A couple books into my writing career, it became clear to me that my mission was more than to tell stories with profound faith arcs. My heartbeat lay in looking for the real servants of God who were doing His work at the time and place of my books’ settings and shining a light on the work that God was doing in that particular time and place through the eyes of fictional characters.
When I came to that realization and started spending more effort researching church history for each of my books, there was without a doubt one story that I yearned to write above all others.
It was the story of abolitionist editor and Presbyterian minister Elijah Lovejoy, the first white American to be martyred for speaking out against slavery. Growing up in a homeschool family in Illinois, I first learned about Elijah Lovejoy from my dad, and he’s the one who took our family to see the Elijah Lovejoy memorial in Alton, Illinois, when I was a young teenager. The more I learned about Lovejoy, his bold stance and unwavering faith, the more inspired I became by him.
While several biographies about him are available and much has been written about his death, I’ve discovered that he has largely been forgotten in our society. And as many times as I’ve scoured the internet, I have yet to find another solitary novel featuring his story, making Sowing Hope the first.
Due to my great respect for the man, it was important to me to portray him as honestly as possible and keep the fictionalization to a minimum. That was easy to do, as his life reads like a novel anyway. While I didn’t add to his story other than add fictional characters to his group of friends to be the main characters in Sowing Hope, I did have to leave some parts of his life out or the book would have been too lengthy. Part of that is due to the fact that my main character, Patrick, makes the decision to walk across America in 1836 to join Lovejoy in St. Louis—a walk that Lovejoy himself actually did take in 1827. Along the way, other inspiring real people, black and white, show up, fellow warriors in the battle for the free press and emancipation of the slaves. The history I uncovered is fascinating and somehow relatable. While Lovejoy remained rooted in his right to speak his beliefs based on God's word and the Constitution, Patrick struggles with maintaining hope when the world around him appears to have gone mad. I can’t think of a more relatable struggle for us today!
It was a new challenge to write a fictional book centered so fully on real people without taking unnecessary liberties, but my subject matter made the project a joy. I can’t wait for a new generation to become familiar with Elijah Lovejoy and the other brave abolitionists who make an appearance in Sowing Hope.
