Are you single, married, divorced or widowed?  

I am still single.

What are you living your life for now?  What are you top priorities?

My children.  Really, they sum up my life.  I truly believe that’s what God wants me to do, what He put me here for.   When I am surrounded by or teaching my children, truly, I couldn’t care less how many bills are sitting on my kitchen table.  Truly,  all I care about is being present with them.  They are the only two individuals I have ever known from whom I do not wish to hide.  They are the only ones  being vulnerable before doesn’t fill me with unadulterated terror.   People say that parenthood is hard.  I’ve experienced ups and downs.  There have been temper tantrums a few times and, okay, pumping breastmilk and breastfeeding every two hours was a challenge.  There have been days when I would have sworn I was dying as a result of sheer exhaustion.  But is the work itself hard?  I don’t find it difficult.   I have grown and healed in so many ways since becoming a mother that all I feel is grateful for the opportunity to witness their lives.  God knew, I didn’t, that being a mother would set off a chain of emotions and events deep inside me that would ultimately draw me closer to Him and heal.  As a result, I happily make this journey of motherhood a priority.

After raising them to the very best of my abilities,  advocacy is a high priority for me.   A couple years ago, I was invited to speak in front of a very large group.  I was very nervous about this particular event because I hadn’t done many speaking engagements at the time and all the ones I had done were on a much smaller scale.  But I accepted the invitation.  I started speaking and, as I looked at the faces of those in the audience, something happened to me.  A goose-bump-like feeling traced my spine.  It was as if a lightbulb went off that said,  this is why.   For the first time, I saw a piece of God’s dream.  Mine had just been to write—-but His was ultimate healing, not only for me but for others, as well.  There is comfort in unity.

Do you have any pet peeves?

I don’t like curse words.  It’s not nice and creates an environment of hostility, which never does anyone any good.

Other than that, no.

Describe your social life.  Who are your friends?  What do you do for fun?

I write for fun.  And I volunteer to teach at church, for fun.   I also take my girls places almost every day, for fun.

There are people at my church with whom I am friendly.  I like to consider myself their friend.  We chat when we see each other and communicate sometimes on Facebook.  Facebook is about the extent of my social life.  I don’t have anyone with whom I meet up for lunch, although my sister and I try to do things together at least once or twice a month.

What concerns you most about what is going on in the world?

There is a level of desensitization that, at times, resembles apathy that hurts my heart. Events that would have left a city forever altered when I was growing up are now daily headlines. People use phones to record tragedies instead of stepping in to reroute them. Things like SARV (sorcery accusation related violence, aka witch hunts) still happen in beautiful places like Papua New Guinea. Domestic violence is on the rise. Child abuse still runs rampant. While things like the #metoo movement and public outcry over Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, there is still shame and fear in disclosing sexual abuse. Ultimately, human rights’ issues do more than threaten lives: these issues threaten relationship and connection. As a race, humans need communion with others. Relationships are what challenges the lies taught by abuse. There are many things that can help us maintain faith in humanity: imagination, nature, talent. But the greatest is people. People are capable of unspeakable evil and magnificent kindness.

Stories taught me differently.  Books like The Ring by Danielle Steel, Only Mine by Elizabeth Lowell and Almost Heaven by Judith McNaught (one of my favorite writers of all time) kept me believing in good men. They weren’t perfect (McNaught has some questionable scenes with Clayton Westmoreland in Whitney, My Love), but they truly loved the heroine. Steel’s The Ring in particular showed Ariana suffering brutality at the hands of a Nazi only to fall in love with a Nazi. The “light in the darkness” theme that resonates so deeply with me.  They weren’t just “silly romance books” to me. They taught me to believe that men like Ian, Clayton, Munford – they might be real and, if they were, then there was reason to trust in men as a whole. Stories weren’t the only things that kept the frayed, fragile trust alive.

My father’s sister, Missi, married her high school sweetheart. I don’t remember a time when Tony wasn’t part of the Johnson clan: I remember when they were dating instead of married, but they were always together.   When my brother Nathan died ten days after being born, Tony was the one who came to take me and my sister to the hospital so that we could see him before they took him away. He flew down the interstate to get us there. When we stayed over with them, he helped me make the bed in our room and told me that he and Missi were proud of how we had turned out, given our instability. When I told my father’s family about the abuse, the response was, “But it was so long ago.” Basically: “we don’t talk about things like that.” I was expected to attend family functions–even if my dad came too–and not speak of it. Good Christians forgave. The exception was Missi and Tony.  They not only believed me, but they made it clear to the other members of the family that they believed me. I don’t see them.  I only have sporadic communication with them. But, seven or eight years ago, I went to see them. And when Tony walked into the room, I cried. He was probably the only truly safe male in my childhood and though we don’t really know each other anymore, I still love him.  

You may remember Joey.  He was a real homeless man I met at a gas station when I was in college. He introduced himself as “a homeless man from Nashville” and never asked for money. In fact, he would refuse it unless I insisted. All he wanted was for me to make him a promise that I would help 3 homeless people however I could, whenever I could. He had a million-watt smile that reached his eyes. He made homemade bracelets that he gave away in exchange for the promise.  I would go to the gas station just to see him.  Because that was during my not-nice-to-myself period and he showed me what joy looked like. Real joy. And he didn’t have a bed to sleep on.  He had nothing and yet he was the happiest person I knew. When I asked him to tell people his name, he smiled and said, “Thank you, darlin, but I can’t do that. I want people to see my face when they see a homeless person.” It deeply impacted me because, while the people we were trying to reach were different – I needed to advocate for children and for survivors; he needed to advocate for the homeless – we were doing the same thing. We shared the same human thread: connection.  He restored some of my faith in men.  

Men whose names I do not know have duct taped that fragile thread of trust together more than once. There was the gas station stranger who said, “No rush, take your time” when I had a mental freeze because making one more decision – even one as simple as what to buy to drink – left me paralyzed, and then, when I thanked him for holding the door open for me, said, “Have a good day, Atlanta.”  Or the time two men were screaming at each other, pushed in front of me in line at the gas station, and made my entire body start shaking. There was a man standing behind me in line who stepped up beside me; he later came up to the window of my car as I was valiantly trying to hold back a panic attack because of the level of anger and said, “Did you fill up? No, let’s fill her up” and proceeded to put $35 of gas into my tank. He said, “No apologies needed. No explanations needed, either” when I tried to apologize for backing into him when the angry men shoved in front of me. He said, “We’re not all like that.” I think of him a lot and I do not know his name. These strangers restored some of my faith in men. 

I share a lot of stories of trauma. 

But the truth is – I am very, very blessed. There are many people who do not and have never had a single person they can say they truly trust(ed).  I am not one of them.  But, more than that, the ability to look for the good in people, to find that “light in the darkness”, is a gift I have worked very, very hard to cultivate and protect. I’ve done it ever since I was twelve years old and studying the Holocaust. My books are a lot of things: sometimes they are explicit, sometimes they are graphic, they take an unflinching look at truly sensitive material like child abuse. Whether we’re talking about the Rwanda genocide, the Holocaust, the cost of complicity and silence, suicide, child sex trafficking, or sorcery-accusation related violence (SARV) in Papua New Guinea, the goal is to find a sometimes faint thread of humanity, a flicker of a light that acts as a beacon for a way out. In my books, that flicker has been imagination (Ash, The Character, Haven), nature (Forget Me Not, Whisperroot, The Way of Water), the arts (Sing Me Home, Broken, Me) and sometimes it’s been something even more precious: people (Echoes of a Wild Girl’s Drum, Remember the Nightingale, River’s Rowan, Holding Home, Mountains of Hope). Because the truth is: people are the strongest light we have. Right now, in my bathroom, the light in the shower is flickering because the bulb is going out. Soon, it will go dark. But I will just replace it with a new bulb and I’ll have light in the shower again. Just because there are people who break boundaries or who leave us with deeply painful wounds does not mean that all people will do that. I will stubbornly duct tape that frayed, breaking, ragged piece of thread that tethers my heart to trust for as long as I live. Because, with trust, comes hope. And, with hope, comes life. 

Do you have peace of mind?

What I know for sure is that I am loved by the Almighty.
What I know for sure is that I love my children.
What I know for sure is that I am not alone, no matter how often the lies whisper otherwise.

These things bring me comfort and give me peace.

Describe you.

I’m a storyteller.  Loyal, stubborn, insomniac, teacher, mother.  I’m faithful but I’m also a control freak;  I don’t like stepping out of my comfort zone.  I hate confrontations and will go way out of my way to avoid them.   Music of any kind is a gift from  God (even nature is melodic:  the wind whistles through the trees, the crickets serenade the night,  birds sing in the morning) that soothes my wearied heart.  

I love people.  I feel great empathy and compassion with others, particularly those who are suffering traumatic events of any kind:  I feel their heartache and have an intense need to comfort them.  I’m a collage made up of many different pieces:  I’m the little girl who read stories aloud to her classmates, I’m the teenager who wanted to race a horse barefoot,  I’m the volunteer who thrived when she was giving,  I’m the woman who struggles with trust issues,  I’m the mother who savors every second of the day,  I’m the servant who once asked God if He were proud of her,  I’m the one who looks for beauty in the day so passionately because she knows it is the key to maintaining a sense of hope.  I don’t care about justice as much as I care about healing.    I’m a reader and I hope I’m a decent friend.  I’m a chocolate and peach aficionado.   I love all things groovy, like brightly colored bell bottoms and bandannas.  I’m the terrible math student, and the writer.  Ultimately,  I’m just one more person on this planet trying to make sense of a wild, but rich, world.

When are you the saddest?

When I feel I have let others down or not been the mother my girls deserve.

How do you deal with stress, with things you cannot change?

I remind myself that while I cannot change the circumstance, I can always control my reaction to the circumstance. And then I remember how blessed I am – I work hard to remember that, no matter what happens, I’ve been through worse. That prevents me from panicking and allows me to see each stressful thing as manageable.

And I write.

What plans or goals do you have for the future?

Goals are things which you expect to achieve.  At this moment in time, the only goal I have is to continue teaching and raising my daughters, to continue to advocate for survivors of trauma, and to write until I do not have breath.