Hello, friends! My name is Lanier Ivester, and I’m so glad you’re here!
Welcome to this quiet corner of the web, where I celebrate all things bookish, garden-related, home-keeping and wander-loving. I am a wife, a writer, a student, a sailor, and a follower of Christ. (I am also terrible at chess, tennis, and anything else requiring mental or physical agility, but I play a mean game of backgammon.)
When I was eight years old I discovered an old typewriter in my parents’ storage house, which I hauled out and set up on my blue and white desk and promptly began work on the next Great American Novel. (Don’t look for it in the stores—it was replaced by a historical epic set in the colonial West Indies. And that one eventually gave way to the inevitable Gothic romance complete with indecipherable Scottish dialect…) I’ve literally been writing ever since, though I’ve upgraded to a laptop (and, no, I don’t type much better than I did when I was eight) and traded in (most of) my ‘high-faluting mumbo-jumbo’ for a rapturous chronicle of the Beauty and Truth and Goodness of the God of my life.
I’m a recovering perfectionist, an erstwhile teacher of classical ballet and a devotee of Very Long Walks, especially with my Australian shepherd Bonnie Blue. A Southern girl, through and through, I nevertheless adore English literature, English tea, English soil. I collect memories and colloquialisms and old books and cats (real ones) and things for my hair that don’t do what they say they will do. My guilty pleasures are ghost stories and Quaker Instant grits, and vintage clothing is my vice–as is a tendency to worry first and ask questions later. I hand-bind books, and run an online bookstore, specializing in titles from a gentler era.
In 1999 I married my beloved Philip, and we’ve been living out our dreams ever since in an 1850’s farmhouse in the beautiful state of Georgia, ‘content to be in Christ together’. At last count our continually-expanding family included two dogs, four cats, four Nubian goats, six Pineywoods sheep, 22 hens, a rooster named Chanticleer (and a junior rooster named Diggory), nine Blue Swedish ducks, ten thousand Italian honeybees, and two of the most pampered peacocks on the planet. If you don’t find me around here I’m probably busy in the bookshop, the barn or the garden. Or having tea in the back yard with my husband. Or out tramping somewhere in our 1962 Airstream.
Or scribbling madly, in pursuit of that perfect word.
Under the Mercy,
Lanier