Third Thursday Book Signing: American Wild by Marissa Hale

On Third Thursday, we’ll be celebrating one of our own! A few years back, Marissa Hale was workshopping this beautiful piece of historical fiction with us. Now American Wild has been birthed and is ready to meet the world! Based on true events, this is the inspiring story of a French widow thrust alone into the New World after her husband’s murder…

America. L’Amérique. A foreign land threatens to take French-born Vittorie LeClerc’s love during a revolution and ultimately succeeds during questionable peace. She watches his last breath evaporate into nothing, leaving her to survive with only her will, a knife and a few gold buttons.

With the help of a mysterious man of the woods and other pioneers, Vittorie navigates uncharted territory, language barriers, fractious warring nations, suspicious settlers, underground slave kings, and a burgeoning new government.

Based on true events and historical figures during and after the Revolutionary War, American Wild is the unforgettable story of a woman’s odyssey into significance, a searchlight into heart, mind, history, and spirit.

Meet Marissa

Enamored of the natural world and the human experience in it, Marissa Hale has traveled to eleven countries on three continents and visited thirty-eight of the fifty United States. She learned French at a young age, studied in Paris, France at the American University there, and graduated from Wheaton College with a degree in Communications.

Marissa began researching the story of Frenchman’s Knob shortly after her own move to Hart County, Kentucky in December 2007. Fresh off the road from touring with her sisters in her band and feeling for the first time like she was terrible at everything she tried to do in her new life, she felt lost, ill-equipped, and alone. The band had broken up, her dyed-red hair seemed misplaced among her sweet Amish neighbors, and she was practically the only woman within a 50-mile radius who wasn’t married with children or a fabulous cook.

When a neighbor delivered Florence Edwards Gardiner’s little green book of her father’s (Cyrus Edwards) stories about the landscape and its people and casually said, “I’ve always thought someone should make a movie out of the second story, the one about Frenchman’s Knob…” Marissa was hooked. Because of her previous experience in France and knowledge of the language, the highest peak in Kentucky being named “Frenchman’s Knob” and the accompanying story captured her attention.

Marissa knew storytelling. She could research. And she did.

Before becoming a historical fiction author with American Wild, Marissa wrote songs and screenplays, performed for crowds of thousands, and taught elementary school art. In addition to writing, she now owns a general contracting company and makes her home in South Carolina with her husband, children, and grandchildren.