The story behind the story

 

Isabel Woods Edwards was born in St. Louis in 1865 and died of tuberculosis in 1897 after nursing her mother and her mother-in-law as they each succumbed to the same plague. Isabel was married to Ben Edwards, the first of the “sons” in A.G. Edwards and Sons, the investment firm started by his father. Isabel was the mother of Albert. Her other children died in infancy and she died when Albert was three. My mother-in-law was Albert’s daughter and she is the person who gave me a set of letters written by Ben to Isabel in 1887 before they were courting describing his observations on a train journey from St. Louis to San Francisco and back. Isabel kept these and a few other letters which are rich in details about trains and banks and churches but devoid of emotion and with scant if any interest in what she may have been doing. My mother-in-law knew Ben (she called him Grandfather Edwards) and Flora, Isabel’s younger sister who married Ben soon after Isabel died and who raised little Albert along with her own children. The stories she told about Ben combined with how the letters provide a window to his mind and heart make me think that he would have been diagnosed on the Autism Spectrum had he lived today. In addition to the letters, I own a dresser that was Isabel’s and the little spun silver purse described in the book.

I wanted the story to function as Isabel’s last week choreographed. As she fades further and further into the world of stories and in the certainty that her death was imminent, she faced death with dignity and grace knowing her future lay with her Savior. Her only fear was that Albert would grow up in a world without stories. I layered the stories of the family’s past into the week’s news. I envisioned Ben, always concerned for his health, visiting Isabel’s bedroom doorway each morning before he left to work at the bank. I spent time in the newspaper archives hunting for news about banks, trains and churches from the last week of Isabel’s life. Ben reported the news to Isabel in the doorway. Flora and Albert also visited from the hallway. Only Lizzie, the African American maid, Isabel’s brother, Matt, and Dr. Barker ever entered the room. After Ben left, Isabel recalled, reread and reflected on passages from Ben’s actual letters that happened on the same day of the week. Monday’s news reflected letters written on a Monday, for example. Isabel died on a Sunday. “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” is inscribed on her tombstone in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis – the photograph on the book’s cover.

Whenever I work in fiction, my goal is to juxtapose dysfunctional families with authentic faith and to continue to explore an academic interest of mine in the history of race in America. I work with four main values. I want to demonstrate honor for every person involved even when they act in ways that are troublesome. I want to redeem the lost stories that did not make the typical American historical canon. I want the story itself to be a transformative experience for the characters, for myself, and for the readers, and I want the story to diffuse wisdom. I hope that my readers will find that I begin to succeed in these goals.

By Lesley Barker c. 2025

Writing After a Stroke

I tried to write a few notes but all that happened was scribbling. I tried to talk but my words were as scribbled. I could not move my fingers to the buttons on my cell phone to text without garbling that as well. It was very difficult to move the light switch in the bathroom. I cut myself instead of an orange. Not sure what was happening to me, my friend took me to the emergency room where I told the receptionist I was there to be evaluated for a possible stroke. That got action fast. I was put in a wheelchair, taken quickly around multiple corners, through various doors, to the first of four CT scans which confirmed I was having a brain bleed, a hemorrhagic stroke- the kind that only 35% of whose victims survive and recover. Three days later, I was discharged from the hospital with three blood pressure medicines, two follow-up doctor's appointments and referrals for OT and speech therapy. I pretty much slept for the next month between therapies. A fourth blood pressure medicine was added at a doctor's appointment where what I said was discounted and where no one touched me other than to take my blood pressure, which I already knew, having taken it at home, and where I was charged $420 for a fifteen minute encounter before they applied the discount thanks to my atypical insurance arrangements. Now, eleven weeks into recovery, I am pretty much back to normal.

Except for a few things. I still cannot write legibly for long enough to utilize journaling, my decades-honed and preferred meta-cognitive tool now discarded. I get food stuck between my cheeks and my teeth. My taste buds are unreliable - salty and sweet flavors disappoint. When I am tired, multi-syllable words blur. Sometimes when I walk more than a block or so, my right foot drags so I have befriended a cane. Unless I pay attention, I get confused about mental sequencing. Is this date past or future? If I want to find Psalm 23 and I am at Psalm 100, do I look left or right in the book? And, I get fatigued easily and dramatically, which for someone who has always been able to push past the walls, is unsettling but seemingly not negotiable. There is nearly always some bearable discomfort in my face and head. I may also have lost the momentum of the new year that started with the successful attainment of my PhD as of January 30.

The stroke disrupted everything. I had to find new ways of getting attention since neither speech nor writing worked at first. I had to pay closer attention to details. I had to rely on new supports. I had to navigate uncomfortable losses and learn to deal with new boundaries. I became visible in new, more invasive ways. I was faced with new challenges and the need to find new approaches to time. It is the same with writing, speaking, consulting, working after the stroke.

New ways of getting attention: I'm working on marketing what I have already written - Pastor's Ex-Wife, Faith Wise Faith Ways, Called to Write? Don't Know How?, Grandparents in Genesis, etc. see my books on Amazon - because I am convinced that these are worth reading. They were written carefully and, I think, are important contributions. Each of them reveals my heart and, hopefully calls new places in the readers' hearts to open. Each of them wrestles with some aspect of faith. Unless the audience connects with these works, I will be like so many creators who are undiscovered in their lifetimes. New supports and new discomforts: So, I am blogging with more intentionality, posting on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, raising the flags trying to say "Look at me. Look at me", which is uncomfortable because I have spent much of my life trying to learn humility and wisdom, which do not call attention to themselves.

New challenges: I'm also writing a chapter for a book, Slavery, Literature and Memory, that will be published by the University of Aarhus in Denmark, assuming what I submit passes the peer review process. It deals with three ways to change the narrative about the memory of slavery: performance, preservation and protest. It follows directly from my dissertation and, in many ways, I am unqualified to attempt it. New courage required: The book by the late James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, is pushing me into a new space that requires new courage about faith and that will probably inform what the chapter says.

New approaches to time & sequencing and new boundaries: Three other fiction projects have been on the shelf for the past four years while I did my doctorate. I find myself picking them up in my imagination. Each is at a different stage. Each deals with the problems of understanding authentic faith in dysfunctional, hurtful families. I wonder if it is time to rework them now and in what sequence I should attempt them. Curse of Kaskaskia is a young adult historical novel about 14 year old Auguste Chouteau. I wrote it before I served as the executive director of the Bolduc House Museum so the reworking of it implies scrutinizing it for details about material culture and more. Isabelle is another historical novel about Isabelle Edwards, the wife of Ben Edwards (a son in AG Edwards & Sons). It is based on the letters I have between Isabelle and Ben written before they were actually courting and is set in the last seven days of her life. It is fully researched and moves, in my mind, choreographed like a ballet. Stuck in the Mud is a murder mystery set in Ste. Genevieve at the museum I used to direct. It, too, is begun. The first few chapters are written. I know how it ends.

New momentum needed: Should I mention that I would very much love to land an academic teaching position in the area of public history, museum studies or cultural heritage leadership? 

Why I Write Fiction or Faith & Cotton Malone

Recently I encountered Steve Berry's books and have read the first three in the Cotton Malone series. I like them. They utilize fiction to explore emotional and current political themes which is what I did in Pastor's Ex-Wife and #whyIwritefiction anyway. I plan to work my way through the series because they are fun. However, I would love to engage with Berry on the topic of faith, which has a consistent role in his books. It seems that, for Berry, faith is a default position that people persist in without any objective, rational evidence or independent verification process. I would love for him to read and respond to my book Faith Wise Faith Ways (available on Amazon). It looks at my experiences of faith and faithlessness over more than forty years walking in active relationship with the personal God who created the universe and who is the best Rewarder. I think most people have a false definition of faith that matches Berry's assumptions. Just an opinion and a challenge.

Courage and Camouflage

It is hard enough to honestly evaluate secret things in our deceitful hearts when we probe them through reflection, meditation, prayer, therapy. These means may allow us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves but certainly no therapist or spiritual counselor expects us to install a window into our heart for the world's peeping Toms vicariously to peek through the slats of its blinds.

Fiction forces us to wash our windowpanes.

More than that: writing compelling fiction takes a mighty courage that tears the blinds down in the plain view of perfect strangers and long time friends.

Of course there is the camouflage of the story.

A friend of several decades called yesterday to say she had finally read Pastor's Ex-Wife. She admired what she called my courage and also enjoyed the story in its own right. Perhaps it takes even more courage to read what a friend writes. And, perhaps the mark of a true friend respects the boundaries between fact and fiction by refusing to risk asking where those boundaries are....

Rabbi David Small

I like (and have just recently discovered) Harry Kemelman's series of "cozy" mysteries solved by Rabbi David Small by applying the methodology of a talmudic scholar. I like them because the author is more concerned about issues of faith and what it means to be an authentic practicing Jew in the New England of the 1960s than about writing a murder mystery. The mystery, always tightly composed, is incidental to the impact of the story but it serves a sneaky device that keeps the reader engaged and provokes new questions of faith and conscience along the way.

If I succeed in my life-long ambition to become known as a writer of serious fiction I will have engaged my readers around the same types of issues as Kemelman. I aim to provoke honest faith by triggering deep questions in my readers all the while providing a compelling story that doesn't let them put the Kindle down until the last page has been swiped.

Hopefully my readers will respect my characters in spite of all of their flaws as much as I respect the Rabbi.

Is it really necessary to be right?

A long-time Christian moved to a new town and for about a year attended a small church without becoming a member while making relationship and contributing to the life of the congregation. Largely because of the demands of a new but necessary job, she missed several Sundays in a row. Her friends told her that the pastor's wife wondered whether this woman had "fallen out of fellowship" and that the pastor was going to visit her to find out. No one called. No one bothered to ask her before the judgments, based on arrogant assumptions, flew like gossip throughout the congregation. The woman came to me extremely wounded asking advice about how to respond. Her first instinct was never to return to the church.

Unfortunately, I have encountered this situation far too many times - sometimes being the focus of the accusations (more than once).

It was this type of spiritual pride that Terry Soldan, the fictitious ex-wife of a pastor in my novel, Pastor's Ex-Wife (available on Amazon for the Kindle, btw), banked on when she left Pastor Ed and ran to her childhood bachelor friend's home. She correctly predicted that Ed and his board of elders and every other member of his congregation would immediately assume that she and William were having an affair and that, therefore, Ed had biblical grounds for a divorce. In addition, Terry would be ex-communicated, anathema, unless she confessed her sin and repented.

Some readers have asked whether it is really plausible for Terry to live in William's house without being sexually involved with him. Other readers will understand that it makes a great deal of sense because they will have lived Terry's life and resonate with her woundedness sharing her understandings.... Unfortunately for the church, William's genuine commitment and hospitality to his traumatized friend brought Terry more normalcy and healing than anything else.

Is it really so necessary to be right? Isn't our own righteousness nothing more than a used tampon according to Isaiah? It doesn't take too long for that to stink.

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.