Today on Writer Wednesday we welcome Patti Callahan, author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis.
Enter below for a chance to win a copy of Becoming Mrs. Lewis! Congratulations to Cherie Gravette who won Heidi McCahan’s The Firefighter’s Twins! Please e-mail my assistant (hello{at}triciagoyer{dot}com) to claim your prize! Note: This post contains affiliate links.
Where I Write
When I first started writing, I took pen and pad to the dining room table. I didn’t even have a laptop at the beginning (in 2000). I really believe that finding a place of one’s own (channeling Virginia Woolf there) is imperative, even if it is a corner of the living room or an unused closet. To say, “This is where I write” is to invite a kind of reverence for what you are doing – WRITING!
Then my office moved to the basement of that same house. Since then, I have moved. Now my writing space is in the side sunroom of our house in Mountain Brook, Alabama. It is here that I keep my favorite things that inspire me and feed my imagination.
I have a bulletin board with my favorite quotes and photos that remind me of the story I am writing or the reasons I am working even when I am not motivated to work. I have artwork by kids. All my favorite books divided by category: signed; inspiring; research, etc. I’m so fortunate because I also have a little fireplace and in the winter I turn that thing on and it makes it so much easier to work when I have a cozy space. I don’t keep any family business (bills, etc) in this space.
Although I finished my last book – BECOMING MRS. LEWIS – over a year ago, I still have photos of Joy and Jack all over my office. They keep me company. But now I am adding photos and newspaper articles and books for my new book in 2020. This new one also requires a great amount of research and my back table is covered in books and xerox sheets from the Georgia History Center and the Ships of the Sea Museum.
I like to know that when I settle in for a day of work that I can find what I need without having to search the house or the files. Right now, I am looking down at my desk and I have my bullet journal with my list of things to do for the week. A list of goals. My journal for morning pages. A bottle of green juice. A pink stone that has the word JOY printed on it. My speech for next week (which I am practicing) and an extra pair of reading glasses.
My office is, in many ways, my sacred space – from drawings done by kids when they were young, to feathers (which I obsessively collect), stones, cards, crystals, and shells. I know I don’t need everything I have in here, but I most definitely want everything I have in here. None of it helps me write but it might help keep me sane and happy. Having this space dedicated to the craft leads me forward.
More about Becoming Mrs. Lewis
From New York Times bestselling author Patti Callahan comes an exquisite novel of Joy Davidman, the woman C. S. Lewis called “my whole world.” When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.
In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.
At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.
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Patti Callahan Henry is a New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, including the upcoming BECOMING MRS. LEWIS – The Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis. A finalist in the Townsend Prize for Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, an OKRA pick, and a multiple nominee for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Novel of the Year, Patti is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs, and women’s groups.
New York Times bestselling author of Losing the Moon, Between the Tides; Where the River Runs; When Light Breaks; Between the Tides; The Art of Keeping Secrets; Driftwood Summer; The Perfect Love Song: A Holiday Story; Coming Up for Air; And Then I Found You; The Stories We Tell; The Idea of Love, The Bookshop at Water’s End and Becoming Mrs. Lewis.
A finalist in the Townsend Prize for Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, an OKRA pick, and a multiple nominee for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Novel of the Year, Patti is published in numerous languages. Her articles and essays have appeared in Southern Living, PINK, Writer’s Digest, Portico Magazine, Birmingham Magazine and more.
Her essays can also be found in anthologies and collections such as Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy; Southern Writers Writing, and State of the Heart. Patti is a frequent speaker at luncheons, book clubs, and women’s groups.
Growing up in Philadelphia as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Patti learned early the value of storytelling. At the age of twelve, her family moved to South Florida where Patti found the sanctuary of libraries and began her slow but steady journey into understanding the power of story to navigate confusing times in life.
Patti attended Auburn University for her undergraduate work and Georgia State University for her graduate degree. Once a Pediatric Clinical Nurse Specialist, she now writes full time. The mother of three children, she now lives in both Mountain Brook, Alabama and Bluffton, South Carolina with her husband.
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