Beth Webb Hart

Beth Webb Hart, a South Carolina native, is the best-selling
author of Grace at Low Tide, Adelaide Piper and The Wedding Machine.
With a B.A. in English Literature from Hollins University
and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College,
Hart serves as an inspirational speaker and creative writing
instructor at conferences, retreats, schools, libraries and churches
across the country, and she is the recipient of two national teaching
awards from Scholastic, Inc. and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers.
She lives with her husband, composer Edward Hart, and their family
in Charleston. Her fourth novel, Love, Charleston, will hit bookstores
this September, 2010.

It is difficult to talk about how my faith informs my writing without sharing a little bit of my personal story so here goes… At the tender age of nineteen, at a time when I could barely stand to be in my own skin for a variety of reasons, I experienced love. It dawned on me that all of those marquee signs along the back roads of the Bible belt (which I made an awful lot of fun of growing up) were actually true.

I grew up at North Litchfield Beach, an obscure nook on the South Carolina coast. Very few people lived at the beach year-round, and I had just a couple of friends to pass the time with. My parents ran a restaurant in Murrell’s Inlet where they worked most nights, and so my two younger sisters and I had to create a way to entertain ourselves.

Whenever I turn in a novel to my publisher, I’m rather puffed up and excited about it until I receive the critique from my editor. This critique is usually ten pages long with a few paragraphs about what is working and many pages about what is not working. It’s a humbling, terrifying experience to read that critique.