About Author Patti Hill

My parents brought me home from St. Francis Hospital in Kewanee, Illinois and laid me in my sister’s new doll bed under the Christmas tree. As the baby of the family, I naturally thought all the tinsel and candy was in celebration of my arrival. It took an embarrassingly long time to learn the truth about Christmas and my role in it.

Early memories of growing up in my small farming community include sugar sweet tomatoes, listening to the corn to grow, raiding my mother’s strawberry patch, and oodles of family to feast with and love. Soon after my third birthday, my father died, and well, that changed everything. My mother and my sister and I moved to Southern California for a fresh start. Despite my great loss, I thrived in the gentle warmth of the Sunshine State. But we left more than our family behind. We stopped going to church, and God seemed distant and foreboding.

At the end of my freshman year, my mother announced we were moving to a small beach community to be near my married sister. I loved the attention of the good-bye parties and the teary farewells. The reality of endless fog and long days of watching television and reading back issues of Reader’s Digest condensed versions seem interminable. I was so lonely, I agreed to accept an invitation to a youth group from my sister’s co-worker. By mid-July, the love of Christ beckoned me. I crawled into bed one night and whispered my willing acceptance of His gift of salvation and purpose.

I graduated from high school with absolutely no distinction whatsoever among 600 other graduates. And then there was college. I changed my major several times my freshman year before my English professor wrote at the end of one of my short stories, “You should be a writer.” I probably should have talked with Dr. Anderson about the best way to prepare for a career as a writer. Instead, I changed my major to Journalism. It seemed logical at the time.

Love rescued me from having to make a career of the high pressure world of journalism. I married Dennis, aka Mr. Wonderful, and we moved to Colorado with seed money to start a landscape installation business. Since 21-year-olds lack the most important ingredient to business success--experience, we liquidated after two years and immediately found out I was pregnant. It was time for a real job. Geoff arrived that July, and three years later Matt was born. Our family was complete. My new job as stay-at-home mom satisfied and stretched me beyond measure.

I returned to college to earn my English degree when the boys got older, not to be a writer but to teach elementary school. Writing was my “someday” dream. The pressure of impending college expenses for two sons made writing seem an impractical pipe dream. Besides, teaching energized me. The challenge of creating a learning community and meeting the educational goals of my students, quite frankly, possessed me morning, noon, and night. I even worried over students in the shower. I couldn’t get away, physically or emotionally, from the rigors of teaching, so I concocted story lines as a way to relax during my twenty minute commute to and from school each day. Then I started scribbling scenes on the backs of envelopes and students’ math papers. Oops.

When the school bells rang in the fall of 1999, I was outlining my first novel, Like a Watered Garden. I wrote the first chapter and attended the Colorado Christian Writers Conference. Lauraine Snelling, an award-winning author of over fifty novels, encouraged me to go home and write the next two chapters as fast as I could and send them to Bethany House Publishers. They rejected the manuscript, but it didn’t matter.

In the time I waited for their response, I’d ruptured a disk in my neck. A long season of pain and therapy and surgeries took the place of my writing time. When I could type again, I wrote one page a day, all I could tolerate because of the pain. I inched my way up to two pages a day. Finishing the novel became my motivation for health and wholeness. When I typed # # # at the end of the last chapter (editor’s marks that signal the end of a written piece), it was enough for me to have the pages neatly stacked on my desk. My friends and family thought otherwise. To please them, I sent the manuscript off again. This time, Bethany House chose to publish Like a Watered Garden, and I was left marveling at the wisdom and mercy of my God.

As I write this, The Queen of Sleepy Eye, my fourth novel, is finding its way into the hands of reviewers and endorsers. I can hardly breathe. I so want to please my reader with a rich, meaningful, and inspiring read. This is exactly how I felt when we sent our sons off to college. I wanted to send notes their professors: Be nice to this kid. He wants to please you. :)

Today, my son Geoff is building his life as an engineer in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Matt is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in entomology at the University of Idaho in May.

My husband, Dennis, co-owns the supreme garden center of western Colorado and eastern Utah. He’s also a regional celebrity for plant lovers. He writes a weekly gardening column in our local newspaper; he dishes out expert advice on his call-in radio show every Saturday morning; and he produces a weekly television spot called Garden Talk. But more than that, he’s my cheerleader and best friend. Sorry, gals, I got Mr. Wonderful.

I’m so blessed to have such smart, funny, and loving men around me.

And then there’s Tillie, our Australian shepherd. Almost three years old and weighing 60 pounds, she’s in charge of annoying me into exercise every day. Thanks, Tillieroo!

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