“When I was in college, I used to drive by an abandoned Victorian house in the middle of a field. It almost looked haunted, it was so badly in disrepair, but I fell in love with it. I daydreamed about buying it and rehabbing it: it would make a perfect bed and breakfast, and where would be more perfect than a small college town in prime foliage country? After school, when I was pursuing a culinary certification, I could imagine it all more seriously, the meals, the tea service…and then real life interrupted my daydreams and my life took a different direction. Nan Grady was born out of those dreams. She’s not autobiographical, but the Damselfly Inn is based on a very real place, and the fictional town that sprung up around it is painted on a real canvas. She and her friends and their love stories were all inspired two decades ago , one way or another, by a crumbling old house near the side of a Vermont road.”