A unique author challenge

At the end of this week, I will be facing yet another interesting challenge in my writing and speaking journey. I will spend four hours in front of four classes of high school students, one after the other! What’s more, they are each from different years, with the classes varying in size from twenty-five students to fifty. Yes, I was a high school teacher at one stage—but that was many years ago now!

The school I will visit is a Christian school in a large country town here in New South Wales, Australia, and I readily agreed to the idea when my contact in that town suggested it. At first, I was to give a one-hour workshop to two smallish groups of the more gifted writers—the first group from the younger classes and the second from the older. Then we decided on a two-hour workshop, involving more creative writing, with these same two groups. Now the concept has changed entirely. I have all students in these years—gifted and perhaps less gifted, interested and uninterested, lovers of English, haters of English!

Yet, despite the shape my input has now become, I would not turn this opportunity down for anything. Firstly, who knows who will be in one of those groups of students? Perhaps there will be some young people present who are voracious readers, who secretly love to write poetry or short stories and who one day dream of being published. Perhaps, like me in my early years, they do not quite believe such things ever happen to ordinary people like them.

Secondly, even if there are no such young people in these groups, I want to share my story with them of how I came to understand who Jesus is and believe in him at around the same age as many of them are and how this experience has motivated me ever since to be who God has called me to be and do what God has called me to do. I want to tell them about how God spoke to me through a passage of Scripture eleven years ago—and my writing journey began. I want to encourage them not to give up on their dreams. I want to remind them that each of them is unique and creative in some way because each of us is made in the image of our creative God.

And thirdly, I want to inspire them to write from the depths of their being and from their own experiences. I want them to think about the things they see and hear and touch and taste and smell all around them and write with imagination, originality and colour. Yes, I hope to give them a few pointers about good first paragraphs, about ‘showing’ rather than ‘telling’, about using dialogue and about so many other things. And yes, I will ask them to do some brief creative writing exercises. But I want them to enjoy the process and to realise no one else sees things quite the way they do and that they have something to say—even if others might say it better.

I hope I succeed. I am looking forward to the challenge! Have any of you experienced similar challenges to this in your writing journey?

Jo-Anne Berthelsen lives in Sydney, Australia. She holds degrees in Arts and Theology and has worked as a high school teacher, editor and secretary, as well as in local church ministry. Jo-Anne is passionate about touching hearts and lives through both the written and spoken word. She is the author of six published novels and one non-fiction work, Soul Friend: the story of a shared spiritual journey. Jo-Anne is married to a retired minister and has three grown-up children and four grandchildren. For more information, please visit www.jo-anneberthelsen.com.

An unexpected outcome

Early last year, I received a friend request on Facebook from someone whose name had been mentioned to me by a mutual friend. This mutual friend had given my new Facebook friend Jo a copy of my memoir Soul Friend for Christmas and she had apparently loved it. Jo and I conversed briefly via Facebook from time to time as she began sending me little comments about my weekly blogs and I soon saw we were on the same wavelength in so many ways. At one stage, she told me how, after reading Soul Friend, she decided to check out some of the books I had quoted or referred to there. Then from time to time, she would post little snippets she particularly liked from these on Facebook and I would always click the ‘Like’ button! It was uncanny how many of the passages she chose were my favourites too!

Recently, I read on Facebook that she and her husband had purchased a beautiful property in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney be used for holidays and retreats and had named it ‘Dadirri’. From the photos, I could see it was a large, tastefully furnished house, surrounded by trees and close to excellent bushwalks. Then just yesterday, Jo messaged me to tell me the story of how this beautiful home had become theirs and why they had chosen the name ‘Dadirri’.

It turned out that she and her husband had long wanted to buy such a property and make it available for retreats for those seeking to be quiet and be refreshed by God. Then one day last year, after stumbling across this house and noting it was for sale, Jo sat down to continue reading the book Lost in Wonder by Esther de Waal—one of those I had quoted in my own book Soul Friend. There she discovered the word ‘dadirri’, an Australian Aboriginal word for deep silence or ‘the open-eyedness of someone who explores where he or she has always belonged’ (p 43) and read how the Christian aboriginal artist, Miriam-Rose Ungummer, describes it ‘tapping into a deep spring that is within us all’. This confirmed to Jo and her husband that God intended them to have that particular property and that its name was to be ‘Dadirri’.

They immediately made an offer and the owners asked to meet them. Jo and her husband discovered this elderly couple were Christians and were having a hard time letting their beautiful property go. But on hearing that Jo and her husband were also Christians, the owners were overjoyed and the deal was soon done.

Jo purposely shared this story with me to show me how my little book had played such a vital part in her family’s dream of seeing a retreat house become reality. Through Soul Friend, she discovered Lost in Wonder. And from that book came the wonderful, meaningful name they chose—‘Dadirri’. A further lovely aside to this story is that my own dear ‘soul friend’ Joy, who inspired my book, lives in the Blue Mountains herself, not far from where ‘Dadirri’ is located!

May this story encourage and inspire you all, as you begin another writing year. When we commit our books to the Lord, be they fiction or non-fiction, God can certainly use them in wonderful and unique ways we could never ever have dreamt up in any plot!

Jo-Anne Berthelsen lives in Sydney but grew up in Brisbane. She holds degrees in Arts and Theology and has worked as a high school teacher, editor and secretary, as well as in local church ministry. Jo-Anne is passionate about touching hearts and lives through both the written and spoken word. She is the author of six published novels and one non-fiction work, Soul Friend: the story of a shared spiritual journey. Jo-Anne is married to a retired minister and has three grown-up children and three grandchildren. For more information, please visit www.jo-anneberthelsen.com or www.soulfriend.com.au.