It's been a glorious week of unusually warm and dry spring weather. I have been trying to capitalize on it, since I hadn't had the chance to finish the yard before it froze last fall. It's hard to stay focused, with many distractions of plans and kids and dawdling filling the last few days. The weekend calls for rain for the next few days, and that'll be easier to justify writing when the days are wet.
What inspired me yesterday, though, was a series of audiobooks that I may have read as a youth by a prolific Christian writer from Alberta named Janette Oke. She had humble beginnings, being born in a log cabin and educated in a one room school. These are the western pioneer realities that gave rise to many of her stories.
She and her pastor husband worked in Alberta and Indiana. In researching this blogpost, I saw that she retired in 2002 at the age of 67 and in concert with her husband's retirement. This meant that her writing career, that started when her family was grown, and ended when her husband's career was over, seemed even more impressive given that her books were written in the span of 35 years!
I had looked in my library and online over the years, and I never found her books, although she has written over 75. This recently changed due to a Covid "gift" when I was browsing an online borrowing app on my phone that is supported by my library. I found that it includes two of her book series that I recognized from the church library, or my mother's personal collection, growing up, and most importantly, several in audiobooks, so that I can listen and still get the day's work done.
I may have read the Seasons of the Heart series before, and I never did get into the Acts of Faith that I remember seeing (historical fiction before pioneer days never peaked my interest). Most recently, however, the CBC tv channel had a series called When Calls the Heart based on the Canadian West series, strangely named given it was about about a teacher named Miss Thatcher from big town Hamilton and society life who learns to love it in the mining town romantically named Hope Valley, Yukon.
I have my issues with the relentless church language that inevitably pops up, and the whitewashed Hallmark channel who have made cringe-worthy but few real efforts to improve their formula, but I have my soft spots too. Oke was one of the "clean" romance novelists I was allowed to read as a child, and the alternatives are certainly bad in other ways that were just as contrived. Her fantasies can have their own issues, and the genre of Christian romance left much of the reality out of relationships. Christians around me didn't have much of a discussion about grey areas outside of marriage, and the idealism of these stories didn't help start the conversation. The male led church hierarchy, the martyr complexes (self-effacement to the obliteration of the ego leads to all sorts of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde scenarios), and the nearly predatory focus"bringing [vulnerable children] into the fold" have to be voiced as cautions to reading this type of literature.
Yesterday I borrowed a book from the Prairie Legacy books, about a young girl learning the difference between right and wrong. It's a sweet read, if not a little simple, but it inspired me to write about some characters that I haven't thought about in a long while.
My daughter thinks that I am mistaken to write something new when I haven't finished something old, but I think that I need to go where the spirit leads. Clearly, Janette Oke made no excuses for her writing a new idea. Thank goodness she didn't listen to feedback by a writing course representative that she "wasn't reading enough". At the time, she had admitted that she didn't have nearly as much time for reading as she would like, but while keeping track, would find herself reading over 100 books a year!
She has a surprising career that began 20 years after she married, at the age of 42, in 1977. She wrote down a story she had been thinking about for months. She actually took writing aptitude tests and this encouraged her. Her kids were teens, and somehow, as a pastor's wife, she made time to read and write. It took her three weeks to write her first story. After a first rejection, and months of research, she was invited to submit the manuscript, and published her first book 2 years later. It was called Love Comes Softly, and it would be the start of the series eight. This would eventually be turned into a tv movie produced for Hallmark, and was so popular with readers that their positive feedback would lead to the series of four that I just started.
It is clear that Janette Oke was a disciplined writer, and this was aided by her belief that this was her calling from God. She saw each book as a "paper missionary", and committed to write two adult books and one children's book a year. She became so well known that other author's asked to collaborate, and after retirement wrote a series with her daughter, who has also gone on to write her biography. I don't think a writer could ask for anything more than that.
Janette Oke wiki
Janette Oke from Canadian Christian Leaders
Book series in order
Interview with Janette Oke about the series When Calls the Heart (ignore the mansplaining commentary at the start and the micro-aggressions at the ending by Michael Landon Jr.)
Quotes from a wise woman
