The Quiet Comfort of Coming Home
What coming home taught me about the story I’m writing. After weeks in Portugal, France, Germany, and Belgium, Nancy Polk Hall reflects on homecoming — and what the Continent revealed about 1960s England.
What the Lisbon Book Fair Taught Me About the Language Books Actually Speak
Nancy Polk Hall at the Lisbon Book Fair: on author camaraderie, the inspiration of being surrounded by stories, and what books communicate beyond words.
The Best Research Isn’t in a Library — It’s in the Places That Still Remember
Nancy Polk Hall on how traveling through Portugal, Belgium, and France’s Moselle Valley becomes the living research behind her historical fiction.
The Aga and I: A 1960s Perspective
My mother is a woman who can handle almost anything with grace and good humor. England in the mid-1960s tested that theory considerably. To me, as a child, it was all adventure — rolling Oxfordshire hills, fields of wild daffodils, a barn on our property the locals proudly called “the new barn,” which had been […]
The Places That Made Me a Writer: From a French Village to the Pages of Call of the Blackbird
Nancy Polk Hall reflects on how growing up in France and England — and returning to Europe as an adult — shaped her storytelling and brought history alive on the page.
The Letters We Keep: What My Grandmother’s Weekly Correspondence Taught Me About Memory
An essay on weekly letter-writing, family archives, and the framed letter by my dressing table — how handwritten mail shaped the way I write fiction.
Three Ways I’ve Learned to Tell the Same Story –And Why Each One Matters
Historical fiction author Nancy Polk Hall explores how the same story transforms across formats — a novel, a spoken word, and the intimate Letters from Caroline series.
When a Book Ends but the Characters Don’t — On Missing the People You Lived With While Writing a Book
What happens when a book is finished and the characters you’ve lived with for years go quiet? Nancy Polk Hall reflects on the friends she finds in her fiction.