violence. Yet when it happens, the grief does not stay inside the family—it moves outward in waves, through the congregation, through the community, through every life she touched. People who loved her rise up together, and suddenly the church itself is under a kind of scrutiny it was never built to withstand. I have watched this happen more than once. Over the years, three ministry families I knew personally have lived through exactly this nightmare. It was out of that knowledge—and that grief—that I imagined the Pastors’ Wives Club: a circle of women bound together by their shared lives in ministry, who find themselves called to seek justice for one of their own. At its heart, this is a story about faith, courage, and the kind of friendship that holds fast even in the dark.

When the story finally found its way onto the page, the headline and a ballad found each other in my files, and from that meeting, the tale found its own shape, the way stories do when they are ready. But There Were Signs also grew partly from the roots of an old Appalachian murder ballad—threading its verses through the contemporary story the way such songs have always threaded themselves through the mountains, carrying the past forward whether we invite it or not. In the novel, when the lifeless body of her beloved friend is discovered, local pastor’s wife Ally Marshall, finds the verses of an old murder ballad rising unbidden in her mind—the chilling verses are as familiar to her as any hymn. The mountains, she begins to suspect, are not finished with the story those verses tell.

For writers looking for inspiration, I’d suggest looking beyond the front page—sometimes the most untapped ideas are hiding in the stories no one thought to combine. A headline and an old ballad didn’t seem like natural companions until suddenly they were.

I won’t pretend to know more than my share, but the world outside your window has never once run dry. A headline, a face, a grief you couldn’t put down—these are not distractions from the work. They are the work. Every idea comes from somewhere, and the real world will always color your fiction more vividly than anything invented from nothing. The real gives fiction its weight. And for those of us who write from faith, that weight is never without purpose. A redeeming thread, however quietly it runs, changes what a story is for—that’s why we spend days dreaming up storylines for our next novel.

Keep dreaming!

A bestselling, inspirational storyteller of hope-fueled fiction, Georgia Curtis Ling was born and raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Eastern Kentucky. Influenced by her heritage, Georgia has a unique voice in Inspirational Christian Fiction with her contemporary Appalachian tales, which include her Christmas romance series, and the Christian thriller series: The Pastors’ Wives Club, including the #1 Amazon Bestseller Contemporary Religious Fiction But There Were Signs and the Fall 2026 release When Daylight is Gone. The Christian thriller series is set against the backdrop of the Appalachian region and exposes evil that lurks in the shadows of a small town.