Stimson said she wrote hundreds of poems as a child, and "thought I was a pretty good poet, too - until I began to realize that there's more to poetry than rhyme and meter. . A good poet selects and polishes each word with care, distilling volumes of truth about the universe into a few glorious lines."
In her 20s, she said, she began to "get serious about fiction writing," and took a story to a writing workshop to be critiqued by a Presbyterian writer she admired, Katherine Paterson.
"She got right to the point," Stimson said. "'The only problem with your story,' she told me, 'is that nothing happens. You've done a good job with character development and dialogue, but there's no plot.
"Oops. At that point I realized I probably was not destined to be the next John Grisham," she said. "I don't hold this against Katherine Paterson at all - in fact, a decade or so later I interviewed her for my first article in Presbyterian Survey. But fiction joined poetry on the back burner, at least for a while."
One of her most memorable experiences as a journalist, Stimson said, was interviewing Fred Rogers, the host of the children's TV program, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood . When the interview ended, she said, Rogers spent some time with her husband, Jerry Van Marter, coordinator of the Presbyterian News Service, and their children, Luke and Rachel, twins who were 6 at the time. "It was an experience our family will never forget," she said.
Stimson said Rogers told her during the interview, "I think we don't realize how hungry people are for what is honest and real." She concluded her address, "God calls us - both as writers and people of faith - to offer to the world what is honest and real."
Whitney said she wrote her novel from the point of view of an African boy.
She said she chided herself for "the audacity to take on the vision and the voice of a 6-year-old African boy," but heard another author say that writing from such an alien point of view is "an act of friendship."
Seeing through another's eyes - those of someone very different from oneself - "is part of what we are called as writers to do."
"The more deeply we explore this life called Christian, the more we see through the eyes of those who are so apparently different from ourselves," she said. "It's the kind of seeing we Christians are called to embrace. And when we do, we see that beneath the appearances, we are all so much alike."
The Steele award is named for the Rev. R. David Steele, an author who was probably best-known for his whimsical "Tuesday Morning" column in The Presbyterian Outlook. The Angell award is named for the Rev. James W. Angell, who wrote 19 books, notably including How to Spell Presbyterian. |
