Featured Author - Patti Lacy

I’m Patti Lacy, a fifty-something woman who was born in the front seat of my parents’ car. My father said I hit the cracked leather “running.” I do like to jog—and take on projects with lightning speed. That’s kinda how this writing thing began.

Since 2005, I’ve written Christian fiction about women with secrets. Unlike many writers, I rarely put pen to paper before working on my first novel except to write some bad poetry in college and later, boring research papers when I worked on my master’s in Literature.

Following in footsteps of both parents, after college, I became licensed to teach, then decided to try something different and enrolled in court reporting school. Twelve years of trying to catch the words of Type A trial lawyers and their clients on a steno machine was enough. In 1995, when my husband got a higher-paying job in Terre Haute, Indiana, I became a stay-at-home mom, the best job I ever had. Then we moved again, this time to Illinois, where I taught humanities in community college until I resigned to write full-time.

After a book discussion meeting held at my house, “Mary,” a wild-haired Irishwoman hung around, ostensibly to help me clean up the kitchen. (I suspected she really wanted to graze on the remains of my Southern hors d’oeuvres instead of scrub pans.) A beautiful day drew us to the front porch, and as we sat there chatting and swinging in the old cane-backed chairs, she began pouring out the most incredible story of love and dysfunction and forgiveness, all tangled like a wild ball of woolen yarn. For years I visualized those rocky Irish cliffs that Mary described—and the double betrayal that nearly ripped out her heart. Years later, God began to whisper for me to tell the story, and He sent Mary and me on a wild odyssey to County Clare, then the breathtaking Connemara region. By the time we’d returned to America, God had explained to Mary why he’d ripped her from those cliffs—and a few other things.

I got on the computer, mixed snippets of Mary’s story with Irish folk songs, images of Ireland, and my own imagination, and sold An Irishwoman’s Tale to Kregel Publications in April of 2007.

Since I hadn’t really attempted to write a novel before, I fell in love with the process of capturing the images and passions in my mind onto paper. Getting rejection letters—some of them not so very nice—stung a bit and seemed to depersonalize the industry. And the decision to fictionalize the story was also hard

My answer would blow up the limits of bytes on this blog. I’m constantly sticking my nose in both secular and Christian fiction and nonfiction. Old classical friends include Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, the short stories of Ray Bradbury and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In the CBA, Lynn Austin, Francine Rivers, Maureen Lang, and Randy Alcorn are a few writers whose books I devour

Romans 8:28 provides the basis for my first two novels. An Irishwoman’s Tale also explores the depths of Christ’s forgiveness and how He expects us to offer that same forgiveness to those who trespass against us. I used the kaleidoscope motif in my first novel to illustrate the fragmented pieces of my heroine’s life and how God carefully arranged the shards and bits of glass to make a beautiful and unique design. In the same way, each reader can have a work of art out of the fragments of their life, with God as the master artist

Sally, the talkative Southern teacher who accompanies Mary on a wild Irish quest in An Irishwoman’s Tale, has become an expert at telling lies and hiding her own secret, buried deep in the murky waters of a Louisiana bayou. But ugly things begin to surface when Sally’s student is raped in the school parking lot after a night class. And the past moves in, threatening to ruin Sally’s happy marriage to a math professor, her stable job—her life. Kregel has contracted Unsettled Waters and expects a release date sometime in 2009. Presently I’m working on a three-book series entitled “Spanning Seas and Secrets.” The first book of the series, My Name is Sheba, begins on the riotous streets of the 1940s New Orleans French Quarter and ends in a filthy brothel in Bangkok, Thailand, during the Vietnam War era.

When God saved Mary, an impetuous Irishwoman, He pulled her from a mire of terrible mistakes—substance abuse and scars inflicted by not one, but two sets of parents. In spite of His redemptive work and the power of the Holy Spirit, Mary’s first memory still haunts her—an old oaken table, moon-shaped faces guzzling bitter tea, cups and cups of the steaming stuff, asking what’s to be done with the bloody eejit.

It takes the encouragement of Sally, a gregarious Southerner transplanted in Mary’s Midwestern town, to propel Mary back to the rocky cliffs of her beloved Ireland; that and her youngest daughter’s fondness for alcohol, a habit which threatens to rip the tapestry of an idyllic life that Mary has so carefully woven for her family.

In a harrowing adventure which spans two continents and culminates in a rescue scene on storied Irish peak Croagh Patrick, the two middle-aged women dredge up secrets that have been buried for decades. By the conclusion of An Irishwoman’s Tale, Mary glimpses God’s perfect plan for her life and is ready to face, with His help, whatever obstacles still lie ahead.

Ha Jin, A Chinese novelist, wrote a poignant novel entitled Waiting. At one particularly frustrating point, his character states he’s spent a lifetime waiting “just for the sake of waiting.” At times my little corner of the publishing process seemed to inch forward when I wanted to dash down the street like Mary Poppins, singing and skipping and getting the word out about my first baby. I’m trying to appreciate each step forward—and backward—and learn something about timing along the way

After traveling internationally with Mary, I knew her pretty well. And being best friends, we’ve been through some wonderful—and hard—things together. In some ways, this book was easy, because I didn’t have to go too far beyond the real-life heroine