About Me

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I have discovered that walking a very narrow path leads to broad places of peace, contentment, and provision. I work as a freelance consultant in the areas of cultural heritage, public history and museums, From 2009-2016, I was the executive director of the Bolduc House Museum in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, (now called New France - the OTHER Colonial America, an eighteenth century French colonial historic site and National Historic Landmark.) My PhD is from the University of Leicester's (United Kingdom) Department of Museum Studies. My research looked at the interpretation of diversity at the American Historic House Museum. I also developed and facilitate an inspirational program for Christian grandparents, Gathering Grandparents.

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Dead Butterfly Wings

My friend, Lisa and her husband, Gavin, were the first readers of Pastor's Ex-Wife. I emailed them a chapter every few days as soon as the first (but not the roughest first) draft was written. They responded with questions, things I needed to clarify, and they shared the emotions the story provoked in them. It made the writing process more real for me to have an audience whose questions often inspired the next chapter as it unfolded.

Oh, yes, I had an outline - really a plan, not an outline. I work best when I have determined certain requirements for each chapter - it had to move the plot forward, it had to include humor, it had to turn around a single unifying metaphor, it had to employ similes and a full range of sensory details....dialogue... an anecdote from my years teaching in an inner city school district, as well as a church building, a pastor, a congregation, a service and sermon.

I mixed and matched the church features like a crazy quilt - everything is based on reality but abstracted like a cubist painting to create a new fictional construct of a church that worked with the story.

I did not realize how important Lisa and Gavin had been to the writing process until last night.

I am working on a new novel (working title "Dead Butterfly Wings"). It is set in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, and is a murder mystery which also treats the theme I dedicate my adult fiction to explore: authentic faith within abusive families.

Lisa and Gavin were my first audience for this first novel - Pastor's Ex-Wife. Lisa shared the background of the protagonist and pastor's ex-wife, Terry Soldan, so her emotional reactions predicted to me whether the story felt real, authentic, plausible....

Until yesterday, I did not have an audience in mind for "Dead Butterfly Wings." Now I do - a person to whom the book just may be dedicated. It won't be the same. I won't be showing him the chapters as they get written but I am writing as if I were telling him the story as it unfolds on the page. I don't even know whether he will ever read it. But, I learned a tremendous thing about how I write just by realizing that I am writing FOR someone specific. It motivates me to put my heart on the page more fully.

Thank you, Lisa and Gavin.

You can read Pastor's Ex-Wife by Lesley Barker on the Kindle. If you don't own a kindle, you can download the kindle ap for free to your computer desktop or smart phone and then you can buy the book in the Amazon Kindle Store here.  

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