Your journey towards Strawberry Moon began with genealogical research and the discovery of your ancestral connection to John and Sarah Whipple. Can you tell us about that discovery and the moment you realised there might be a novel waiting within their history?
My journey toward Strawberry Moon began in an unexpected place: a trip to Ireland. While exploring my husband’s ancestry, we found his family’s clan castle. It was an experience so surreal that it made me wonder whether my own lineage held anything grand or storied. Instead of regency, I found an indentured servant.
I remembered learning about indentured servitude in school, but I had never truly sat with the human reality of it, the fear, the hope, the dislocation. I began to wonder who John had been before he crossed the Atlantic and what life demanded of him once he arrived in 1630s Massachusetts.
That curiosity became a spark. The more I researched, the more I felt the emotional weight behind the fragments of his life. It wasn’t long before I realized there was a story waiting there, not just about John, but about the world he entered, the people he encountered, and the woman who might have walked beside him. That was the moment the novel began to take shape.
Genealogical records can provide names, dates, marriages, births, and deaths, but rarely tell us how people thought or felt. How did you begin transforming those fragments of documented lives into fully realised characters?
For John Whipple, the records offered just enough to sketch the outline of a life: he was indentured, he got into trouble with Alexander Miller during those years, he was granted land after his term ended, and he eventually married a woman named Sarah. Those details gave me a framework, but they didn’t tell me who he was or how he moved through the world.
With Sarah, the record was even thinner. All I had was a gravestone stating she died in 1690 at sixty six, and that she was born in Dorchester. No maiden name. No family. No story. When I researched Dorchester in 1624, I discovered it wasn’t yet an English town; it was a Neponset village of the Massachusett people. That single fact opened an entirely different door.
From there, I began pulling threads. Merrymount was only about a two hour’s walk from the Neponset village, and Thomas Morton wrote in New English Canaan about Merrymount men taking Native women as wives. I found myself wondering what happened to those women and to their children, who would have lived between worlds. Then I came across John Winthrop’s 1633 journal entry describing the people of Dorchester taking in Neponset orphans after smallpox devastated the tribe. Suddenly, the fragments began to form a pattern.
Even John and Sarah’s later move to Rhode Island intrigued me. Rhode Island was where the “heretics” fled for religious freedom, following Roger Williams. That choice suggested something about their worldview, something not entirely aligned with Puritan authority.
When writing fiction inspired by your own ancestors, did you feel a particular sense of responsibility towards the real people behind the story?
I did feel a sense of responsibility, especially because so much of John and Sarah’s lives exist only in fragments. With the more intimate or personal moments, I was always aware that I was imagining experiences the record doesn’t confirm. And with Sarah in particular, I don’t have definitive proof of her mixed heritage. That’s where I took creative liberties but I did so always within the boundaries of historical plausibility.
The absence of her maiden name, the timing of her birth, the location of Dorchester in 1624, and the documented interactions between English settlers and the Neponset people all opened a door to possibilities the record doesn’t explicitly name. My responsibility, as I saw it, was to treat those possibilities with respect: to avoid sensationalizing, to stay grounded in what the historical context allows, and to honor the cultural realities of the time.
I wasn’t trying to rewrite their history so much as to acknowledge the silences within it and to imagine what might have lived inside those gaps.
Your research eventually became what you describe as a search for both historical and emotional truth. What does "emotional truth" mean to you when writing about people who lived almost four centuries ago?
To me, emotional truth means trying to understand what life felt like for people who lived four centuries ago. It’s not just imagining their circumstances, it’s recognizing the complexity of their world. We often reduce the 1630s to “everyone was a Puritan,” but that erases the reality of local Indigenous nations, varied social classes, competing beliefs, and the many different reasons people crossed the Atlantic. Not everyone belonged to the ruling Puritan class, including John Whipple. His life trajectory suggests he wasn’t fully aligned with their politics or their spiritual worldview, and that contrast fascinated me.
I wanted to lean into that tension, to imagine what it meant for him to live under another man’s control, to navigate a society he didn’t entirely fit into, and to hope for freedom or agency someday. Emotional truth, for me, is exploring those human pressures and contradictions with honesty.
The archival record gives us dates, laws, conflicts, and outcomes; it rarely tells us what those moments felt like for the individuals inside them. Where the record is silent, I try to stay faithful to the cultural realities and human complexities of 1630s Massachusetts including the often overlooked history of the Massachusett people, whose world existed long before full colonial settlement. Emotional truth lives in the space between what we can document and what we can empathically imagine.
Strawberry Moon takes readers into both English colonial society and a Massachusett community. How did you approach researching two very different cultures and representing their beliefs, customs, and expectations with sensitivity?
Researching these two cultures felt like uncovering two different worlds: one familiar from school lessons, and one I had never been taught at all. The Indigenous history was the most revealing for me. Like many people, I was shocked to realize the Massachusett tribe existed and then frustrated by how little information is readily available about them. The question “Why were we never taught this?” stayed with me throughout the entire writing process.
Because the historical record for the Massachusett is limited, I had to look to neighboring tribes, especially the Wampanoag, to understand cultural practices, beliefs, and seasonal rhythms. I relied on primary sources where I could: Winthrop’s journals, which include small but meaningful references to the Neponset people, and Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, which describes interactions between Merrymount settlers and Native people, along with detailed observations of the local flora and fauna. I also paid attention to living traditions like clambakes still held by local tribes and the significance of the June full moon, called the Strawberry Moon because of the wild strawberry harvest in New England.
On the English side, I learned quickly that colonial life was far more complicated than the simplified “Puritan world” we’re often taught. Their society had its own tensions, hierarchies, and contradictions, and not everyone fit neatly into the ruling Puritan class. Understanding those nuances helped me portray the English community with honesty rather than stereotype.
My goal was always sensitivity and accuracy: to stay grounded in what the historical record supports, to honor the cultural realities of both communities, and to acknowledge the humanity of people whose stories were often recorded incompletely or not at all.
Merrymount occupies a fascinating place in the history of early Massachusetts, particularly because of its conflict with the Puritan authorities. What drew you to this episode, and how did it help you establish the world Sarah inhabits?
What fascinated me most about Merrymount was that it represented a brief moment where English settlers and Native people lived together with a kind of ease and mutual acceptance that rarely appears in the colonial record. When I learned that some of the Merrymount men had married Native women and spent their nights in the Neponset village, I couldn’t stop wondering what happened to the children of those unions. Their existence seemed obvious yet the archives are silent.
Merrymount itself was a settlement of single, formerly indentured men who had left the harshness of Plymouth behind and tried to build something more egalitarian. Thomas Morton believed all men there were equals, each contributing to the community. That vision however short lived helped me imagine a world where Sarah might have felt whole, accepted, and connected to both sides of her heritage.
And then it was gone. After only four years, Merrymount was destroyed, its men dragged back to Plymouth or sent south to Virginia to be indentured again. I hadn’t known any of this history before researching the novel and discovering it was a genuine light bulb moment. It offered a plausible explanation for Sarah’s beginnings.
Merrymount gave me a way to anchor Sarah’s identity in a real historical moment: a place where two cultures briefly intertwined, and where a child like her could have existed even if the record chose not to preserve her story.
The 1630s brought disease, extreme weather, displacement, and warfare to communities already experiencing enormous change. Was there a particular piece of research that altered your understanding of this period or changed the direction of the novel?
Absolutely. Winthrop’s Journal was the single most transformative source I encountered while researching the 1630s. As the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, Winthrop recorded everything from political tensions and religious disputes to sudden storms, crop failures, outbreaks of disease, and the escalating events that led to the Pequot War.
Reading his entries felt like slipping behind the curtain of the colony. Instead of abstract history, I was seeing the daily anxieties, the moral justifications, and the sheer vulnerability of a community trying to impose order on a landscape they didn’t yet understand. His notes on extreme weather and illness were especially striking.
That perspective changed the direction of Strawberry Moon. It helped me understand how fragile life was in the 1630s, how quickly circumstances could turn, and how deeply fear shaped both policy and personal choices. Winthrop’s writing grounded the novel in the lived texture of the period and reminded me that the characters weren’t moving through a static historical backdrop; they were navigating a world in constant upheaval.
Historical records from colonial America were largely created and preserved by particular sections of society, leaving other voices much harder to recover. How did you deal with the silences and biases in the historical record when constructing Sarah's story?
The silences in the historical record were impossible to ignore, and they shaped the way I approached Sarah’s story from the very beginning. To write a character who lived between cultures, I had to read widely and question constantly.
I relied heavily on Plimoth Patuxet Museum’s online resources, which offered grounded insight into Indigenous and colonial life. Indian New England 1524–1674 provided invaluable context for Indigenous family structures and political relationships, and I paid close attention to how figures like Roger Williams and Thomas Morton described the Native communities they interacted with. Their perspectives were imperfect, but they sometimes preserved details that would otherwise be lost.
The single most practical resource was Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It provided tangible realities such as prices of goods, punishments, clothing, the rhythms of work, and it corrected misconceptions I’d carried since childhood, like the idea that Puritans dressed only in black and white. Those details helped me build a world that felt lived in rather than symbolic.
None of these sources could give me Sarah’s voice directly. But together, they allowed me to reconstruct the world she moved through.
You came to historical fiction after working as an educator and becoming immersed in genealogy. How has that journey shaped the kind of historical novelist you want to be?
My journey into historical fiction has been shaped by both my years as an educator and my immersion in genealogy. Teaching trained me to be exacting, to check sources, verify details, and make sure I’m presenting information responsibly. That instinct carried directly into my writing. I want readers to feel the period as truthfully as possible, so I work carefully to get the history right while still honoring the emotional heart of the story.
Genealogy was the beginning of that impulse. It gave me the backbone of my writing; a personal connection to the past but it was my love of research and my search for historical truth that ultimately shaped the kind of novelist I want to be. I’m drawn to the overlooked corners of early America, to the people whose stories weren’t preserved, and to the emotional realities that sit beneath the recorded facts.
In many ways, my approach is still an educator’s: I want readers to learn something about this world simply by living in it with the characters. But more than that, I want the history to feel human, intimate, and alive.
Strawberry Moon grew from a very personal encounter with your own family history. Has writing the novel changed the way you think about ancestry, inheritance, and the connections between people living centuries apart?
Writing Strawberry Moon didn’t change the way I think about ancestry so much as deepen what I already believed. No matter the century, people wrestle with identity, belonging, and the search for love. Those struggles aren’t modern inventions; they’re human ones.
What changed for me was the clarity with which I could see the way those same struggles echo through history. The setting shifts, the dangers, the expectations, the cultural pressures, but underneath, the emotional landscape is familiar: heartache, hope, fear, loyalty, longing.
Writing the novel made the past feel less distant. It reminded me that the people who lived centuries ago were not abstractions or symbols; they were individuals navigating their own uncertainties and desires. In that sense, ancestry feels less like inheritance and more like connection, a reminder that the human experience is shared, even across hundreds of years.
A huge thank you to Amber Hoyem for joining me today and sharing the fascinating journey behind Strawberry Moon.
It has been wonderful to discover how a search into family history grew into something much larger, opening a window onto people, communities and experiences that are so easily lost amongst the more familiar accounts of the past. Amber’s determination to look beyond those familiar narratives and explore the human lives behind the surviving records makes the story behind the novel every bit as interesting as the history itself.
If you enjoy historical fiction that explores lesser-known history, family connections and the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, then Strawberry Moon is certainly one to add to your reading list.
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Amber Hoyem
Amber Hoyem writes literary historical fiction rooted in early American history. She is the author of Strawberry Moon.
A former secondary educator, her descent into genealogical research drew her into early American history. What began as curiosity became a years‑long search for emotional and historical truth—one that revealed her ancestral ties to John and Sarah Whipple and the archival traces that sparked Strawberry Moon.
Originally from Southern California, Amber now lives in Oklahoma with her husband, two sons, and their fluffy puppy, Brooke. When she isn’t writing, she can usually be found at a BMX track, cheering on her youngest, who behaves as if gravity is someone else’s problem.
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