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author interviews

"Without Preaching or Apology": Q&A with Alberto Salazar, author of "14 Minutes"

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Here is my Catholic Post interview with legendary runner Alberto Salazar about his memoir 14 Minutes.  I reviewed 14 Minutes here.  Alberto, thank you for being willing to answer all my questions.  I’ll be watching the Olympics (along with the rest of the world) and see how your runners do.

Q.  I really enjoyed reading 14 Minutes.  Why did you want to write a book at this point in your life and career?


This certainly isn’t a quiet or contemplative period of my life. In fact, with the continuing success of the Oregon Project, and the London Olympics coming up, I’m busier than ever. Nonetheless, I felt called to write this book as a way to explore the meaning of my near death experience. Why was I spared? What is God’s plan for me? I don’t think you can grapple with those questions at your own convenience. Also, as my “14 minutes” dramatically showed me, next year, or even tomorrow, is never guaranteed.


Q.  You write how you are wary of being held up as a Catholic role model, but I appreciate how you share your Catholic faith (and its ups and downs) openly.  In fact, I read part of the book to my husband, who is a Catholic theologian, and he said approvingly, “He’s using technical language there!”


In particular, the prayer you say as a child (“Please, Mother, when I die, don’t let me be afraid.  Bring me straight to heaven to your son Jesus”) runs as a theme throughout your various experiences.  How would you say that your faith has matured over the years, while still retaining that child-like confidence?

My Catholic faith has definitely grown and matured over the years, but the progress of my faith has hardly followed a straight line. There have been peaks and valleys, cycles and seasons. For instance, as I write in the book, I don’t pray today with the same intensity and frequency that I did during periods of crisis in my younger life, but that doesn’t mean my faith has lessened, or that another intense cycle of prayer doesn’t await me in the future. I think following the faith of my father, mother, and forebears–the Roman Catholic Church as part of Cuban-American history–has helped me maintain some core of child-like confidence.


Q.  You were without a heartbeat for 14 minutes after a massive heart attack in 2007.  After that experience, are you afraid of death?


I don’t think it’s possible to completely lose your fear of death. I think my experiences have helped me somewhat in understanding death, and if you understand something you tend to fear it less.


Q.  You write about coaching Olympic hopefuls, especially Galen Rupp.  What’s the status of that, and will you be in London this summer for the Olympics?


 We are lucky to have some of the finest distance runners in the world as members of the Nike Oregon Project. They include Mo Farah, a citizen of Great Britain, who joined our team two years ago, and Galen Rupp, a native of Portland, Oregon, who I have been coaching for more than a decade. Besides being ideal training partners, they are also great friends. Mo and Galen will both be running the 10,000 meters at the London Olympics, where they will be competitors rather than teammates. It will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Dathan Ritzenhein, another outstanding Oregon Project athlete, will also be running the Olympic 10,000 for the U.S.

Q.  Tell us a little more about the Nike Oregon Project and where you see it going in the future.


The Nike Oregon Project started in 2001 with the goal of developing a select group of world-class U.S. distance runners. Over the last year we’ve added Mo Farah and one or two other non-U.S. athletes. I see that international reach continuing into the future, and U.S. distance runners–both from the Oregon Project and other training groups–continuing to reduce the gap between them and the great runners from the East African nations.


Q.  You, and those you coach, are in a different category than non-competitive runners (like me).  I ran a marathon, but my goal was finishing, as opposed to a time, and I’m grateful to live in a time when people like me are cheered when we finish.  I was annoyed to read a New York Times article recently about how some fast runners resent or don’t consider the rest of us “real runners,” yet I recognize that different runners will have different goals.  Any thoughts on that, or do you have any words of wisdom for non-competitive runners?


Well, now I’m just a regular, non-competitive runner myself, but the sport is still crucially important to me. I still consider myself a “real” runner, and any real runner knows that the mark of legitimacy is effort, not results. Also, as I write in the book, “real” runners depend on their daily workout as a time of prayer or meditation–it doesn’t matter if you run the marathon in 2:08 or 5:08.


Q.  You worked with gifted sportswriter John Brant on this book.  What was that process like, and do you think he was able to incorporate your voice fully into the book?


John and I had a great time working together on this book. He asked good questions, and we had some memorable conversations.


Q.  Is there anything else you would like to add, or wish I that I would have asked?

Thanks for these insightful questions, and for your interest in 14 Minutes. I’m especially gratified by your focus on the faith journey portrayed in the book. I tried to talk about my spiritual life without preaching or apology.

Q&A with Karen Edmisten, author of "after miscarriage"

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Thanks, Karen Edmisten, for being so open and willing to answer all my rambling questions.  You can read my review of After Miscarriage: A Catholic Woman’s Companion to Healing & Hope in this weekend’s print Catholic Post or here on the blog.
 
Q. First, can you tell us little more about yourself, your family and your writing?
I’m a former atheist (I was baptized at the age of 30 and came into the Catholic Church at age 35), a wife (my husband came into the Church five years after I did), and a  homeschooling mom of three girls. Our oldest daughter will graduate this year and my other daughters are 15 and 9. I’ve always written in one form or another, but I began writing for publication about five years after I became a Catholic. I started blogging (at Karen Edmisten) in late 2005, and my first book (The Rosary: Keeping Company With Jesus and Mary) was published in 2009. My second book (Through the Year With Mary) came out in 2010.
Q.  Why a book about miscarriage?
I’ve had five miscarriages myself, so it’s something I’ve lived, something I’ve thought a lot about. I wanted to share the things that were helpful and healing to me over the years, and I wanted to offer a specifically Catholic resource to address some of the questions and misunderstandings that I hear about the Church and miscarriage.
And, the grief I experienced through my miscarriages, while devastating at the time, ultimately helped me to grow closer to God, so I also wanted to share some of that hope and encouragement.
I also wanted to reassure others that they are not alone if they feel the grief of miscarriage deeply and for a long time. We’re often expected to “get over it” fairly quickly, and while it’s important to heal and keep moving forward, I think we are often surprised by how shaken we are by the loss.
Q.  You are very candid in the book about your own struggles through multiple miscarriages, and even share journal entries.  What gave you the courage to share this, and were you at all concerned about sharing “too much”?
I don’t really think of myself as courageous – maybe I should be concerned about sharing too much, but that doesn’t usually occur to me! It’s more a matter of thinking, “If this is helpful to someone else, then it’s worth saying.” Maybe because I was, at one time in my own life, such a questioner of all things religious, and I deeply appreciated people who were willing to share their spiritual journeys with me, that I want to do the same for others if I can.
Q.  Having lost a baby through miscarriage or stillbirth is kind of a “sisterhood” in a way.   Do you find women more willing in the age of the Internet/blogs, to share about membership in “the sisterhood” and talk about these kinds of details about their lives?  Is that a good thing or not?
I think we’ve always been willing to share and to support each other in that “sisterhood” – it just seems a natural reaction among women. But I think the age of the internet makes it much easier to find help, support, understanding – and I think that’s a great thing.
Q.  I’m not sure if this is a question or an invitation to discussion about this.  When I interviewed Amy Welborn about her book Wish You Were Here, I was thinking of, but never got to a post about, good books for kids who might be going through grieving.  So many of the books “specifically for or about grieving” left us cold when my own kids were going through the loss of both sets of grandparents in just a few short years.   
Amy had a great response that it isn’t necessarily a book about grieving that helps when you experience a loss, but everyone finds different types of books (perhaps something completely different-mysteries, for instance) /coping mechanisms that are helpful.    It may not be the right time or healing balm to read about death and dying.
And yet the experience of miscarriage/stillbirth is so intimate and unique, I think reading After Miscarriage is helpful for most women who have experienced it, whether recently or long ago.  The resources you provide to places like Elizabeth Ministry and the like are also very helpful and pertinent.  Your thoughts?
Thanks, and yes, I do hope that After Miscarriage ishelpful to women (and men) at any stage of that journey. But I agree with Amy that there are a lot of things that can be helpful that aren’t specifically about grief. Sometimes the tiniest thing was a healing gesture for me – bringing fresh-cut irises from the garden into the house.
One of my miscarriages occurred when my oldest daughter was six years old. She was devastated. I didn’t find that books about grief were all that helpful to her – what helped her the most was just my presence. She simply needed to know that I was there, that we could play Candyland, or go out for ice cream.
When I did read books about grief, they weren’t about the specific kind I was experiencing, but they were what I needed. For example, in After Miscarriage,  I quote A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, and Two-Part Invention, by Madeleine L’Engle. Both of those books deal with the loss of a spouse, and yet both were extremely helpful and meaningful to me after miscarriages, simply because they so accurately captured the state of grief itself.
Karen and I corresponded about some of the resources that are available to families undergoing a pregnancy loss.  
 
Karen Edmisten and the owner of one resource, Heaven’s Gain, will be on an “After Miscarriage” show on the Catholic Answers Live radio show on May 28th.
 
In addition, Elizabeth Ministry International has a very helpful FAQ page for families undergoing miscarriage or stillbirth.

Meet a Reader: Emily Stimpson

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This month’s “reader” is an author with local roots.  My review of her new book is in the current print Catholic Post  Thanks, Emily!  I look forward to meeting you at the Behold Conference in just a few days.
 
 
 
How you know me: I’m a contributing editor to “Our Sunday Visitor,” a blogger for CatholicVote, and the author of The Catholic Girl’s Survival Guide for the Single Years. Although I now live just outside of Pittsburgh (in Steubenville, Ohio), I was born and raised in Rock Island, attended Jordan Catholic School, and go to Mass at St. Mary’s Parish when I’m home visiting my parents, Gary and Ricki Stimpson. Most of my family still lives in the Peoria diocese, including my second cousin Adam, who is parochial vicar for three parishes in LaSalle, and my aunt Susie Budde, who directs choirs for both Sacred Heart Rock Island and Sacred Heart Moline.
Why I love reading: Story-telling, at its best, is truth-telling. A good story gives flesh to all that’s beautiful and true. That helps us discover worlds and ideas beyond our imagining. It also helps us discover much more familiar territory: the human heart.
What I’m reading now:  It’s Lent, so I’ve had to lay aside the Agatha Christie murder mystery I was reading and pick up my normal Lenten fare, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Every Lent my goal is to make it all the way from the beginning of Dante and Virgil’s tour through Hell in the Infernoto Dante’s reunion with his lost love Beatrice in the Paradiso. That literary journey helps me understand the journey every soul is on in this life. It also reminds me why we Catholics do what we do during Lent—what all that praying, fasting, and sacrificing is about.
My favorite book: I love too many books to pick just one, so I always tell people I have favorite authors more than favorite books, writers who’ve changed the way I see the world and the life I’m living. At the top of that list are C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and John Paul II: Lewis for his clarity, Chesterton for his sense of wonder, and John Paul II for his theology of the body, which is really an articulation of the Incarnation and what it means to be a human person. If I had to add one more, it would be P.G. Wodehouse: He’s a master of wit and words. A regular dose of his work keeps my writing sharp, quick, and tight.

A Catholic Girl’s Survival Guide for the Single Years

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If you get the print edition of The Catholic Post, you’ll notice the book page’s “Meet a Reader” feature this month is a writer with local roots (updated the link)—Emily Stimpson, author of The Catholic Girl’s Survival Guide for the Single Years.

Stimpson’s book is a must-read for young Catholic women.  There’s sensible advice about everything from dating to careers to married friends, and so much more, all from an optimistic and realistic Catholic perspective.   I have so many books I want to (and frankly, “have to”) read, but I enjoyed every chapter of this engaging book because of Stimpson’s spirited and honest voice.  I even breezed through  (and found interesting!) the closing “bibliographic essay” with a wealth of resources for further reading and discussion.

If you’re married already, reading A Catholic Girls’ Survival Guide makes you say, “I wish there had been a book like this when I was single!” At least, it was my first thought– I know I’m not the only one.
Some months back I reviewed what seems like a very similar book, the excellent How to Get to “I Do”: A Dating Guide for Catholic Women by the talented Amy Bonaccorso.  However, I think both books are equally worth reading and having, rather than being either/or.  Each of these strong young women has a unique perspective and message, and readers everywhere benefit.

Interesting trivia:  both Bonaccorso and Stimpson will be among the dozen featured bloggers at the Behold Catholic Women’s Conference on March 10 at the Embassy Suites.  The Behold Conference might be the first time a Catholic women’s conference anywhere will feature “new media” and bloggers, but with that and much more, it promises to be a great event for women of all ages and vocations.

Q&A With Patricia Treece, Author of "God Will Provide"

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As I mentioned in my mini-review of God Will Provide last month, I had hoped to post an interview with author Patricia Treece.  I’m delighted to be able to share our conversation.  Thanks, Patricia!

 Q. Tell Catholic Post readers a little more about you and your work. 

I’m a convert who fell in love with God’s friends the saints, particularly modern saints and holy people of our time who are on their way to official sainthood. Their lives, often so like our own, offer me mentoring, companionship, and prayer help. To share them with others – the whole human family – is my delight. I’m so grateful that God has given me a lively writing style and a talent for research from my training as ajJournalist and the several languages I studied in high school, college, post-grad., or independently with tutors. In turn, it is a grace and a lot of fun to give these gifts back to God by spending much of my time with the holy. You know people, in part, by the company they keep. God’s saints have helped me know and love God. My prayer is that my books help readers in the same way.

Q.  I found God Will Provide an amazing book, “brimming with wisdom and grace.” How did you get the idea for it, and how long did it take you to complete the book?

Thank you for asking. I am so relieved you found “wisdom and grace” instead of an author just thinking she can tell others what to do in trouble! I certainly can’t but  wisdom and grace are found in the saints and they get them from the Lord, who uses very ordinary people like me sometimes to pass them on.  

During the dark winter days of 2008-09, I woke one Sunday morning and almost immediately grabbed something to write on. An outline complete with many of the examples which appear in the book poured out. I don’t wake in work mode on the Sabbath! But I felt – of course I knew I could be deluded! – God, out of love, was letting me be an instrument to help the many people struggling in the terrible economy. I felt this work was a Divine invitation to everyone to position himself or herself so that God could meet their needs, material, emotional, and spiritual. I brought the outline to an editor I was working with on another project. He found value and I set aside the other project and began work, hoping to have it out by Christmas 2009. Call it just the way things go and laugh or see in what happened the kind of roadblocks that come against projects that will do good (I believe both are true) but as 2010 neared its end I finally learned that the publisher actually had no money and the printer-ready book was not going to come out.  A new publisher took it early in 2011 but wanted many changes so the twice-edited book was edited, to good purpose, twice again. Yet it made it out by mid-December 2011. 
     
Q. I found myself so uplifted and spiritually nourished by every single page. What is your intention for the people who will read it?  

You hit it, Nancy, right on the head. My prayer is that readers be uplifted and spiritually nourished. May the book fix in every reader faith – as the saints lives show – that God cares about your material and other  troubles, God has power to help, and God loves you and wills to help you.

Q.  You have such an interesting mix of saints and near-saints. How did you select the saints for the book?

Time and again in researching and studying saints’ lives, I have found instances of Divine Providence whether for their own material needs or those of the many they ministered to. I usually made notes about these and threw them in a file. I have also listened to the stories of people I know and experienced myself, that we non-saints, if our lives are pointed Godward, receive Divine Providence too. So when the outline for the book, I believe, was given me, many of these came to mind. In my file, I found others – way more than I could use. And sometimes an example fell into my lap just at the perfect moment. I could almost say I didn’t select the saints, they were sent to play their role.

Q. Don’t take this as a criticism, but to me all the stories are all delightfully mixed up in the book. I normally like books that are super-structured (8 Habits of Highly Effective …, etc.), but in God Will Provide, the way you wrote helped me just let all the saintly wisdom soak in. Was that your intention in writing?

I certainly hoped the saints’ wisdom, which is a gift from God, would soak in, but I can’t claim that I consciously structured the book to mix up the stories in just this way. Sometimes a story started in one chapter and, after editing – and I had a very good editor at Paraclete who stretched me to sharpen my focus –  ended up in another. I guess I’ll just have to blame the Holy Spirit! 

Q. Any more books or writing projects in your near future you would like to share with Catholic Post readers?

The book I set aside due to the need I felt to get God Will Provide out is my next project. Nothing Short of a Miracle: God’s Healing Power in His Saints some of your readers may remember when it came out in the late 1980s. I took it out of print to update it with the addition of healings from the 1990s forward as well as to let readers know what has happened to some of the children particularly who received great miracles when they were tykes or infants. At the moment with five new chapters and all the updates, I may have to cut a bit. Isn’t it wonderful to think that our God gives us ordinary people (if you think about it, few beatification and/or canonization miracles, for instance, go to any but the most ordinary folks) so many miracles that a book on just some of the recent ones through just modern saints can easily get too long!

Q. Is there anything else you wish I would have asked, or would like to share? 

I would just like to thank you, Nancy, for relieving my mind that I did probably  receive this book from the Lord to help people, rather than am kidding myself about that.  And I thank you for mentioning it as possible reading for Lent. With the modern emphasis on doing something positive for Lent, I would be thrilled to think of people reading God Will Provide. Especially in these difficult times when it’s a temptation to turn away from God in disbelief or even get angry at Him in one’s struggles, I’d be so happy to think of some reader discovering or discovering anew that God loves and wants to provide for them. 

Q&A With Amy Welborn, author of Wish You Were Here: Travels Through Loss and Hope

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I am delighted to have the chance to share this Q&A with Wish You Were Here author Amy Welborn.  Thank you, Amy, for being willing to answer all my questions about your work and your life.  What a gift for readers here, and your book is to readers everywhere.



Q.  Tell Catholic Post readers a little more about you and your work.
A.  I’ve meandered around the Catholic world professionally in various capacities for a while.  I have a BA in history from the University of Tennessee and an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt.  I have taught religion in Catholic high schools and served as a parish Director of Religious Education.  I have been writing for the Catholic press and Catholic audiences for about twenty-five years now, beginning back in the 80’s when I lived in Florida and wrote a column for the Florida Catholic.  In the years since, I have written regular columns of faith and life for Catholic News Service and Our Sunday Visitor.  I’ve written books on apologetics, spirituality and such for various publishers, including Loyola Press and Our Sunday Visitor.  I do a lot of smaller editing and writing projects as well: writing study guides and pamphlets, editing and evaluating manuscripts for publishers and so on.  And of course, I write online on my various blogs.  When it comes to writing for the Catholic audience, I’m primarily interested in continuing what I started: teaching.  I really enjoy taking a complicated or dense subject and trying to make it understandable for a specific audience. I also enjoy, on a more basic level, experiencing interesting things and writing about them. 
Q.  Wish You Were Here was such a moving memoir of a tough year for you.  You wrote a little on your blog about the death of your husband, and your subsequent trip to Sicily and Barcelona.  When did you realize you should, or that you wanted to, write a book about that time in your life?
Oh, a few months after Mike died, I started hearing questions and hints from various readers about turning this into a book.  I resisted for a lot of reasons, until my friend David Scott – who was my editor at  the OSV newspaper for a bit and was a friend of Mike’s – said, “You’re writing about it anyway on your blog.  What difference does it make if you put the same words on paper, between covers?”  As I made the plans for Sicily, it seemed to take on a helpful framework and evolve into a book in my head, so at that point, I contacted Trace Murphy at what was then Doubleday Religion, and he was open to the idea.  It was a long slog from that point to this, mostly because the task was a lot more challenging than I had anticipated, and writing this way is different that tossing out blog posts. But I’m grateful to my editor, Gary Jansen, and pleased with the result. 
Q.  As I wrote in my review, “If you’ve been through the loss of someone dear, Wish You Were Here will just make sense….Your’re fine, and then you’re not.  You’re overwhelmed with sadness, and then you have hope.  You cling to your faith, but you have doubts and questions and what-ifs.”  Did you realize how much you were writing for so many other people when you wrote about your own experience of grief?
A.  I didn’t realize, but I hoped I was. That was the only reason to write it: to help other people.  I don’t mean that to be pretentious. It’s just true. I was helped by other people’s writing about their own experiences – everyone from the well-known like C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed) and Kathleen Norris (Acedie) to simply bloggers sharing their own experiences of grief – that I hoped I could contribute a helpful voice to that never-ending conversation. 
Q.  I wrote down so many quotes from the book it slowed me down!  Your writing is so “quotable” and looks effortless.  Do you find writing easy, or is it a hard process for you? 
A. Thank you.  It’s both.  Journaling is effortless, but shaping it is far more difficult. But I actually enjoy the editing process quite a bit.  That is when the real writing actually happens. 
Q.  Very recently, you lost your father as well.  Do you mind if I ask if this grieving is different, or if it is hard to be discussing this book when going through another loss?  
A.  It’s a different experience, to be sure.  My father was older and quite ill – and had beaten a lot of odds to even get to the point that he was.  But the other thing – and this is quite important – is that Mike’s death really changed me and my own stance toward death.  I have really committed myself to living what I profess in the Creed every Sunday about life, death and resurrection. 
Q. It’s clear from the book that (despite inevitable travel-related ups & downs), that your teenager and younger ones, benefitted and even thrived with the trip.  Do you plan any more far-away excursions with your kids? 
A.  Oh, yes…but I like to keep my travel plans under wraps until I’m practically there!
Q.  Any books or writing projects in your near future you would like to share with Catholic Post readers?
A.  I am working on smaller projects and just really trying to see if fiction is something that I can actually do, or if my identity as “fiction writer” is something that only exists in my imagination.