Last week I attended the Writing for the Soul (WftS) conference in Colorado Springs, Colo. Every year Jerry B. Jenkins and his Christian Writers Guild convene a group of writers, from the very accomplished to beginners. The point is to educate, encourage and empower writers who are
Read more →My Mom would be 70 years old today. That seems old. I can only picture her as young–probably because she died at 46. In the prime of life, with a full head of thick brown waves, sparkling green eyes and a radiance that suggested she might be
Read more →Generation X is sometimes dubbed ‘The Divorce Generation.’ We were children of an era plagued by divorce. A new report on divorce’s impact on faith says Gen X children of divorce “form a kind of broken leading edge, with spiritual stories quite often characterized by loss or
Read more →My parents divorced when I was 9 years old. Most of my memories of them together involve quarreling. Pointless squabbles peppered with mean words and pulsing forehead veins. Their unnecessary war made me feel unsafe. I wasn’t sure where the enemy lines were drawn. Nor did I
Read more →One of my goals for the new year is to read more e-books. Not just books–stacks of them line my desk, nightstand, bathroom. I even borrow my children’s library books. Bedtime stories are balm to a mother’s day-worn soul. Holding books, seeing and smelling them; this is
Read more →A 23-year-old woman who was gang-raped in New Delhi Dec. 16 passed away last week due to injuries she sustained during the attack. The details are so vile—and so well-reported by news organizations—I won’t elaborate. If you need background, see the links below. A warning: If you’re
Read more →I’m working on a book proposal and looking for potential sources to interview. My proposal is focused on women who have brutal first brushes with motherhood. That includes anything along the lines of: a difficult pregnancy or complicated birth postpartum depression/anxiety, postpartum post-traumatic stress disorder, postpartum obsessive-compulsive
Read more →My family and I are vacationing in Colorado, and today we climbed Pikes Peak. Our Jeep did the actual climbing. But we successfully steered the vehicle skyward, to the mountain’s 14,115-foot summit. The 19-mile drive demands a stealthy crawl in low gear, up an increasingly steep two-lane
Read more →Mom had more faith than anyone I’ve met. Unshakable faith in Christ, really. I was reminded of that recently, as I rifled through a box of nearly forgotten items from my childhood. I landed on an autograph book, a gift for my tenth birthday. Among the few
Read more →I have five best friends. My husband, my sister, and three women–college friends–I’ve known for about 20 years. One of those three women, Nina, moved away from Chicagoland last month. Her husband landed a gig in Silicon Valley, so they packed up their kids, their lives and
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