Donna Hill Explores Issues of Black Identity in 'I Am Ayah'

Romance and women’s fiction author, Donna Hill, chats with us to discuss her newest novel, a historical fiction, titled I Am Ayah: The Way Home. The story begins in Manhattan where we meet aspiring photographer, Alessandra Fleming, who receives an unexpected phone call one day that her estranged father is in the hospital. Alessandra decides she must go back to her home in Sag Harbor to find out what happened to him and assist in his recovery. While there, she journeys deep into her family history, going back many generations, and uncovers hidden truths with the help of her father’s neighbor and new love, Zach. For Hill, Sag Harbor had long been a location she wanted to use for this story. “One of the places I’ve been fascinated with for a very long time was Sag Harbor. I have set several novels in Sag Harbor and I visited it several years ago and have been enamored with the place, and as I was doing work on previous books, I was picking up bits and pieces of history of Sag Harbor…the locations and areas in Sag Harbor that were established by freed black slaves and those who had escaped and the indigenous people of America who were in these places in Sag Harbor. I was fascinated with these locations and I knew this next book I was going to do was going to take place there, and because of the history of the locations and the people who lived there, it was perfect fodder for this novel. So, I wanted to write a novel that looked at history but also had a contemporary element to it, in today’s language… I didn’t want it to be historical fiction per se but I wanted it to be this contemporary writer’s understanding of the history of her family.”

With over 100 published titles to her credit, Hill writes anywhere and any chance she gets. In addition to writing novels, she’s also an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, and with her busy schedule she has little time to sit down in one place for very long to just focus and write. “My writing routine sort of revolves around how I feel, where I am. I can write essentially anywhere. So, I can be on a bus going downtown and I’ll start writing… I was always a working mom and so I was going to work every day, coming home, and taking care of the kids and family, etc., so I would have to write when I could, and I would write late at night. I wrote Rooms of the Heart, my very first novel, going back and forth on the subway everyday. So I took a notebook, I wrote on my way to work, I would come home, I would write on my way home…I can write on the plane, in middle of a conference, whatever… it was just something that I’ve always been able to do.”