Happy New Year and welcome to special bonus episode of From Sparks to Light. Today I’m chatting with my good friend and fellow author Frances Rivetti who has just released her second work of fiction, the novel The House on Liberty Street. A story that takes place on Christmas Eve in the northern California community of Petaluma.

Frances and I have known each other since our boys were in elementary school. In my early years as a fledgling blogger and wanna be writer, it was Frances who inspired me and when I found myself at a crossroads after my mother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, desperate to try to figure out how to put my thoughts to paper, it was Francis who encouraged me to call our now mutual editor and friend Elaine Silver who walked me through the steps necessary to make my dream a reality.

Frances is an adventurer. The mother of three boys and the wife of an English man of Italian heritage, she’s never been one to shy away from new challenges. This conversation, about the writing life, the journey she’s taken from the small roads of Fenland in the UK to the northern California community of Petaluma, where both she and her character Adamaria both live, and the wish that she has to present stories that inspire took place on a rainy morning just before the new year. Her novels tell the stories of strong and courageous women who, like the woman who created them, lean into the challenges that life presents, learning and growing along the way.

Frances Rivetti was born and raised in the East Anglia Fenland region of the UK. She trained as a newspaper reporter with the Ely Standard and Wisbech Standard newspapers in Cambridgeshire in the late 1980s, before making a move into Press & Public Relations work with the East Anglian Regional Health Authority, based in the city of Cambridge, traveling back roads with her notepad and camera in order to produce in-house newspapers for hospitals large and small throughout East Anglia. 

She relocated to Northern California in 1990, at first temporarily, soon launching into a decade-long career in media relations with the Living History Center, producers of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire and Dickens Christmas Fair. During the late 1990s, as a mother of three young sons at home in Sonoma County, she returned to freelance PR and journalism, with a focus on lifestyle writing for wine country and regional publications and a five-year column in the Petaluma Argus Courier, South County Notebook. 

Frances has worked with local non-profits promoting their mission within the community, predominantly Petaluma Educational Foundation, handling its PR for several years and maintaining strong ties with many local groups that she writes about on her established blog site, Southern Sonoma Country Life. 

She later established her own publishing house, Fog Valley Press and wrote her first book, Fog Valley Crush — Love at First Bite, At Home in the California Farmstead Frontier, as a non-fiction love letter to the place she calls home, which released in 2014. Fog Valley Winter, Pioneer Heritage, Backroad Rambles & Vintage Recipes followed in 2016.

Her first novel, Big Green Country, set against the controversial backdrop of Northern California's Emerald Triangle, released in 2019 and was awarded a Gold Medal for best regional fiction for the Pacific West in the 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards. 

The House on Liberty Street is her second novel. She lives in West Petaluma with her husband Timo. 

You can listen to her episode here.