Love Letters To Anna

This is an engaging account of how a young couple from the hills of middle Tennessee endured the darkest years in our nation's history. Their own words tell how they not only survived, but kept their love for each other and their faith in God alive through the most desperate of circumstances. These were not the wealthy plantation owners of the Southern stereotype, but the son of a cabinetmaker and the daughter of a blacksmith, the kind of hardworking small farmers that actually populated most of the antebellum South. Burton Warfield and his brother-in-law Alonzo (Lonny) Worley both made it home to Isom, TN after the war and a few years later bought a farm together. Burton later decided to move his family west to Arkansas, but the farm has remained in the Worley family, and we still produce grain and cattle there. When I stand on the little rise above Dry Fork Creek where their house once stood, I am reminded of a war-weary veteran who came here to rebuild his life, his family and his community after that great tragedy we know as the Civil War. Stephen G. Worley, Great-grandson of Samuel Alonzo (Lonny) Worley

Anna's Love Letters

When Richard Slater receives a letter of complaint from one of his constituents, a Margaret Hayton, he merely responds with his standard letter of empty promises. Clearly, this woman is insane and must be avoided at all costs. But she will not be dismissed so easily, and when Richard finally sets eyes on the ‘twenty-something vision in stone-washed denim, with a cloud of dark ringlets and huge, serious eyes’ he risks losing his heart, his head and quite possibly his political career.

"Before my grandmother, there was Anna." So begins the true story of a family secret, a trunkful of hidden letters, and a love story buried away for almost a century. In 1894 Roy and Anna graduated from high school and begin writing hundreds of love letters to each other until 1898, when Anna died, suddenly and tragically. Roy was devastated. Even after he married, he grieved every year on the anniversary of Anna's death. The letters lay hidden for decades, until his granddaughter brought them out of the shadows. Who was Anna - the woman Roy loved so deeply that he mourned her even after his 63-year marriage to someone else? This is Anna and Roy's story - a snapshot in time in the waning days of the Gilded Age; a love story for the ages. In Anna's words: "We will write as often as we must, for we are never going to be tired of each other, if we live a thousand years."

This book deals with love, marriage/family, and witchcraft issues but its central question remains that of whether love without understanding is love. Tackling love from much broader and interdisciplinary angles than just the love-making that most love stories usually focus on, it advances the duo of love and understanding as the foundation of any successful marriage/family. Although Momany is blessed with often easily finding this rare duo, the tensions of belonging in Cameroon have been constant and persistent challenges. The book uniquely raises and brings new and ground-breaking perspectives on its subject-matters, obviously leaving many social scientists with much to do further research on.

An aimless young woman starts writing to an accused serial killer while he awaits trial and then, once he’s acquitted, decides to move in with him and take the investigation into her own hands in this dark and irresistibly compelling debut thriller. Recently ghosted and sick of watching her friends fade into the suburbs, thirty-something Hannah finds community in a true-crime forum that’s on a mission to solve the murders of four women in Atlanta. After William, a handsome lawyer, is arrested for the killings, Hannah begins writing him letters. It’s the perfect outlet for her pent-up frustration and rage. The exercise empowers her, and even feels healthy at first. Until William writes back. Hannah’s interest in the case goes from curiosity to obsession, leaving space for nothing else as her life implodes around her. After she loses her job, she heads to Georgia to attend the trial and befriends other true-crime junkies like herself. When a fifth woman is discovered murdered, the jury has no choice but to find William not guilty, and Hannah is the first person he calls upon his release. The two of them quickly fall into a routine of domestic bliss. Well, as blissful as one can feel while secretly investigating their partner for serial murder…

Anna Eikenhout (1902-1986) was an honors graduate of Ohio State University, a fine-arts librarian, a skilled pianist, and an avid reader in three languages. Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988), a little-known painter and would-be shantyboater, seemed an unlikely husband, but together they lived a life out of the pages of Thoreau's Walden. Much of what is known about the Hubbards comes from Harlan's books and journals. Concerning the seasons and the landscape, his writing was rapturous, yet he was emotionally reticent when discussing human affairs in general or Anna in particular. Yet it was through her efforts that their life on the river was truly civilized. Visitors to Payne Hollow recall Anna as a generous, gracious hostess, whose intelligence and artistry made the small house seem grander than a mansion.