Give a warm welcome to Kathy Otten, author of A Place in Your Heart. Pull up a chair, grab a drink of your choice from the cooler, a Chocolate Chip or Peanut Butter cookie from the plate, and let’s find out a little about Kathy Otten and A Place in Your Heart. What inspired this particular story? In my research for a previous story I came across mention of a woman named Mary Ann Bickerdyke, who worked as a nurse during the Civil War. She fought hard for the patients, ignoring the dictates of many of the officers and doctors in charge of the hospital where she’d come to help. At the time she arrived many of the food, clothing, and supplies sent by the Sanitary Commission were being, used, sold, or eaten by the officers and orderlies at the hospital. When Mother Bickerdyke (as the patients fondly referred to her) discovered the cook and his friends had been eating food meant for the patients, she put a purgative in some cooked peaches, and threatened the sickening thieves that next time she would use rat poison. When she discovered an orderly wearing a shirt from the Sanitary Commission, she tackled him to the floor in the middle of the ward, sat on him while she pulled it off, then whirled it over her head in triumph. I fell in love with her spirit and Gracie McBride was born. The first chapter includes Gracie doing what Mother Bickerdyke did to the Continue Reading →