Jen Gilroy

Photo Credit: Sue Phelps Photography

Blogging at Fresh Fiction

Jen Gilroy | My favorite fireside reads for the holidays
December 12, 2017
For me, winter—and the holidays in particular—is the coziest time of year. During these cold months, I return to comfort reads—the books  Read More...

Jen Gilroy: The top 5 challenges of writing small town romantic women’s fiction
August 18, 2017
I write in the area between romance and women’s fiction. I’ve been a romance reader since my teens, and most of my favorite  Read More...

Growing up under the big sky of western Canada and spending summers in a little Ontario town, books were my passport to other worlds. Pioneering Laura Ingalls, Jo March and her sisters, the English girls in Noel Streatfeild’s books and L.M. Montgomery’s independent, nature-loving heroines all became friends.

I started writing poems and stories in elementary school and, as a teenager, reached the semi-finals in a local short story contest. Even after all these years, I still remember the thrill of the judge encouraging me to keep writing.

Then life and work intervened, and I set aside the craft of fiction to study, teach and, most recently, work in marketing communications and international business development.

Along the way, though, I read romances and women’s fiction, escaping into a world where characters grew and changed their lives for the better and found happy endings. And one day, I realized that by losing my creative writing, I’d also lost part of what makes me who I am.

Now I write the kind of stories I like to read–heartwarming romances about finding home, family and community–where ordinary women overcome sometimes extraordinary challenges to earn their happy ever after.

I’m an RWA® Golden Heart® finalist 2015 in Contemporary Romance, and that manuscript sold to Hachette Book Group USA, Grand Central Publishing, Forever. It was published on January 31, 2017 as THE COTTAGE AT FIREFLY LAKE. Two more books follow in the Firefly Lake series—SUMMER ON FIREFLY LAKE (July 25, 2017) and BACK HOME AT FIREFLY LAKE (December 2017).

After many years in England with my husband, a tech guy who’s still a small-town boy at heart, and our teen daughter, an English rose, who teaches me to cherish the blessings in the everyday, I’ve come home to my roots and live and write in a small town in Ontario’s Rideau Valley.

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