December 6, 2005 7:30 PM
Wrestling with and Writing from the Heart
“Each of us has been given a gift and when we do not use it we will be filled with despair.” Thus author Jan Karon speaks of what moved her to leave a successful advertising career to move back to a small town in her home state and begin writing her bestselling Mitford series of novels.
Profiling a way of life—“reasonable, moral and strong”—that Karon asserts can still be found all over the country, the Mitford series documents ten years in the later life of Father Tim Kavanaugh, an Episcopal priest. “There is something about the spark of this man that is already vanishing under our nose,” she says. “I wanted to get it out and look at it before it disappears.”
Those who gathered were inspired by a woman who wrote her first novel at age ten and then ignored her calling until forty-one years later. Karon recounted her struggles to trust that God would lead her in the right direction, even in the face of publishers’ rejections and her own belief that she was writing the wrong kind of book.
Even now, in her success, Karon says, writing is not always easy. “It’s a battle I must fight daily. Life is the most interfering obligation.” But one gets momentum, she says. “You’ve been lumbering along like an elephant, and suddenly you can run. You get a little lift and you take off.”
Of herself, Karon says, “I just write from the heart. I’ve never thought of myself as a regional writer or a southern writer or a Christian writer. I am a Christian who writes.”