Welcome
My mother, Yvonne Lehman, and I had many conversations prior to her passing in 2021 about whether she should keep her website or not. She didn’t necessarily need one – she had contracts with several publishers, all stemming from her reputation as a prolific author with a writing career that spanned 60 years. So, when health issues started to demand her attention, she let her domain expire. Her website was too much work. Instead, my mother wanted to put her energies into restoring her health and writing her stories. But she left this world with work unfinished.
I, too, have questioned whether or not I need a website. My work as a mentor, editor, and screenwriter has always come by word of mouth. But after spending the past year sorting and organizing a lifetime of my mother’s writings, opportunities have arisen that I simply must share. So, I have decided to create this website, not only for myself, but for my mother, for her loyal readers, and the writing community she served so passionately!
This forum is also a place to pay homage to my mother. Because of her, I can define myself as a writer, a mentor, an editor, an encourager, a teacher, a screenwriter, and a Christian. I recognize the calling God had for my mother’s life is identical to my own – to write for His glory regardless of the outcome – and I have humbly picked up her mantle. Using Yvonne Lehman’s legacy as a model for my life, I will continue the work she started.
But now God requires I create a legacy of my own.
Lori Marett
Romancing the South
Iron Stream Media honors the South’s beloved author Yvonne Lehman with daughter, Lori Marett, and author Eva Marie Everson
At the passing of my mother, publishers, agents and authors reached out to me to express their deepest sympathies. Iron Stream Media, who at that time had a working contract for my mother’s latest novel, also shared their condolences. Because her death was unexpected, and her novel incomplete, Iron Stream came up with a creative way to honor her and her work while fulfilling the contract. They suggested that I and Eva Marie Everson (award-winning author and a dear friend to me and my mom) reprise two of my mother’s earliest published works, Smoky Mountain Sunrise (1984) and Somewhere a Rainbow (1999) for an omnibus edition. Eva and I carefully ushered these two novels into the 2020s while marveling at how much this world has changed, politically, culturally, and technologically since these novels were first written – just the addition of cell phones impacted several plot lines in both novels! So, in this new collection titled Romancing the South, you’ll find two heart-warming stories of tragedy and devotion redeemed by love, revealing that while love often breaks the heart, it’s also what heals and mends it again.
Romancing the South is available at your favorite online book retailer!
In Somewhere a Rainbow, Brooke faces the challenge of rebuilding her life after her unfaithful husband is killed in an auto accident. With most of her money gone, she takes her five-year-old son to Hilton Head Island—to a cottage almost as broken down as her life. When carpenter Jake Randolph offers to help, Brooke immediately distrusts him, but as the months pass, he begins to melt the emotional ice around her heart. Then Jake reveals he’s concealing a secret past and Brooke’s hope of a brighter future is destroyed. Or is there a rainbow beyond the storms of heartbreak?
In Smoky Mountain Sunrise, Ramona Martin agrees to be dashing Andre Doudet’s girl for a summer in the incomparable Smoky Mountains. What possible harm could it do? But when she finds herself caught in a web of deceit, Ramona comes face-to-face with some of the most challenging tests of her life—as an athlete, as a woman in love, and as a Christian. Is posing as Andre’s girlfriend a game worth winning?
