Kimberly Ferrato Author of The Ground Keeps Its Own

When Tennessee Inspired a Story I Never Expected to Write

By Kimberly Ferrato

I grew up in Southern California, so Tennessee was completely different from anything I was used to. I honestly never imagined that I would spend part of my life there, and I definitely never imagined it would inspire me to write my first novel.

When I started spending more time in Tennessee, I fell in love with the small towns, back roads, old houses, churches, and cemeteries. There is so much history everywhere you look. But the more time I spent there, the more I started thinking about the stories behind those places. I wondered how many secrets had been passed down through families and how many things had happened that people simply stopped talking about.

That was really where the idea for The Ground Keeps Its Own began.

Blackwater Ridge is fictional, but I wanted it to feel like a town you could actually find somewhere in Tennessee. I wanted readers to picture the old homes, the cemetery, the church, and the people who have known each other their entire lives. More importantly, I wanted to explore what happens when a town has spent generations protecting its secrets and those secrets finally start coming to the surface.

Writing the book was also a completely new experience for me. I have written professionally for more than twenty years, but writing a novel was different. I honestly didn’t know if I could do it. At first, I worried about whether I was doing everything the “right” way. Eventually, I stopped worrying so much and just wrote the kind of story I would want to read.

On August 9, 2026, I independently published The Ground Keeps Its Own. Since then, one of the most exciting parts has been seeing people actually read and connect with something that once existed only in my head. The book currently holds a 4.8 out of 5-star rating on Amazon from six reader reviews, and seeing that response to my first novel has meant more to me than I can really explain.

Tennessee gave me more than the setting for my first novel. It gave me Blackwater Ridge—and a story I never knew I had in me.