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About the author and artist
Cynthia Moyer grew up in a tiny brick cottage in the middle of her mother’s rose garden in southern Illinois where her imagination was her best friend. A child of the 1970s, she spent all of her time reading, drawing, sewing clothes and quilts for her dolls, and playing with her little brother while their mother was at work.
At the age of 16, she spent a year in the Philippines as an exchange student, eating lumpia and pancit and hanging out with her barkada. She once ate lunch in a volcano, walked through rice paddies on her way to school every morning, and fell asleep every night to the sound of rustling bamboo outside her second-story windows and the scent of gardenias wafting up from the garden below.
After high school, she headed to Seattle for college, majoring in English literature and conservation of wildland resources. She worked at the Center for Urban Horticulture when she wasn’t filling in at her favorite coffee shop as a cook, doing promotional marketing for local bands, cleaning houses, or babysitting children of all ages.
She’s lived on the Makah Indian Nation above a bay filled with otters and whales, in a blue cottage with a pink sewing room, a purple cottage with a backyard overflowing with flowers, on an acre under a misty mountain, in a haunted yellow mansion overlooking the Columbia River, and in the Buttercup Cottage near the Goonies house before moving to Rosemary Hill in the Umpqua Valley of SW Oregon.
Rosemary Hill was supposed to be her forever home, where she had beehives, chickens, farm kitties, wonderful neighbors, and a deer named James. She was a Douglas County Master Gardener and treasurer of the Umpqua Valley Beekeepers Association, and was working toward opening a lavender farm, cutting garden, and building Rosemary Hill Gardens into a thriving home-based business.
In 2023, she lost everything. Now, with their 13th move in 27 years, Cynthia is now living in a very small town in eastern North Carolina, writing novels that will keep the spirit of Rosemary Hill alive forever.
At the age of 16, she spent a year in the Philippines as an exchange student, eating lumpia and pancit and hanging out with her barkada. She once ate lunch in a volcano, walked through rice paddies on her way to school every morning, and fell asleep every night to the sound of rustling bamboo outside her second-story windows and the scent of gardenias wafting up from the garden below.
After high school, she headed to Seattle for college, majoring in English literature and conservation of wildland resources. She worked at the Center for Urban Horticulture when she wasn’t filling in at her favorite coffee shop as a cook, doing promotional marketing for local bands, cleaning houses, or babysitting children of all ages.
She’s lived on the Makah Indian Nation above a bay filled with otters and whales, in a blue cottage with a pink sewing room, a purple cottage with a backyard overflowing with flowers, on an acre under a misty mountain, in a haunted yellow mansion overlooking the Columbia River, and in the Buttercup Cottage near the Goonies house before moving to Rosemary Hill in the Umpqua Valley of SW Oregon.
Rosemary Hill was supposed to be her forever home, where she had beehives, chickens, farm kitties, wonderful neighbors, and a deer named James. She was a Douglas County Master Gardener and treasurer of the Umpqua Valley Beekeepers Association, and was working toward opening a lavender farm, cutting garden, and building Rosemary Hill Gardens into a thriving home-based business.
In 2023, she lost everything. Now, with their 13th move in 27 years, Cynthia is now living in a very small town in eastern North Carolina, writing novels that will keep the spirit of Rosemary Hill alive forever.
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Clockwise: Cynthia caught her inner child in the dahlias (Swan Island Dahlias, Canby, Oregon); a perfect Lavender Dream latte at Gathering Grounds in Roseburg, Oregon; baby Buddha during happier times in the garden at Rosemary Hill, Umpqua Valley, Oregon; and a wonderful sign seen in an antique store near Canby, Oregon.
