Grace Grows: Interview with author Shelle Sumners

I hope you are having a GREAT Summer.

This post is the final installment of the Super Summer Reading series. I've really enjoyed sharing these books with you. The three authors I featured are friends of mine and people whom I find inspiring and whole-hearted--and brave. They also happen to work wonders with words.

In case you missed them, you can catch up with Amy Wright Glenn and Matt Kailey by reading my previous posts about their books here, and here.

Today I bring you the third and final featured book. The novel is Grace Grows by Shelle Sumners. Shelle and I worked together in a church years ago and we promised each other we would make our respective dreams come true: hers was to be a published author and mine was to be a speaker and writer. Looks like we kept those promises to each other!

Meet Shelle.

Shelle Sumners lives and writes in Bucks County, PA. Her debut novel Grace Grows, published by St. Martin’s Press, is a Random House audio book, a Featured Alternate selection for Doubleday, Literary Guild, and Rhapsody Book Clubs, and is published internationally. It has a companion soundtrack of phenomenal original songs that appear in the story, written and performed by her husband, singer-songwriter and Broadway actor Lee Morgan.

DD) Hi Shelle. Thanks for being great and making time for this. Why did you want to write your book?

SS: I had a compelling dream about a woman and a man who were together at a waterfall. It was just a snippet of a moment, but I knew what they were feeling—love, sadness, and hope. I woke up and the arc of their story started flowing through me like rushing water. I sat up in bed and speed-wrote 18 legal-pad pages of notes about Grace Barnum and Tyler Wilkie. I started writing their story that week.

DD) I know that writing a book is no easy task. What moved you from idea to action?

SS: I had spent a few years teaching myself to write screenplays and knew all along that I was building up to writing a novel. At the time I started writing Grace Grows, I had just completed my first attempt, a rough-draft novelization of one of my screenplays. Grace Grows was my first novel written completely “from scratch.”

DD) what were 3 obstacles you met while writing?

SS: Challenge one: Time. Never enough. I was working full time, so I wrote the book at night and on weekends. I did a lot of scene writing in my head while driving to and from work. It took me about 18 months to finish.

Challenge two: I was trying a couple of new things—writing in first person and writing humorously. These were fun challenges to try to meet. I read a lot of David Sedaris and Anne Lamott on the side, for inspiration.

Challenge three: Going the distance. Quitting writing Grace Grows was never a deep possibility, because I was so in love with Grace and Ty. I needed to see how it was all going to turn out for them. But I could have been easily drawn away from writing by the demands of daily work and life and how tired I sometimes was; by how often I wanted to just do nothing. At the time, I had a subscription to these daily Buddhist wisdom emails and one day I got this bit of scripture from the Dhammapada (translated by Thanissaro Bhikku)

Having applied himself

to what was not his own task,

and not having applied himself

to what was,

having disregarded the goal

to grasp at what he held dear,

he now envies those

who kept after themselves,

took themselves

to task.

I tacked this to the bulletin board behind my computer monitor, at eye level. I’m looking at it right now.

DD) I love that quote. And that story! You're such an inspiration to me while I take on the task of writing my book. Tell me two new things you learned about yourself while writing:

SS: I am here to make things with words. Life becomes timeless and deeply blissful when I am creating a moment in a story.

DD) See, even in that answer you made something beautiful. In your own (beautiful) words, why is your book good summer reading for my tribe/community?

SS: Grace Grows is about a woman who is learning who she is and how to live freely and authentically. It’s about rapturous romantic love (and sex). It’s about comprehensive, lifelong sexuality education. It’s about forgiving your parents, and how friends can be family.

DD) This was so fun. Please share anything else you want my readers to know:

SS: Grace Grows has an accompanying original soundtrack of the songs in the story that Tyler Wilkie writes for Grace Barnum. They were written by my collaborator (and husband), real-life singer-songwriter Lee Morgan, and they are truly amazing and lovely. You can hear one of the songs, “Her,” on my website, along with samples of the other songs: http://www.shellesumners.com/grace-grows-book/original-songs/

You can purchase Shelle's book, Grace Grows, right here: http://www.amazon.com/Grace-Grows-Shelle-Sumners/dp/1250003504/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346373958&sr=8-1&keywords=grace+grows