As a writer, Jill Hannah Anderson got her start writing articles for Her Voice, the quarterly magazine published through the Brainerd Dispatch. After 10 years of that, and as her kids began heading off to college or getting married, she thought, “Maybe I could write a book.”
And write she did. Jill’s fourth book, Closer to Home was recently published, and her next book is in the first round of edits with her publisher.
Closer to Home is set in the 1970s and is the story about a woman from Missouri on the run after witnessing the brutal murder of her boyfriend. In a recent What We’re Reading interview, Jill described her protagonist, Joleigh Moore, as resilient, looking for stability and love.
Luck leads Joleigh to Grandfield, a small town in southern Minnesota where she carefully carves out a new life, from making money trapping leeches to making good friends and feeling secure enough to start planning for the future.
Jill found inspiration for Closer to Home from her own life. Joleigh’s skill in trapping leeches was inspired by a friend Jill’s who had trapped leeches for decades, and throughout the book there are references to popular music of the time. Jill is a music lover and made a Closer to Home playlist based on the songs mentioned in the story.
With her father in the military, Jill’s family moved around quite a bit while she was growing up, but they eventually ended up in the Twin Cities area for several years. It became a real home for Jill, but in her senior year of high school, her family moved once more, this time to the Detroit Lakes community.
She explained, “I was devastated. I was 17. I had to go with them. And for years in my heart, I wanted to go back home.”
"Home is people, not a place."Author Jill Hannah Anderson on her novel "Closer to Home."
Jill set Closer to Home in 1977, the same year that her family moved and then realized that she was writing the story, in part, for herself.
She said, “It wasn't until I was finishing this story that I realized that [the Twin Cities] wasn't home anymore. None of my family was there. I hadn't lived there for years. The neighborhood had changed. I had changed. And I think that without realizing it, that was an important part of the story for me--to understand that your home is not necessarily where you think it is… Home is people, not a place.”
Learn more about Jill Hannah Anderson and her books on her website.
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