unpacking

Highlights from the 2006 Festival of Faith and Writing:

“If God could shape Adam out of mud and Eve out of thin bone, what might he do with each of us?”
Luci Shaw

“A creative gift is not an ‘or.’ It is a need.”
Debbie Reinstra, author of Great with Child

“Don’t write from an empty life. Write from a crazyfulloverflowingspillingoutonthefloor kind of life. It may be the only life you get.”
Leslie Leyland Fields, author of Surprise Child

In the United States, there are approximately 250 people who make a living writing books full time.
Author’s Guild Statistic

“All creation is an act of faith.”
Alice McDermott, author of Charming Billy

“Reading ‘unfits’ a person to be a slave.”
Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God

“When Christ says leave your family, that’s harsh. When Juliet says it, it’s beautiful. We need to put the text back in the context of the narrative of Love.”
Don Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz

“Who you are writing for should always be present in your mind. The question is, are you writing to please them, or to serve them?”
Michael Card, author and recording artist

“The idea that the real world is realistic is absurd.”
Salman Rushdie, yes, THAT Salman Rushdie

“At the core of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses is this question: Who shall have the power over the stories we tell ourselves about the way we live?”
Salman Rushdie

“There is a wistful certainty in most young writers that they cannot ascend to the highest level of their art, in part because of a lack of confidence in the reader.”
Marilynne Robinson, author of Pulitzer award-winning Gilead

“We have a tendency as mothers to live as if our personal lives are on pause. Life is not on pause. It is on play. We need to live in the now.”
Yours truly, at a forum for mothers of young children

“It is more important to believe you can rewrite than it is to believe you can write.”
Ellen Kushner, author and “Sound and Spirit” program host on PRI

“If you lie, you drive back into hiding that which God would call into the sunlight…you are the voice in the wilderness to someone. If you are to be that voice, you must tell the truth, even if it means you bleed to write it truthfully.”
Walter Wangerin Jr., author of The Ragman