Barbara Hettwer

A 4th generation Californian, I grew up in Alhambra with aching lungs from the summer smog. I went to Catholic schools for 12 years in the days of the nuns wearing habits. They had EVERYTHING in their huge pockets including scissors and smelling salts, which Sr. Erminold actually used on me when I fainted at a piano recital! I graduated from UC Irvine and became a math teacher.

While raising my kids, I lived in a beautiful home in San Clemente with a view of the ocean. After getting a horse, I moved to Oregon to have room for him. Horses don't fit well on a cul-de-sac in Orange County.

I am now married to a man with 8 children! We have 10 total and 19 grandchildren. We live in a large home which my husband built in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Oregon where it truly seems to rain for 9 months straight.

I enjoy playing the piano, genealogy, and horses. Since I retired from teaching, I took the time to write a book. The Seamstress of Jamestown is my first but not my last. I have often heard writers and critics say that a first novel is often the best. I can see that in mine. I put more of myself and my mother into it than I ever could again.

My mother was a seamstress in New York City, working at one of the top dressmaking houses on 5th Avenue in 1938. She worked on a dress for Eleanor Roosevelt and embroidered the initials on Kate Smith's lingerie. I used some of the sewing details she described for my heroine.

Although my book is fiction, it is immersed in true history, both in Baltimore and the California gold rush town of Jamestown. It is also sprinkled with my and my mother's personal history including some Sr. Erminold lore.