Judie Mitchell lives in the beautiful Dandenong Ranges in Melbourne. Now retired, she taught in secondary schools for nearly forty years, mainly teaching English, History, and Literature.
Judie wrote lots of poetry in her adolescence and into her 20’s. (Didn’t we all!) Then life got in the way.
She began writing seriously after retiring. She was chastened by the realization that decades of teaching English and literature had not prepared her for actually writing a novel! She attended lots of workshops run by Writers Victoria, and several conferences which helped her understand more about the writing and crafting process.
The catalyst for her first novels was reading The Midwife’s Tale by Laura Thatcher Ulrich, which explores the diary of midwife Martha Ballard in late 18th-century colonial Puritan New England. The period of history became something of an obsession, and she has now self-published her first novel set in the late eighteenth century.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is based on a true story of the first recorded prosecution for an abortion.
Her second novel All Men Would be Sinners if They Could is now published on Amazon. It follows the true story of a woman suffering terrible domestic abuse in the same period, and how she overcomes her trials.
A third novel, based in the same time period, and again based on a true story, is underway.
Judie and her husband visited New England in 2017 and walked in the footsteps of Martha Ballard, many of her characters and the people she had researched. It was a heady experience! She has started a blog, on the website, talking about her research. There are so many resources and so much fascinating information and stories that don’t make it into her novels.