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If a story is in you, it has got to come out. - William Faulkner
My brother, Frank, and
I had lots of freedom in those days,
I loved to read and
write from the time I first learned my alphabet and started putting words
together. In second grade, I was the first in my class to be inducted into the
“Fifty Book Club” and
Every summer, my
family spent time in the North Carolina mountains where my grandparents had a
small cabin with one room downstairs and two rooms and a screened-in porch
upstairs. I built dams in the creek, caught
Because my father was
a flight engineer for Pan American Airways, my family could fly for free (if
there
Throughout high
school, my interest in reading and writing grew. Each summer, we attended the
Shakespeare Festival at the University of Miami. My mother took cour
The early years of our
marriage were taken up with my teaching special education classes in an
elementary school in Loudoun County, Virginia and then staying home to raise our
two children, Daniel and Katie. Writing took a
back seat in those years, but we made a lot of trips to the library. Once my
children started school, I started writing again, working mostly on picture book
manuscripts, none of which have been published. For three years in the 1980s I
Around the time of Ken
Burn’s public television series on the Civil War, Jackie and I decided to
combine our writing
talents and col
After our success with
our first book, we collaborated again on Rebel
During the years Jackie
and I researched and wrote both books, I worked fulltime in the Guidance
Department of Frederick High School and later in admissions and academic
advising, first at Hood College in Frederick, MD and then at Carroll Community
College
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lthough
my formal writing name is
Edith Morris
Hemingway, most everyone calls me Edie. I was named for my great
grandmother, Edith Call. The only other “Edith” I knew as a child was an old
lady. I was born in Miami and spent most of my growing up years in south
Florida. My family lived near a bicycle path, and my brother and I often
rode our bikes to the beach. Every now and then I’d meet an alligator
stretched across the path, and if there wasn’t room to pass it, I’d turn around.
My biggest fear, though, was of land crabs. Whenever it rained hard
(especially after hurricanes), the crab holes were flooded, and huge pink and
blue crabs crawled onto our front porch. Their gigantic claws spanned
more than a foot, and I was sure those clicking monsters could snap my toes or
fingers right off.
and we explored the surrounding
neighborhood on our bikes. There was an old graveyard where the cousin of Davy
Crockett had been buried (and dug up). At times, we even sat along the edge of
a canal and watched the filming of some early TV programs such as Flipper,
Gentle Ben, and The 
salamanders, climbed rocks, hiked
up Grandfather Mountain, picked wild blackberries on Tater
Hill, square danced, listened to Appalachian folk music, and, of course,
read! Some of my favorite books were The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Calico
Captive, The Good Master, and A Wrinkle In Time. It was in North
Carolina that my baby sister, Mary Kate, was born prematurely and died, and also
where I accidentally stuck my hand into a yellow jackets’ nest and was stung
more than 30 times. Both of these incidents appear in Tater Hill, the middle grade novel I am currently writing.
were empty seats on the planes). When I was 14, my parents took me out of
school for 6 weeks while we traveled around Europe.
I was in my first year of studying Latin and loved exploring the Coliseum and
the Roman forum, all the while trying to translate the writing on the ruins. We
rented a car in Paris and drove through the Loire Valley of France, went
sledding in Switzerland
, and took a ferry across the English Channel to England,
Scotland and then flew on to Ireland. I’ve never decided if my favorite part of
the trip was hiking through the ruins of Tintagel (a legendary castle of King
Arthur along the coast of Cornwall), scanning Loch Ness for a sight of the
monster, or walking by myself out to the Giant’s Causeway at the tip of Northern
Ireland. I still have the journal I faithfully wrote in every night of that
trip.
ses in
English literature, while working on her master’s degree. She and I used to
take long evening bike rides while she quoted poetry to me and I tried to figure
out the titles and authors of the poems. When it was time for college, the
North Carolina mountains drew me back. I attended Guilford College in
Greensboro, NC for my first year and then transferred to Appalachian State
University in Boone. There I met and fell in love with my brother’s roommate,
Doug Hemingway. The first thing that drew me to him was his name. After all,
what aspiring author could turn down the possibility of the name E. Hemingway! We were married the summer after we graduated.
owned and operated a frozen yogurt shop. During
the slow times, I sat in the back room and typed (I did not own a computer then)
the first draft of a novel, which, by the way, is still sitting on a shelf.
Throughout those years, my husband never laughed at my dream of becoming a
published author. I joined the Society of Children’s Book Writers and
Illustrators 
laborate 
Hart
in Westminster, MD. In 2002, I decided to pursue a Master of Fine Arts
degree (MFA) with a concentration in Writing for Children at the newly
established brief residency program at
Now what I enjoy most
of all is juggling my writing time with playing with my grandchildren, Connor, Mairin,
Annabel
and Aria, and leading
