Personal Prayer Power Blog

In a previous post I mentioned that in 1980 I was chosen to attend the Guideposts Writer’s Workshop in Rye, NY where I was priviledged to meet Catherine Marshall. 

When I learned that Catherine (that’s what the editors fondly called her) would be at the workshop, I was absolutely star struck because I consider her the pioneer of Christian inspirational writing of our era.  I was 6 months pregnant at the time of the workshop.  (I was pregnant with our son, Chris, who inspired my website www.militaryprayers.org)  I was dying for Catherine’s autograph, so I found room in my suitcase for a cheap (and light!) paperback copy of Beyond Our Selves hoping to get her autograph.  

I didn’t know much about books back then and I’d never really understood that paperbacks are made out of pulp paper and aren’t made to last like hardbacks.  In fact, the book was already several years old when I carried it to New York.  Nevertheless, Catherine gamely signed it “To Karen Barber.  Cordially, Catherine Marshall.”  I still treasure the book, even though the pages are turning brown with age.

As the 15 writers and assorted editors sat in a circle of chairs around a large room, Catherine told us about her passion for writing.  She described for us how writers like herself are fairly solitary people who prefer being alone with their thoughts.  She also described her particular thirst for details, which her editor husband, Leonard LeSourd, agreed might go a little overboard at times.  She described how while writing her best selling novel Christy she persuaded the railroad to allow her to ride a segment of rails that her grandmother would have ridden to arrive in the small town in West Viriginia where she would teach in the one room school house at Cutter’s Gap. 

So zealous was Catherine for detailed research that she admitted that on her current project – her novel Julie later published in 1984 -that she traveled to England to learn more about the family background of a ficticious English character whose family name she had randomly chosen.   

Along with all of the insight into writing, Catherine surprised me by mentioning a heartfelt regret about her work – that Christy had never been made into a movie.  The movie rights had been purchased by a major stuido – and then tabled.   Only years later was Christy finally filmed in a special TV series. 

This disappointment suprised me because I’d always assumed that famous and incredibly gifted authors such as Catherine would have all of the necessary doors easily opened to them.  However, being one of us was her particular form of genius.  I realized that her writings struck such deep chords in all of us because she was indeed one of us.   She had a knack of saying, “I don’t think I’m a special case.”  By that she meant that the way God was real in her life was the way God could be real in anyone’s life.  Even in mine.