In Profile

Top novelists in the category talk about their worth

-- Publishers Weekly, 6/17/2002

KAREN HANCOCK
Fantasy Serving Truth
Take Dean Koontz, toss in Star Trek and add C.S. Lewis. They are all part of the lineage of Arena (Bethany, May), a hybrid sci-fi/fantasy/ allegory, brought to intriguing life by first-time novelist Karen Hancock. She comes on the scene at a time when religious fiction is knocking down traditional barriers and crossing market lines. And between Harry Potter, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the public appetite for sci-fi/fantasy appears to be growing.

Though her timing is current, her interest and inclination are lifelong. Hancock wrote her first novel in high school and ambitiously sent it off to Doubleday. Upon its rejection and return she threw it away, mortified. What followed, instead of the writer's path, was school--she has a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology from the University of Arizona--marriage and a life-altering conversion to evangelical Christianity. She was pursuing her newfound faith through Bible study when George Lucas's pioneering Star Wars film hit in the late 1970s. "When I was watching Star Wars, you could start seeing the parallels," she explains. "There is a real strong savior motif."

Hancock is a staunch believer in her genre as well as her faith, notwithstanding the reservations that some evangelicals have about science fiction and fantasy. "Science fiction and fantasy are among the best media for conveying spiritual truth," she maintains. "I don't think we have to say 'Christ' and the typical words, but the truth has to be there." She cites such authors as John Bunyan, asserting, "Fantasy started out Christian."

Hancock, who lives in Tucson, Ariz., with her husband and has a college-age son she home-schooled for eight years, has been working steadily on her craft. Arena took five years. One of her professional angels has been sci-fi novelist Kathy Tyers, also of Bethany House and author of the Firebird trilogy. The two friends have traded critiques since before Tyers's trilogy helped develop the Christian sci-fi niche. Tyers has been pushing her along, introducing her to Bethany's Steve Laube, who acquired Hancock's work for the house.

Laube, an editorial director, actually handles adult nonfiction for Bethany, but reads science fiction on the side as an avid fan. "I've been waiting almost six years to find the right manuscript," he explains. Even after the house began publishing Tyers, he held onto Hancock's manuscript for a while, "because we needed to see if the genre had feet," he explains. Both he and Carol Johnson, editorial v-p, are expecting Internet marketing to help create an online buzz for Arena, reading-group style. (Hancock has her own Web site.) "Science fiction readers are wired, more than other fiction readers," Johnson says. "If they hear enough accolades, they try a book out." -- Marcia Z. Nelson

ROBERT WHITLOW
Laying Down the Law for Fiction
Adopting the mantra "write what you know," Southern lawyer Robert Whitlow has penned a trio of legal thrillers that has drawn considerable attention, including comparison to another, albeit more famous, Southern lawyer and writer.

PW's own review of Whitlow's work referred to it as "the Christian answer to John Grisham," a comparison that both flatters and frustrates Whitlow. "Of course, I welcome the comparison between us," states Whitlow, "but I chafe at the label 'Christian fiction.' To me, faith is a part of life, therefore it ought to be a part of the story."

While Grisham and Whitlow share the common bonds of being writers, Southern lawyers and professing Christians, Grisham isn't burdened by the "Christian" label, since he is published by Doubleday and doesn't write for the evangelical market.

Whitlow's success has come more gradually and less spectacularly than Grisham's. It was in 1996 that Whitlow downsized his law practice so he could focus more on writing, but it was not until 2000 that his first book with W Publishing Group, a unit of Thomas Nelson, became a CBA bestseller. And barring some Grisham-like fame, Whitlow says he plans to continue practicing law part-time.

Sales of Whitlow's three books now number in the low six figures. The newest, The Sacrifice, was published in April, and backlist sales of the first and second books, The List and The Trial, are steady, according to W's director of fiction, Ami McConnell. Coming off 16 weeks on the CBA bestseller list and with a 2001 Christy Award in the contemporary fiction category for The Trial, expectations are high for The Sacrifice. Using a story line that could easily have been lifted from today's headlines, Whitlow deals with the demon of racism in Southern life.

In The Sacrifice, young attorney Scott Ellis secures his first noteworthy criminal case and struggles to ascertain the guilt or innocence of his client, a white youth with a shaved head and lightning bolt tattoos who is charged with assault during a local black congregation's creekside baptismal service.

To support the book's release, Whitlow spoke and signed at the American Library Association convention in Atlanta in June. "He also is slated to make special appearances at several general-market and Christian bookstores, primarily in Southern states," says McConnell, who is Whitlow's editor. She reports that Whitlow is contracted with W for two more titles, with the next set for release in May 2003. Whitlow has written "about half" of the as-yet-untitled manuscript, which he says will continue his focus on legal issues. -- Sean Fowlds

AUGUSTA TROBAUGH
Fulfilling Youthful Dreams
She came late to fiction writing, so maybe she's making up for lost time or pouring forth stories subconsciously tucked away for decades. Perhaps that's why she awakens to find her fingers typing on an imaginary keyboard. Or why she sleeps with a pen in one hand, a flashlight in the other and a notebook under the pillow to capture the characters and scenes she literally dreams up.

Happy beyond her dreams at age 63, the late-blooming novelist retired May 31 from her job as a grant writer for a public library, so she can devote herself to the books she writes under a pseudonym derived by combining the name of a Georgia city with a surname plucked from her family tree. "I still can't believe all of this has happened," says the Georgia-based author pen-named Augusta Trobaugh on the day she has sent back to her publisher the proofs for her fourth novel to be published since 1997.

The privacy-loving writer has fulfilled a lucrative, two-book contract with Penguin Putnam's E.P. Dutton imprint with Swan Place, scheduled for September release. It tells the story of a 17-year-old widowed former roadhouse dancer trying to mother three stepchildren. "Her heart is in the right place, but her middle name is 'dysfunctional,' " Trobaugh tells PW.

Pandora Films recently optioned Trobaugh's first Dutton book, Sophie and the Rising Sun (2001), with Wendy Finerman (Forrest Gump) set to produce and Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) writing the screenplay. Yun-Fat Chow (Anna and the King; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) is being considered for a lead role in this story about a WWII romance in Georgia between an Asian gardener and the town spinster.

Trobaugh says she's still in the pinch-me stage. Writing aspirations in her 20s were tucked away, unmissed, while she married and raised a family. Then, in the space of five years came divorce and the death of four beloved female relatives, including her mother. "I was cast adrift," Trobaugh says. She turned to writing for comfort. After a friend got one of Trobaugh's short stories published in a small literary magazine, someone sent it to Baker Book House. Baker asked if Trobaugh had any novels. Three were under her bed, but at the time she was too poor to photocopy more than the first few chapters.

Through Baker's publication of her critically acclaimed first two novels, Praise Jerusalem! (1997) and Resting in the Bosom of the Lamb (1999), Trobaugh became known to a Christian readership. She says she appreciates Baker, but "I have struggled financially for so many years, and when Penguin Putnam made their offer, there was no way I was not going to take it."

Dutton doesn't position Trobaugh's books Christian fiction, but as "good, clean fiction" that depicts small-town Southern life and celebrates the human spirit, says Kathleen M. Schmidt, associate director of publicity.

Trobaugh is a self-described conservative, an old-fashioned person, but one who likes mystery and abhors predictable stories. She calls herself a "mongrel Christian" who attends a Baptist Bible study, is moving from Episcopalian to Anglican--"the Episcopal Church is becoming way too loosey-goosey for me"--and wears a Virgin Mary medal as her only jewelry. Looking forward to a summer finishing up her new book, River Jordan, not yet under contract, Trobaugh says, "I am never happier than when I am in a story, especially a story when people fall on their faces and pick themselves back up. I truly believe that God loves us the most when we are face-down in the mud we made." -- Juli Cragg Hilliard

WILLIAM CUTRER, SANDRA GLAHN
Tackling Wrenching Issues
In a third medical thriller, a pair of writers--one an M.D. and the other his former patient--dare to broach one of the most divisive subjects in American life: abortion. Says Glahn, "We're expecting a lot of heat, sure. That's why we would never have done it as a first book."

False Positive (May) is the team's first book for WaterBrook, after two novels and a nonfiction title for Kregel, which released the coauthors from their contract to allow them to seek a crossover audience through a bigger publisher. The earlier thrillers were the Christy Award finalist Lethal Harvest (2000), which focused on human cloning and embryonic stem-cell research, and the sequel, Deadly Cure (2001), which took up end-of-life issues and adult stem-cell research.

Cutrer and Glahn make an unusual fiction team. William Cutrer is an obstetrician-gynecologist who specialized in infertility treatment and now teaches bioethics and spiritual formation at the Southern Baptist Seminary (he no longer has an active practice). Glahn is a journalist who edits the Dallas Theological Seminary's magazine, Kindred Spirit, and serves on the school's adjunct faculty. Initially doctor and patient, they became friends on medical missions trips they took with their spouses to the former Soviet Union.

When Glahn and her husband, now adoptive parents of one child, encountered reproductive problems, she was frustrated with the limitations of books with evangelical Christian perspectives. So she and Cutrer, then also living in Dallas, wrote one: When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden: Encouragement for Couples Facing Infertility (Broadman & Holman, 1997). They followed it with Sexual Intimacy in Marriage for Kregel, published in 1998 and updated in 2001. The coauthors had begun to emerge as evangelical voices on reproduction issues when, while flying back to Dallas from a cancer workshop, they started discussing stem-cell research. A nonfiction approach would be too dry--what about fiction?

Lethal Harvest was released the day it was announced the human genome project was almost complete, Glahn says, and Kregel published Deadly Cure the same month President Bush announced his stand on adult stem-cell research.

Even before Cutrer and his wife moved to Louisville, Ky., three years ago, most of the novelist pair's work was done via e-mail, with editing and feedback from their spouses. Though Cutrer provides more medical expertise and experiences and Glahn is more the writer, their back-and-forth leads to true collaboration, they both say. It doesn't come without pain and conflict. But, Cutrer tells PW, "We always realize the finished product is better than anything either of us would have done on our own."

Cutrer says False Positive is set in one clinic where abortions are performed and in another clinic that encourages other options. The central character is an ob-gyn resident. Though both believe that human life and personhood begin at the one-celled stage, Cutrer and Glahn tried to put compassionate, skilled characters on both sides of this complicated issue. Glahn says they expect to be accused of compromising their beliefs by seeing any good at all in people who provide or condone abortions.

Glahn and Cutrer say they work to write complicated people, some with problematic pasts. "We wanted to also provide some healing and hope for people who've made the decision to abort," Glahn says.

While they await inspiration for the next thriller, Glahn and Cutrer plan two nonfiction books Zondervan: one on fertility for 2003 and one on contraception for 2004. --Juli Cragg Hilliard