Hey, there! Long time, no blog! What do you think of the new look around here?

We have a title! Coming in Fall 2020 from Our Sunday Visitor Books is my next project, The Broken Grown-Up’s Guide to Joyful Family Life. This is designed to be a pocket guide to how the Greatest Commandment and the Beatitudes are God’s special healing tools to those of us who’ve survived family abuse and dysfunction.

And old friends of the now-archived Sabbath Rest Book Talk will be almost as delighted as I was to hear that our very own Rebecca Willen will be my editor on this project! I shrieked so loudly when I got this news that my dogs started barking. Then again, they’re terriers, so they bark at falling leaves and the gentle shifting of the earth’s crust…

Fall of 2020 might sound like a long time to you. Having launched books before, I knoooooooowwww painfully well that time is going to fly, and a year from now, a year won’t seem like enough. One thing I need to do is start lining up some speaking gigs. So, like, if you want, um, an articulate speaker on the subject of healing, hope, and forgiveness, think of me?

Speaking of Speaking, I did make it, if only for one morning, to the Catholic Writers Guild Live/Catholic Marketing Network Trade show in August. I made it to the annual Catholic Mom Contributors’ Breakfast, and it is such a treat to see all these good friends I’ve made over the years, not to mention to put faces and actual audible voices with the names of other writers I’ve followed for ages but hadn’t yet had a chance to meet.

Once the breakfast was over, I had cornered desperately like a wild and hungry animal was talking casually with Marge Steinhage Fenelon of My Queen, My Mother and Forgiving Mother fame (look for reviews on both in the coming weeks). While Marge’s story and mine are not identical by any means, we have walked out of the same shadows into the exact same light. I went to her, begging for politely requesting some mentoring. Among other things, she shared about how, before she gets up to speak, she asks Jesus and Mary and a whole range of saints to be there will her. She said something along the lines of, “So I ask my saint posse to assemble—”

And I almost stopped her and asked, “Assemble…? Like… the Avengers?”

You’d be proud. I kept the nerdiness to myself at the time, but here I am, sharing it with you, because, I mean, really—you didn’t expect to keep that much nerdiness to myself, did you?

So after I got home from that desperate sob session casual chat, I started making a list of who’s in my saint posse, and which Avenger corresponds to that saint’s role in my life. I’m going to turn that into something fun for my newsletter subscribers soon. So do think about subscribing to the EMC Reader. If you do, you’ll get my booklet on the 9 Ways of Prayer of St. Dominic for free. Marvel movies? A free book? If that doesn’t tempt you, I don’t know what would.

Either way, who are some of your heavenly role models and intercessors? Who’s who in your posse of saint superheroes?