Kentucky bourbon country runs deep in Suzanne Feinstein's DNA. Her 3rd great-grandfather was William "Stiller Bill" Caudill, who ran a government distillery in Eastern Kentucky. When production was outlawed in 1888, he kept his word to abandon the still—turning to farming and beekeeping, distributing honey instead of bourbon.
Born in Lexington and raised between central Ohio and western Kentucky, those precious summers on her grandparents' fifty-acre Nicholasville farm shaped her literary landscape. She walked to the Kentucky River through limestone bluffs, past stacked stone fences and wildflowers, playing in dusty tobacco barns and absorbing every sensory detail that would later bring her fiction to vivid life.
In 2009, a devastating fire consumed her grandparents' farm. During the fire cleanup, she discovered a dresser drawer filled with her grandparents' correspondence from 1940-1946. This treasure trove of romantic love became both personal salvation and literary inspiration. Like her character Erie Shelbourne, she became a true "archivist of the heart," transcribing these letters and sharing them on Substack (earlandmabel.substack.com).
Feinstein holds an English degree from Western Kentucky University and an MBA from Vanderbilt. After beginning her career as an editor for Writer's Digest Books and Athlon Sports Publishing, she found her professional home at Vanderbilt, where she's served for twenty years and currently leads student life initiatives at the Owen Graduate School of Management. She shares her woodland Tennessee home with her rock musician husband, their exceptionally creative teenager, and their rescued dog and cat. There she creates The Trestle Ridge Stories—fiction infused with the hard-won wisdom that choosing to love fully is always worth the cost.
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Kentucky bourbon country runs deep in Suzanne Feinstein's DNA. Her 3rd great-grandfather was William "Stiller Bill" Caudill, who ran a government distillery in Eastern Kentucky. When production was outlawed in 1888, he kept his word to abandon the still—turning to farming and beekeeping, distributing honey instead of bourbon.
Born in Lexington and raised between central Ohio and western Kentucky, those precious summers on her grandparents'...
Erie Shelbourne spent twenty-two years perfecting the art of not kissing Seth Mattingly. Now she has a year to make up for lost time.
Seth Mattingly—barefoot, brilliant, and quietly unmoored—has always been the center of Erie’s world: the boy she dared, the artist she believed in, the friend who painted Civil War tragedies into...
Reading this felt like a luxury — every single sentence is just dripping with beauty and emotion. I feel like I need to YELL at someone about this because it's so damn good.
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CV
Reading this book is a treasured time. I don't want it to end.
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R
I’m absolutely immersed in this world. You’ve created something so deeply evocative and tender that I feel like I’m in the room with Erie and Seth, watching their history unfold in real time.
