Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew writes, loves, teaches, and urban homesteads in South Minneapolis. When she’s not chasing her gregarious daughter around the neighborhood or dancing with her partner, she’s doing her best to support the spiritual life of writers. Her books are Swinging on the Garden Gate: A Spiritual Memoir (Skinner House Books), Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir (Skinner House Books), On the Threshold: Home, Hardwood, and Holiness (Westview Press), and the novel, Hannah, Delivered (Koehler Books). You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Hannah, Delivered is a novel inspired by my sister and other fabulous midwives who appreciate the wisdom inherent in women’s bodies. I wanted to honor them and explore what gifts midwives’ spiritual wisdom might bring to our contemporary experiences around birth, death, and faith.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I drink lots of tea while writing.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
The living writer I most admire is Marilynne Robinson for her novels Gilead, Home, and Lila. I’ve also been very influenced by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, all the novels of Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, James Baldwin’s essays, and I could go on and on…
What are you working on now?
I’m wrapping up a writing book called Living Revision: Opening the Writer’s Art that’s for people who want to take their writing and their engagement in life to the next level.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write a lot. Read a lot. Find a strong community of fellow writers.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
I love this quote from Ann Belford Ulanov: Aliveness springs from our making something of what we experience and receiving what experience makes of us.
What are you reading now?
Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure by Nancy Nordenson
What’s next for you as a writer?
I’m writing a collection of essays that translate the teachings of St. John of the Cross into contemporary stories about motherhood, urban homesteading, and life as a bisexual woman.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The Bible. St. John of the Cross’s Dark Night of the Soul. Rilke’s collected works.
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