Nancy Johnston Hall
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I’m a health and medical writer. Because I love to write, I retired reluctantly from my career as owner of a health communication company, where I wrote everything from brochures and books to television PSAs, documentary scripts, billboard slogans—on and on. Our major clients were the NIH and CDC. When my husband and I moved from Minnesota to North Carolina, I found a new form of writing—personal essays. When I ran out of “life” to write about, my writing group suggested I try fiction. For my debut novel, I was inspired to write a fictionalized version of my own ancestors’ stories—two families who were among the first to settle in the Blackhawk Territory of (now) southeastern Iowa. An evocative letter passed down in our family from the real Louisa Evans, my great-great- grandmother, inspired the literate voice of my fictional Louisa’s journal. I have begun a second novel set in England and Paris in the 1920s, this time loosely based on an in-law’s family.
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Sweet Fields Beyond: A Novel of the Iowa Frontier
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Historical Fiction
In the spring of 1837, recently widowed Louisa Evans leaves Pennsylvania to follow her sister and brother-in-law west in a prairie schooner bound for the Black Hawk Purchase—land newly opened after war and treaty. Through Louisa’s vivid journal, we witness the unvarnished life of a frontier woman: the punishing miles of the trail, the loss of loved ones on the trail, and the fierce work of carving a farm from wilderness. When tragedy leaves Louisa and her brother-in-law Isaac alone on Iowa soil, they must build not only a cabin and farm but a new kind of partnership—rooted in labor, grief, and an unspoken bond that will test their conscience as much as their endurance. Based on the true journeys of the author’s ancestors, this novel captures the courage and conscience of those who first broke the prairie sod. Written in an intimate journal voice rich with period detail, it is a story of endurance, moral reckoning, and the making of home in a wild land. 
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