SW: I have published a lot of essays and poems that respond to or engage with the Bible in direct and indirect ways, but this is the first project I've published that is positioned as a resource. Just about everything I've written previously has been nonfiction or autobiographical in nature; this book project required a lot of restraint to avoid interjecting my own personal experience, even my own opinion. It was a very different kind of writing.
HD: How did the project come to be? Could you describe your writing process?
SW: I wrote on a regular basis for an online column called "Off the Page," a publication of Discovery House, for a couple of years. The column offered a platform for engaging with the intersection of faith and everyday life. One day, the editors of the column reached out to me to talk about the possibility of writing a family devotional for them. It wasn't a project I had ever really thought about doing, but the more we talked, the more excited I got about the vision they had for the book and how it could work. I wrote a couple of sample entries. They liked them. And away we went!
Outside of my master's thesis, this was the first writing project I've had with a hard deadline. I began writing the book in May 2017 and had a due date of November 1, 2017. I knew that I needed to have some kind of structure and schedule to stay on target for the due date, and because I have a full-time job and a family, I would need to stick to my guns to get the work done. I tried to write two to three devotionals a week. The mornings are my time - I wake up usually around 5:45 or 6 and spend an hour or so working on writing projects, reading... or sometimes scrolling through Facebook. No one else is up at that hour in my house, so it's the best and most sacred time of day for me. That's when the majority of the work was done for the devotional.
I read several recent books on the Bible as I was writing and referenced a lot of support materials - the Strong's concordance for original Greek and Hebrew terms, Walter Brueggemann's book on the Old Testament, The Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill, The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns, and What Is the Bible? by Rob Bell, among other books and authors I've read and been influenced by over the last 18 years.
HD: Who is the target audience for the book?
SW: The target audience for this book is families with school-aged children, although one of my friends is using it with her 3-year-old and another with her 17-year-old, and both seem to be finding it beneficial for conversation starting. Beyond that specific age range, the idea for the book is to help people engage with the Bible in a way that is accessible and practical to our daily lives.
HD: What advice do you have for authors hoping to publish on similar subject matter?
SW: Everything you do, do with excellence. You never know what doors might open. I started writing for "Off the Page" because the editor there read my work in a literary journal. I published the essay in the literary journal after a decade of blogging and practicing writing. The journey is slow, but every step along the way is important.
HD: Do you have another project in the pipeline?
SW: I don't have another project like this one that I'm working on, but I have a full-length poetry manuscript, a memoir, and an essay collection I'm beginning to send out places. All three projects have been coming together the last couple of years, and I'm hoping to start making something of them!
