Local Author Wins National Award

Maureen Newman is off to Ottawa for the Write! Canada Conference

A local writer is showing how grief can deepen one’s faith into something greater than verses.

Maureen Newman, of Granville Ferry, has won the Canadian 2010 Word Guild award for her short story, On My Mother’s Side. Although she’s well known in the Folk Art circles, a regular at the annual festival in Lunenburg each year, writing is a new pursuit for her.

She will travel to Ontario next month to the 26th annual Write! Canada Conference, where she’ll have a chance to pitch her unpublished full-length manuscript to publishers, editors, and agents.

Newman admits she was surprised at winning the God Uses Ink contest, an annual competition to promote unpublished Christian writers. She entered hoping to build up a writer’s portfolio to help her find a publisher for her novel.

“I had no idea how hard this would be when I started,” she said. “I just knew I wanted to write a book. Once the novel is written, what do you do with it?”

She was advised that building name recognition through awards and having other work published would help to generate interest in her book. On My Mother’s Side, her first short story, centers on a daughter contemplating her own future reflected in the mirror after learning her mother has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Newman’s first novel, a historical Christian fiction, centers on the healing power of faith to overcome grief. Her heroine goes back in time to witness Christ’s journey from childhood, after she tragically loses her husband and son.

“After her husband and son were killed, she left her faith,” she said. “Often our first reaction is anger, why should our loved ones be taken?”

If we close ourselves off in anger, we close ourselves off from the comfort of God’s love, she added. Her heroine regains her faith after realizing that Jesus was once a human being who was walking the same road as the rest of us, feeling the same sorrows and the same pain.

Newman added that once she sat down to write, the words just flowed. But then she knows how it feels to lose a son. In 1996, her own son was killed in a car accident. She remembers the hurried trip to Nova Scotia and the moment his loss hit home.

“ We were at the funeral home and I knew I was about to see my boy lying there,” she said. “Over and over I started saying the 23rd Psalm. A peace came over me and I knew there was a little bubble of peace around me that would keep me safe.”

She added this famous verse from the Bible stopped being words for her and was instead transformed into a deeper faith. If we stay open to God and not close ourselves off in times of trouble, our faith will overcome the grief.

“It’s not that you wouldn’t give anything to have them back,” she said. “But if you have faith through the pain and loss, it’ll grow deeper. It was hard to go through, but I have a deeper faith in God because of it.”

• 27 May 2010
• The Annapolis County Spectator
• By Heather Killen