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| A Pioneer Christmas Collection |
An Interivew with
Michelle Ule
How did this project
take shape?
Barbour asked for
submissions—and received nearly sixty—for a new Christmas collection. Our
stories were chosen, though we did not "meet" as a group of authors
until this summer when we began working on marketing collaboration efforts.
Share some themes of
your compilation. What ties the novellas together?
We were tasked to tell a
story set between 1700-1900 that included romance, Christmas, and an unusual
setting. The authors certainly found different places to conduct their
Christmas romances! Hardship, of course, was a central element to these stories
and the weather caused problems as well. The pioneer pluck of the heroines
served as a common thread through the stories along with their novel ways of
celebrating Christ's birth.
What makes your project
stand out from other Christmas titles?
I wrote a personal blog
post about how this collection differs from others. You can see it here: http://michelleule.com/2013/08/27/12-days-of-pioneer-christmas-uncommon-romance/
Fully a third of these
romance stories began with a married couple—I'd not encountered that before in
romance novels and certainly not a third of the stories coming at romance from
that angle. The situations were unique and they all had happy endings, but took
us to places you don't often encounter in traditional romance stories.
Tell us one interesting
fact about your novella.
My novella, The Gold Rush Christmas, features a
fantastic and true tale of what happened to the prostitutes of Skagway, Alaska
when a young missionary preached a funeral sermon inviting them to change their
lives. 80 percent left town the next day thanks to the generosity of a
steamship captain and a miner who had already found his gold.
What’s next for you as
an author? Or for your team? Will you write together as a team?
I'm working on a World
War I novel featuring Oswald Chambers. We do not anticipate writing together
again as a team, though we've enjoyed getting to know each other as we've
marked our book.
What else would you like
to share about this project?
These are good stories,
easy to read in an hour, which grapple with some hard truths even as a couple
fall in love. Several feature unusual truths and they all end up celebrating
Christmas in an unusual fashion--whether in a cave, a tipi, an abandoned Pony
Express station or even a Tlingit long house--these stories provide new angle
on the reason for love and the season remembering Jesus' birth.
I wrote another blog
post about what makes this collection (and the other one: A Log Cabin Christmas
Collection) inspirational: http://michelleule.com/2013/08/31/12-days-of-christmas-whats-inspirational-about-these-collections/
A Pioneer Christmas Collection
Christmas and Romance Follow Pioneers into Untamed Lands: The wild
and untamed lands of America called to the brave and determined pioneers who
desired a new way of life. Faced with primitive lodgings—a cave, a dugout,
a sod house, a barn—settlers encounter their first Christmas in a new land with
both trepidation and hope. From the mountains of North Carolina to the woods of
Michigan, across the plains of Oklahoma and deserts of Arizona, these settlers
soon learned that wherever the heart dwells, Christmas and romance can find a
place to call home.
In this exclusive collection of nine Christmas romances, readers
will relive a pioneer Christmas with all its challenges and delights as penned
by some of Christian fiction's beloved authors, including bestselling authors
Margaret Brownley and Lauraine Snelling.
