Seasons: Watching Leaves Change in Adventist Publishing and My Writing Career
My first published work was a poem called “Seasons Four” in the pages of Our Little Friend when I was nine years old. It appeared not in a special corner set aside for children’s writing, but on an illustrated full page spread, as if I were a “real” writer.
Like many North American Seventh-day Adventists in the 70s and 80s, my reading life followed a well-worn path from Our Little Friend and Primary Treasure to Guide and Insight. In church school, my teacher read Swift Arrow aloud to the class, and at home my reading broadened to not just include Uncle Arthur’s Bedtime Stories, but also Anne of Green Gables, Harriet the Spy, and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Despite the eclectic bookshelves of my childhood, when I imagined being a published writer—which I did, constantly—I thought, first, of church periodicals and publishing houses. My early publishing credits followed the same trajectory as my Sabbath School reading: from Our Little Friend to Insight. My first novel, All My Love, Kate, was released by Review and Herald Publishing Association in 1986, as I completed my senior year at Andrews University.
Two Esthers
Fifteen years later, I was a teacher on maternity leave with a baby and a toddler, determined to defy the dire predictions of other women writers who told me “You won’t be able to write anything while your kids are small.” I was still writing for Adventist periodicals, and had published eight books, mostly for young adult readers, with Review and Herald.
I was also eager to publish outside the church. Throughout the 90s I submitted short stories to small literary magazines, gaining an impressive collection of rejection slips along with a handful of published stories. Two urges motivated me: the desire to prove myself in a more competitive market, and the need to tell stories that did not fit neatly on the Adventist Book Centre’s (ABC) shelves.
Years earlier, in a college literature class, I had written a paper on 18th-century Irish author and satirist Jonathan Swift’s complicated relationship with a woman named Esther Johnson. That paper became the seed of my first historical novel, The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson, which won a Best Unpublished Novel award in 2000 and was released by Penguin Books Canada in 2006. It was my first major piece of work published outside the Adventist world.
My favourite part of that project—other than dreaming that a contract with a big-name publisher would lead to instant fame, which did not happen—was giving voice to a woman from the past whose words had been silenced. Swift probably destroyed Johnson’s papers, letters, journals, and poetry after her death. No scholarship could restore her lost words, but writing fiction allowed me to imagine who she might have been.
Once I began thinking about women’s lost and silenced voices, I realized that of all the places in history and literature where women lurk, wordless, around the edges of familiar stories, the Bible contains some of the most striking silences.
While The Violent Friendship of Esther Johnson was on its long road to publication, my thoughts turned to the other Esther—the one I’d loved since Uncle Arthur’s Bible Story, the brave Jewish girl who saved her people. The book of Esther is sometimes noted for the absence of any mention of God, but there is also a surprising absence of Esther’s own voice in the book that bears her name. In the ten chapters consisting of 167 verses, only eleven verses contain words attributed to Queen Esther.
Filling in the Gaps
In writing about both Esthers, I was learning the craft of the genre I most enjoyed reading: historical fiction. I experimented with how and when to add the voices, the scenes, and the colour that both biblical and historical records often left out of the story.
For example, I said above that Swift probably destroyed Johnson’s writings. History only records that she left her papers to him in her will, and almost none of them survive. His letters to her were published; her replies disappeared.
A historian might speculate that Swift got rid of Johnson’s work, but a novelist can write the scene. A lonely, grieving man sits alone in a room, reading the pages on which a woman he loved recorded her hopes, her pain, her anger. Then, doing what he believes best for her reputation—and his own—he feeds the pages one by one into the fireplace.
In a similar way, I searched the gaps between history and the Bible story for Queen Esther. Who was she before she saved her people, and what might her life have been like after? The Greek historian Herodotus, our best source on the life of Persian King Xerxes I, records that Xerxes had a wife named Amestris, but no wife named Esther or Vashti. But I knew that Xerxes’s father Darius had at least six wives, and I remembered King Solomon’s legendary 700 wives and 300 concubines. I imagined Esther as one of a network of wives and concubines living in the closed yet busy world of the harem. I read about harems, imagining the other women she knew there, their friendships and rivalries.
In the years following these two Esthers, I have written more fiction illuminating both biblical and secular history. I am surprised these stories have not met with more resistance, either from biblical literalists or historical purists. I can only assume that readers who pick up books labelled as historical fiction—or “biblical narratives,” as Review and Herald catalogued my books, to avoid the word “fiction”—are prepared for some imaginative elements.
Writers of historical fiction have different approaches to their craft: to how much “embellishing” of history they are willing to do. My personal guideline is that I will write many things that probably did not happen, but I try never to write anything that could not have happened. I aim to keep my characters’ stories coherent with the time and place in which they lived, and with the major historical events they lived through.
As a reader of historical fiction I can accept writers fabricating conversations, motives, and even entire characters that history does not record, but the anachronism of a scene set in my hometown in 1916, on a street that I know didn’t exist at that date, pushes me right out of the story.
My aim is not to push readers out but to draw them in. Listen: this is the world we know existed in a particular time and place. Now meet this woman who lives there, whose voice you have never heard.
Autumn House
My interest in retelling biblical women’s stories was timely: such stories were selling well in the wider world dugin the late 90s and early 2000s. Some writers stayed faithful to the biblical accounts (like Francine Rivers in her Lineage of Grace series), and other authors (like Anita Diamant in The Red Tent) subverted tradition.
The Adventist publishing world paid attention. When I approached Review and Herald with the idea of a novel about Queen Esther, they were enthusiastic. I worked with Penny Wheeler—who had been one of my favorite Adventist writers before she became my favorite editor—and her husband, editor Gerald Wheeler, and acquisitions editor Jeannette Johnson. Our collaboration, beginning with Esther: A Story of Courage in 2003, continued through Deborah and Barak: If God Be With Us (2006), and on to Lydia: A Story of Philippi (2010).
Editors and executives at Review and Herald were refreshingly open to new ideas during those years. Not only did all my book pitches receive green lights, they led to further opportunities.
I was invited to write a monthly column, each one focusing on a biblical woman, for the Adventist Women of Spirit magazine. Some of those columns were later collected in a gorgeously illustrated book, Daughters of Grace. Review and Herald asked me to write two volumes of a planned series of Christmas gift books, focusing on characters in the Christmas story. I got the go-ahead for Sunrise Hope, a contemporary novel that did not even have the veneer of a Bible story to disguise its fictional nature.
Despite my success, it was not all smooth sailing—there were challenges too. With Esther: A Story of Courage I wanted to get as close to the edge of ABC-appropriateness as possible in depicting harem life. No graphic scenes, of course, but I wanted to make it clear that Esther’s experience was closer to that of a victim of sex trafficking than that of a beauty pageant contestant.
Wheeler pushed back gently. She understood my desire to make Esther’s story feel authentic, but she was also aware that teenaged Adventist readers and their parents expected books on the ABC shelves to be “safe.” After many discussions, I cut or toned down a few scenes that were, while by no means scandalous, a little too PG.
Besides the occasional reminder to stay within the standards of what Adventist readers expected, editing was never heavy-handed. I was given generous resources, such as the services of iconic Adventist scholar Dr. Leona Glidden Running, then in her late 80s, as a historical consultant on Esther. Those years between writing Esther and releasing Lydia: A Story of Philippi felt like a spring season of blossoming opportunities.
This was not just my private good fortune. Review and Herald had published books inspired by Bible characters and stories for years. I wore out my childhood copy of Lois M. Parker’s Princess of the Two Lands (1975) from repeated readings. But books of this type exploded on ABC shelves in the first decade of the 2000s. Patty Froese Ntihemuka’s The Woman at the Well, Mary & Martha, and Zaccheus came out in quick succession. Terri Fivash followed up her popular Joseph and Ruth & Boaz with the first volumes of a projected multi-book series on King David. Pacific Press Publishing Association released similar books during these years.
Many Review and Herald books in this period, including some of mine, appeared under the imprint “Autumn House.” The publisher hoped that these books might make the leap into general Christian bookstores. At the time, this felt forward-thinking and optimistic, but in retrospect, the name of the new imprint seems like an omen. The leaves were already beginning to fall.
Closing Doors
The story of the 2014 closure of Review and Herald Publishing Association as an independent entity is a story of business and church politics that I have neither the knowledge, nor space in this article, to explore in detail. I only know how those final years felt to me as a writer.
The last book I pitched to Review and Herald was not about a biblical woman, but a biblical man who intrigued me. You could not say James the brother of Jesus was silent in the Scriptures—he gets a whole book in the New Testament—but he remains shadowy. There is no narrative to explain his transformation from skeptic to leader of the post-resurrection Christian community. When I told Johnson I wanted to write a novel about James, she gave me the same enthusiastic response I had received for all the previous books.
When I submitted the manuscript months later, the atmosphere had chilled. I had not signed a contract for the book, but I had proceeded on the usual understanding that the publisher was interested and would be happy to see the finished product. Suddenly, everyone I talked to was evasive. I sat through a long phone call from a new Review and Herald vice-president with whom I had never spoken. By the time the call ended, I understood that they were pulling back on “biblical narratives” and that my book on James would not be accepted for publication. About that same time, my series of books based on characters in the Christmas story was also cancelled.
For a decade, doors had been opening for me and my projects at Review and Herald. With that phone call, a door seemed to be closing—not just on a chapter in my writing career, but on a period of openness and creativity in the church’s publishing business.
Pacific Press eventually picked up James, the Brother of Jesus and released it in 2011. I was proud of the book, but it felt like the culmination, rather than the continuation, of my career as an Adventist writer.
By the time Review and Herald book publishing was officially merged with Pacific Press a few years later, it was clear to me that the publishing house was not continuing either the Autumn House imprint, or the vision that had led to its launch. Fewer and fewer “narratives” appeared in each year’s ABC catalogue. Fivash self-published the later volumes of her Dahveed series; Patty Ntihemuka began writing Christian romance for Harlequin Enterprises. Some writers who had released one or two books during the “Autumn House” era never published again. Church publishing refocused almost exclusively on non-fiction books, which may have been more acceptable to conservative Adventist readers.
Doors close and doors open. My own writing career grew in many directions between 2000 and 2011. While fame and fortune never materialized, I developed a steady relationship with a regional press, Breakwater Books, publishing historical fiction rooted in the place where I lived.
As I had done with Bible stories, I was now exploring corners of Newfoundland, Canada history where women’s stories had been ignored or silenced. I wove real-life people and events into the stories of my fictional characters, mining not only documented local history, but also my own family stories for fragments of detail that brought the past to life. I have been fortunate to find a local reading community that embraces my books—even when I have heard from descendants of real people I have used in my fiction, their response has—so far—always been positive.
I look back on the writing I did within the Adventist world with satisfaction. Despite the “cringe factor” most writers associate with their early efforts, I consider Esther, Deborah & Barak, Lydia, and James some of my best work. Writing those novels taught me how to write historical fiction, which turned out to be the love of my (literary) life.
If Adventist publishing had continued to move in a more expansive, risk-taking direction, would I still be writing for church markets alongside my other historical fiction? It is hard to say. In order for me to write a novel, something has to pique my curiosity—and since James, no other biblical story has yet caught my attention in that way.
Maybe, as I grew older and continued to love my church but disagree with its leadership on more points, I might have been less comfortable with an Adventist imprint on my books. Perhaps my transition away from writing for the ABC market would have happened regardless of changes in the publishing business. I will never know for sure.
What I do believe is that if the openness that I found at Review and Herald in the early 2000s had continued, not just in publishing, but in other areas of church life, the Adventist church today would be a better, more forward-looking institution. It might also be a church with a more effective and relevant outreach to a changing world.
