Books, TV, and Sunday School

I was born in the early sixties, to bookish parents. My dad was in the military, so we moved a lot, taking our books with us.

The seventies have been characterized as a tumultuous time in America. The tumult entered my world in the form of grim pictures on the covers of Time and Newsweek. I guess my parents read these before leaving them to gather dust on the coffee table. I certainly didn’t read them. Instead, I eagerly ate up the humor and satire in the latest Mad magazine and whatever Archie comics I could lay my hands on. On TV, I watched All in the Family (a groundbreaking situation comedy which tackled controversial issues previously considered unsuitable for prime time) and Kung Fu (my personal favorite: a Shaolin monk travels through the American Old West coolly using martial arts to school bigots and other bad guys).

And Mom took me to church, where Sunday School teachers told stories about Abraham, Joseph, Jesus and the apostles.

My parents didn’t limit my media diet very much (though I was greatly affronted when they wouldn’t let me read The Exorcist, a book centering on the exorcism of demons from a twelve-year-old girl, when I was twelve. Let the record show that I was also prevented from reading The Catcher in the Rye). However, they knew that reading was a good thing. So, while my mother practiced annoyingly careful economy in almost every other category of spending, she allowed me to buy anything I wanted from the Scholastic catalog when it came time to place an order.

Scholastic Book Club

Remember the Scholastic book club?

The teacher gave every elementary student a two-page sales flyer with book covers and descriptions. You chose your books, filled out the order form, and brought the payment to class the following week. You waited agonizingly till the books arrived. And when they did you found that your stack was taller than anybody else’s. At least, if you were me you did.

Because my mom, who grew up in the Depression without a refrigerator, who clipped coupons obsessively, who hated having to buy us new clothes when we insisted on growing out of our old ones, valued reading. There were books and newspapers and magazines all over our house. Mom and Dad both seemed to do little else but read when they were at home. So, when I showed her that Scholastic flyer, Mom cast a desultory eye over my selections and put the appropriate amount of cash into an envelope with the usual warning: “Don’t lose it.”

When the books arrived, the stack on my desk included shiny paperbacks about witches, wild animals, historical figures, pirates, adventurers, scientists, clever children solving mysteries, dinosaurs, scientific children adventurously solving mysteries about dinosaurs. And lots of books about horses. I loved Harriet the Spy and the Ramona books because the protagonists were allowed to be grumpy and maybe not as clever as the children solving mysteries in the other books. You know, more like me.

L’Engle, Ingalls, Enright, The Living Bible

My tastes got more serious as I entered middle school: Gone-Away Lake, Little House on the Prairie, A Wrinkle in Time.

If you’re reading this, you’re already a fan of stories. You already know that reading creates worlds in a person’s mind. Each book is a door to a different world. Once you’ve read the book, you can return anytime in your imagination. Even today, I go back to the world of Portia Blake in Gone-Away Lake. Stories can go deep.

When I was in junior high, I told my mother I liked her new Bible, called The Living Bible. It was so much easier to read than the King James version. The following week, I had my own brand-new copy of The Living Bible, courtesy of Mom. Now the world of the Bible expanded. I could read stories about Jesus and picture them in my mind.

Conrad, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Heinlein, Rand

Fast forward to high school, where my literary tastes broadened. Advanced Placement literature classes took me to still more exotic locales. I went to Joseph Conrad’s Belgian Congo and James Joyce’s Dublin and Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg. In addition to atomizing the classics in school essays, I developed my own taste in literature, particularly the works of the popular science fiction pioneer Robert Heinlein and atheist philosopher Ayn Rand. By that time, I was perusing my father’s newsweeklies and his motorcycle magazines and something called The Whole Earth Catalog, with articles about countercultural products and ideas, a sort of nerdy hippie wish list for DIYers and proto-preppers. Sometimes I bought The Mother Earth News (a DIY back-to-the-land magazine) and read my sister’s copies of Seventeen magazine when she wasn’t looking, which contained articles like, “Dance away your flab!” and “Sew and knit for back-to-school.”

I also got myself a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. So there. To me, it is most memorable for what would be called today, its “voiciness.”

Missionary Biographies

Then I graduated from high school and left home and got married and had babies. I got more serious about my faith. I started reading Christian books. I devoured works like The Hiding Place (a biography of Corrie ten Boom, a Dutch watchmaker who hid Jews during the Holocaust); Shadow of the Almighty, Elisabeth Elliot’s account of her martyred husband Jim’s life; The Cross and the Switchblade (the harrowing tale of preacher David Wilkerson’s ministry to gang members in Brooklyn). These stories were testimonies to the power and goodness of God. I still refer back to them frequently, in my mind.

Children’s Classics

You’ve gotta read to your kids. I started paying attention to children’s books. I couldn’t afford to buy them new, so I combed thrift shops and library sales and picked up books that looked promising: The Wind in the Willows, Little Women, Winnie the Pooh. I had never read them, or even heard of them! I read them for myself as much as for the children.

As each child showed readiness, I introduced phonics. I worked with them one on one. What a blessing to be able to give them such a valuable gift! What a blessing to learn how people learn.

It wasn’t until my children were reading middle-grade books that I began seeking out classics for them. Homeschoolers had lists of classic literature for children, so for the first time, I read books like Anne of Green Gables, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Little Prince. All the while, I pondered the art of writing: how did these authors create such unique characters, such engaging dialogue, such absorbing plots?

The Lord of the Rings!

My homeschooling friends spoke about something called The Lord of the Rings as if everyone had read it. I had not. It was just so… long. At last, in my forties, I got tired of hearing people enthuse about it. So I read it. It was long. But it was great. I discovered the beauty of fantasy fiction.

The Lord of the Rings helped me visualize the battle between God and all other powers. It’s fiction, but it’s True. All the way to the climactic battle at the end. As I studied the Bible, it was telling me the same cosmic battle story, and God was inviting me to fight. I began to pray more.

I wrote Bible studies and published movie reviews. I wrote a blog in hopes of encouraging Christians in their faith.

Shakespeare!

When my kids were in high school, I began teaching a course on literature and composition at our co-op. The students needed Shakespeare. I girded up my loins and read my first Shakespeare play since Romeo and Juliet in freshman year: King Lear. It was heartbreaking. It was brilliant. I now watch each new adaptation and am destroyed every time.

I learned to tactfully, gently, respectfully, help the students improve their writing.

My Own Book: Bringing Mom Home

After I finished homeschooling, I headed to California to help my sister take care of our mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. While there, I earned a bachelor’s degree in Communication, focusing on literature and cross-cultural studies. I was able to zero in on classic literature like never before, to analyze the works of brilliant writers on a university level.

I watched a lot of movies with Mom, especially enjoying the director’s commentary, pondering the phenomena of memory, of story, of plot and characters and dialogue. Though movies are a visual medium, screenwriters use some of the same tools of storytelling that authors do. Movies, and books, are a series of scenes.

I began to think of my life as a series of scenes. As I cared for Mom, I wrote and published some of the more interesting life-scenes on Medium, just to process my own experiences. After my mother died, I expanded upon those scenes. In doing so, I found the theme of that period of my life: trust God and obey him, and he’ll not only be with you through it all. He will change you in the process.

This series of scenes became Bringing Mom Home: How Two Sisters Moved Their Mother Out of Assisted Living to Care For Her Under One Amazingly Large Roof.

I had read enough classic literature by this time to know what a good story looked like. But creating my own book was, to say the least, quite challenging. I persevered for my children. They needed to know what God had done for me. I read books and articles about the craft of writing. I finished my first draft and hired an editor. I made changes and sought out beta readers to give me fresh feedback. I made changes and had my manuscript proofread. I was ready to publish. Then my research into the publishing world revealed a heartbreaking truth: traditional publishers aren’t interested in memoirs unless they are by a famous person, or a person who has undergone something very dramatic or unusual.

So I had to learn about self-publishing.

Self-Publishing

You can hire people to do self-publishing tasks. But you have to pay them. A lot. I didn’t want to do that. So I did all I could myself. I wrote ad copy and a short bio, bought an ISBN, chose a trim size, and researched keywords. I paid someone to format my manuscript according to Amazon’s standards (and mine). All the blogs and podcasts and books strongly recommend hiring a cover designer, so I paid a designer and uploaded my shiny new book cover onto Amazon with all the other things. That's how I became a published author.

Sonship Mentoring

Also at this time, I signed up to be professionally mentored through a nine-month discipleship program called Sonship. This emotionally rigorous process changed my life. And it wouldn’t have been so powerful without the very specific one-on-one help my mentor gave me, an insight I would later find valuable.

Learning Grammar Through Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

Meanwhile, I had earned my English-teaching certification and would soon head to Eastern Europe to teach English to Lithuanian- and Russian- speakers. This certification, and my work with students, considerably upped my grammar game. I was forced to explain English grammar. My students wanted to know why English has so many tenses, and how do you know when to use a/an, the or no article? I researched, and gave them answers.

Solzhenitsyn and Tolstoy

During those two years of teaching, I had my own apartment on campus. When I wasn’t teaching or preparing lessons, I was cooking or cleaning or doing laundry. I discovered Librivox, and listened to lots of Tolstoy and classic Russian short stories. (And half of The Gulag Archipelago, the soul-crushing, almost-700-page account of Soviet work camps, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I got lost and couldn’t find my way back.) But Tolstoy –! I have many happy memories of ironing my air-dried clothes, the screenless windows wide open and the sun pouring in, and listening to volunteer readers narrate Anna Karenina and Resurrection, and my favorite, War and Peace. These stories were a deep dive into Truth. I came to the surface a changed person.

Author Accelerator Fiction Book Coaching

When I returned from Eastern Europe, I decided to become a book coach and, accordingly, signed up for Author Accelerator’s Fiction Book Coaching Certification. It turns out, a book coach working one-on-one with an author is similar to a mentor working one-on-one with a disciple. The commitment and accountability, the specific questions, and, most importantly, the willingness of the one being coached to open their mind and see things differently, leads to breakthrough.

One-on-one. Like the way my mentor worked with me. The way I worked with my children. Tailored to their needs.

Writing My Second Book

While working through Author Accelerator's curriculum and doing its practicums, I’ve begun a work of fiction. I’ve read more classics on the craft of writing. And I’ve spent more time than I thought possible watching YouTube videos and reading articles on creating believable characters, writing a killer first chapter, how to land an agent, etc. Will my new book encourage readers in their Christian faith? I hope so. Will it be well-written? I’m trying. My story matters. Not because it’s my story, but because I know God and can tell some of His story in mine.

And I definitely understand "the war of art." It's hard to get my story on the page in such a way that readers will receive it as I have received the many wonderful stories I have read.

I still have much to learn. But I definitely know more now about creating and publishing stories than I did even one year ago. Author Accelerator is laser-focused on training its coaches to help writers reach their goals.

Flannery O'Connor: Sometimes the Truth Isn't Pretty

As an adult, I discovered the works of Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic writer best known for gritty portrayals of hypocrites and charlatans. She is often embraced by Christians who love literary fiction as a writer with a firm grasp on the human condition on the one hand, and the grace of God on the other. Her stories are the very opposite of sentimental. Her short stories can be unexpectedly gory, but often contain an equally unexpected epiphany which redeems the violence.

O'Connor's work reminds me that the truth is frequently, though not always, ugly. The way I see it, telling the truth with fiction doesn't mean leaving out the gritty parts. It means balancing sin and brokenness with grace. If we are intentional, we can portray the human condition and deceitfulness of sin without provoking readers to sin. And we can include the eternal perspective so often missing in literature produced after the First World War.

Ironically, portraying life as it really is (Tolstoy's War and Peace), and people as they really are, (O'Connor's short stories), can open the way for a life-giving portrayal of grace.

Let’s Create Life-Giving Books That Will Outlast Their Authors

Tolstoy and O'Connor, Tolkien and Lewis are dead, but their work lives on. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia still portray the cosmic battle between God and all other powers, and invite readers to join God’s side and fight. My memoir isn’t as well-written and compelling as their work, but I’d love to think that there are people who have read Bringing Mom Home and were encouraged in their faith. Copies of my book are circulating out there, somewhere. Someone might pick up a copy, even after I’m dead, and my words will point them to Jesus. I find that possibility mind-boggling.

We will always need fresh memoirs and biographies to show us what God’s been up to recently

For almost sixty years, my life has been basically Jesus and my family and books. I have read and analyzed books, taught writing to groups and individuals of all ages, studied and practiced book coaching, and learned some things about the publishing industry. I want to use all my experiences, as a person of faith and as a reader and writer, to help like-minded people create their own life-giving books, telling the truth with all the excellence they can muster. Because stories are powerful.