Judith Favor

Author

ASKING WRITERS about The Beacons of Larkin Street

By

Working Cover Draft for The Beacons, a new novel by Judith Favor

Working Cover Draft for The Beacons
a new novel
by Judith Favor

 

Reading connects people;
so does writing.

Writing helps clarify ideas,
keep track of details
and discover hidden meanings.

Expressing our truths with love
connects us—physically, mentally,
emotionally and spiritually—
to our readers
and to our deepest selves.

 

We read to know we are not alone.

C.S.Lewis

 

  • The Beacons of Larkin Street is a Nineteen-Seventies historical novel written by a contemplative feminist great-grandmother, an ordained minister who once pastored a church in San Francisco.
  • Where do you see contemplative perspectives influencing the stories? Feminist perspectives?  Grandmotherly points of view?  Ministerly perspectives?
  • Set in San Francisco, twelve aspects of the City structure the novel. What connections do you see between the human characters and the character of San Francisco?
  • Tales of The Beacons move between the perspectives of seven women. Do you find the author’s omniscient POV to be confusing, credible, clear, challenging or something else?
  • If Beka were the sole narrator, the reader would get one singular angle on each character. Do you think Beka’s POV would have strengthened the novel?  Why or why not?
  • If she were the sole voice, Rev Ruth would have told the story very differently. Would you prefer her first-person voice? Why or why not?
  • Which of Rev Ruth’s difficulties as a first-time pastor give you the greatest insight into her character? The most compassion for her?
  • How about Beka’s efforts to guide things as Saint Lydia’s Head Beacon?
  • The seven women have different sexual orientations and diverse attitudes about sexuality and spirituality. Did the author convince you that each is justified in her beliefs and practices?  Why or why not?
  • In Dot and Rev Ruth’s conflict over communion, do you think the resolution took too long, or came too fast? How might you have done it?
  • Who was your favorite character? What about her intrigued you?
  • Which scene was your favorite? What made it memorable?
  • At the end, several story lines are left unresolved. Do you wish the author had resolved the characters’ dilemmas?
  • Do you think Rev Ruth will live or die? Return to guide St. Lydia’s, or go to Cleveland?
  • What do you think will become of Paige? Dot?  Hope and Millienne?  Luz?
  • Are there other subplots you wonder about?
  • This is the first in a trilogy. Which dilemmas and storylines do you most want resolved in a sequel?

Spiritual Direction

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Spiritual direction is an ancient ministry,
a unique one-to-one relationship in which
a trained person assists another person
in the search for an ever-closer union
of love with God.

“Spiritual direction explores a deeper relationship with the spiritual aspect of being human. 
Simply put, spiritual direction is helping people tell their sacred stories every day.

Spiritual direction has emerged in many contexts using language specific to particular cultural and spiritual traditions. Describing spiritual direction requires putting words to a process of fostering a transcendent experience that lies beyond all names and yet the experience longs to be articulated and made concrete in everyday living. It is easier to describe what spiritual direction does than what spiritual direction is. Our role is not to define spiritual direction, but to describe the experience.

Spiritual direction helps us learn how to live in peace, with compassion, promoting justice, as humble servants of that which lies beyond all names.”

Liz Budd Ellmann, MDiv
Executive Director, Spiritual Directors International

Stillpoint offers a two-year training program in The Art of Spiritual Direction (click here for details), and also provides references and resources for persons who are seeking spiritual direction. Directors listen carefully to the unfolding of directees’ lives, to help them discern the ways in which God is leading them. Spiritual Directors meet regularly (usually once a month) with persons who are seeking to share and explore their journeys of faith. The term “spiritual direction” has a long, rich history, and the term is still used today even though the practice of spiritual direction consists much more of “holy listening,” rather than direction in the sense of offering guidance or direct advice.

A Spiritual Director is a privileged witness in the spiritual unfolding of another person. The focus is on the relationship between the “directee” and God, much more than on the relationship between the director and directee.

Review of Wolf Hollow By Lauren Wolk

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Reviewed by Judith Favor December 1, 2016, in Friends Journal
Wolf Hollow Book Cover Image

Dutton Children’s Books, 2016
294 pages
$16.99/hardcover; $10.99/eBook

“The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie. I don’t mean the small fibs that children tell. I mean real lies fed by real fears––things I said and did that took me out of the life I’d always known and put me down hard into a new one.”

In Wolf Hollow, Lauren Wolk introduces a girl who becomes brave and good in the face of something terrible. In 1943, Annabelle lives among people who love her in the hills of rural Pennsylvania, a place she loves.  She enjoys a steady life until a dark-hearted girl comes to her hills and changes everything. After Betty punches her and threatens greater hurts, Annabelle finds ways to protect herself and her little brothers by seeking inner guidance.

Toby, a scarred veteran of the first war, lives in the woods nearby.  He looks odd and rarely speaks, but Annabelle senses his kindness. She tries to protect Toby from the lying girl who manipulates people into blaming him for the cruelties she has inflicted. Tensions mount when Betty disappears and Toby, suspected of kidnapping her, takes off.  As men and dogs search for the missing girl and man, Annabelle searches her conscience and finds courage to speak the truth, a young voice calling for justice.

Lauren Wolk is an award-winning poet and author of the adult novel Those Who Favor Fire.  In Wolf Hollow she writes an indelible account of a reflective child who stands strong on behalf of others.  Although this compelling story of moral complexity and quiet heroism is marketed to third through seventh graders, I commend it to Friends of all ages, particularly librarians, First Day teachers, parents and grandparents.

To sum up the power of Wolf Hollow, I affirm the view of Julie Strauss-Gabel, President and Publisher of Dutton Children’s Books: “The stories that lay bare the ugliness of our world are also the stories that stay with us. They inspire acts of everyday bravery and turn small voices big.”

Judith Favor also lives in a place she loves, among people at Claremont Monthly Meeting who love her. She looks forward to reading Wolf Hollow to her grandkids and, some fine day, to her first great-grandchild.

http://www.friendsjournal.org/wolf-hollow/

“As It Is: Spiritual Journaling”
(update)

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As It Is: Spiritual Journaling with Judith Favor (banner)

I’m pleased to say you can still enroll in AS IT IS: Spiritual Journaling!

Participants from Syria, Barbados, England and the US are dealing with difficult others, blessing absent ones and befriending money in their journals today.

E.courses offered by Spirituality&Practice reach across the years and around the world to help people explore spiritual life with clarity and authenticity. Course material remains in the archive, ready when you are.

If you sign up before September 2, you’ll have access to the Practice Circle. After that you can sign up with S&P’s on-demand system, choose your own start date and select when you want to receive the twelve journal-prompt emails.

Please join us today – or later!

http://www.SpiritualityandPractice.com/AsItIsE-Course

“As It Is: Spiritual Journaling”
(class starting soon!)

By

As It Is: Spiritual Journaling with Judith Favor (banner)

Monday, August 8th – Friday, September 2nd, 2106

www.spiritualityandpractice.com (Sign-up Webpage)

“As it is.”

These three little words embedded in the lines of a prayer taught by Jesus remind us to seek the workings of the divine “on earth as it is in heaven” — that is, to approach our many challenges in union with Sacred Presence. But how? One profound and reassuringly helpful tool to foster this sense of unity is spiritual journaling. Through contemplative writing, we get practice in recognizing and responding to our relationship with God, self, others, nature, work, and society just “as it is.”

Spiritual Journaling opens space to relate to deep questions:

  • What does this event or this emotion have to say to me?
  • What can this disappointment teach me about healing?
  • What does this discovery reveal to me about the presence and leading of the Holy Spirit?
  • How can my anguish over the suffering of this person or that group stir my love into action?
  • How can my felt sense of yearning guide me in taking the next best step in this situation?

Whatever spiritual path you are on, this e-course will equip you to explore interior, interpersonal, social, and sacred realities. Holy questions gleaned from scripture, poetry, and literature will offer a variety of perspectives on faith and doubt, action and reflection. In each email sent on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for four weeks, you will receive:

  • An introductory reflection on the day’s topic
  • A tip for getting started with your writing
  • A special query to spark your thoughts and journal writing
  • A suggested action and resources for going deeper if you wish
  • A link to the “Practice Circle” (a community forum open 24/7 to share with others in this e-course and to receive guidance from Judith)

Judith began journaling when she was ten, in a small blue diary with a gold lock and miniature key. She chose a ballpoint pen, because she knew that writing in pencil would let her fudge the truth. In 1974, she began a lifelong love affair with keeping a journal, studying journaling as an art form and not only writing but also inserting soul collages, tree photos, and icons in her journals.

In 1981 she enrolled at Pacific School of Religion and then went on to be pastor of United Church of Christ congregations in San Francisco until the ministries of spiritual formation and writing laid claim to her soul. She now lives with her husband Pete at Pilgrim Place in Claremont, California. Her heart is enriched by her work in spiritual accompaniment, teaching, and contemplative writing.

Judith invites you to freely express your full range of written reactions in this e-course — confused or certain thoughts, positive or negative emotions — because each aspect of the truth of yourself will reveal valuable insights. You may want to follow her journaling prompts exactly; you may also view them as a trampoline and record the bouncing associations that follow. This e-course gives you lots of freedom, most of all the freedom to follow your heart and the arc of your own life’s story.

(4 CEHs for chaplains available.)

Monday, August 8 – Friday, September 2

[The above text content courtesy of www.spiritualityandpractice.com]

Queries about Silence

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Is silence collaborative, complicit?

“You know your part in this,” Sheriff Bowen once told him, and he did. Leo had not spoken up. He should have told someone about his brother torturing dogs. Leo knew he had been a coward.

  • from Silent Voices, Part One: Boy

Is silence the space between words, a pause between heartbeats?

That evening, Cordelia heard Leo’s baritone sounding the overture to an opus, one she would be hearing for nearly thirty years. It took longer for her to discover the complexities of this opus, to make out its woodwind harmonies, its percussive dissonances and its long, silent rests.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Three: Coming Together

Does silence signify absence? Does it entail presence?

Leo didn’t quite know how to be normal under the shadow of goodbye, although he had lived through it once. In Granny Phoebe’s case, he had her love to live up to. In Margaret’s case, his mother-in-law’s temper outweighed most everything else.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Three: Coming Together

Does silence make you nervous? Can it be menacing?

The silence that followed Leo’s departure was like a held breath. Chastened by her husband’s outburst, Cordelia wilted into a state of rebuke. Little did she know it would become a permanent condition.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

Is silence voluntary, even communal?

What are Leo’s mother and I doing here, sitting quietly like this, Cordelia wondered. Praying, she supposed, though neither said anything remotely prayerful. She didn’t want to break the peace by asking.

            – from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

Is silence a refusal to speak, or to respond?

Nothing had ever been said about her husband’s mother leaving the convent. Cordelia felt the pressure to ask, but was relieved by the silence. She was not at all ready to hear about private matters between a failed nun and her God.

  • from Silent Voices, Part Four: Wife

How may silence and gender be related?

On this winter day she felt it again, the race of her pulse that propelled her to keep after him. “You may have uncovered a terrible crime. What will you do, Leo? You must do something about this.”

            He hung his head and went mute, not for the first time. She was desperate for him to speak, to say anything, but he was too busy breathing. No matter how hard she pressed, no matter how urgently she pleaded, Leo kept his mouth shut, saying nothing for such a long time that she eventually stopped waiting for an answer.

  • from Silent Voices: Part Seven: Widow

Can silence be pleasurable, even palpable?

            Nobody knows about our sexual chemistry during my first two pregnancies. Our secret. She used to wonder what the men at the bank thought when Leo came to work with his face aglow, but never dared ask.

  • from Silent Voices: Part Seven: Widow

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

Chapter One of Silent Voices

By

But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
                                  Wendell Berry, from “Rising”

1902    ON THE RUN

The boy slumped, forehead resting against the grimy window of the train.  Leo removed his spectacles and put them in his shirt pocket.  He couldn’t see much without them but that was how he wanted it today.  He was too ashamed to look anyone in the eye.  The past two weeks had been tense with accusations and threats.  Now – all because of his younger brother – his family had been run out of town.  He was furious at Albert, humiliated about being forced to leave his home in Montana.  Leo had found a seat as far as possible from his family and pretended he didn’t even know them.   His brother had a problem with violence.  It was a form of madness, Leo thought.  Albert’s madness had already caused more heartache than he could bear.

The last glimpses of home made his belly ache.  After Dad announced they’d be settling in Oregon, starting over, Leo already hated it there, just as he had begun to hate it here.   He kept his back to the aisle, shrugged Mother’s hand off when she touched his shoulder and ignored her until she went away.  Tears rose, threatening to spill over.  Leo tightened his throat, forcing back the tears, clamping his jaw so hard it made his molars ache.

“Bull.”  That’s what Dad called his younger brother, sounding proud.  “Loner,” he called Leo, sounding mean.  He hated it when they made fun of him.  Sheriff Bowen had said “solitary.”   Leo rolled the word around in his mouth.  Solitary tasted better than loner.

“You and I are a lot alike, son.  We both tend to be solitary,” the sheriff had told him on that awful evening.  “Yes,” he’d repeated, “we have something in common.  That’s why I’m giving you a chance to get right with what you’ve done.”

Tears filled his eyes again.  Remembering the sheriff’s gentle tone made his nose run.  Leo wiped his coat sleeve across his face and hoped no one noticed.  Mother told him to use a handkerchief but he didn’t have one now.   Dad told him boys don’t cry and his younger brother didn’t.   Albert – who told everyone to call him Bull – hadn’t shed a tear since he was in diapers, at least not that Leo had seen.  They had to share a room but that was no place to let his feelings out.  Leo went into the woods whenever he had to cry.  Will there be any woods in Oregon?  What if I can’t find any woods?

Alongside the tracks Leo spotted a railroad storage shed painted the same dried-blood color as the one he’d vomited behind a few weeks back.  He shuddered in his seat, remembering what he’d heard on his way home from school that afternoon.   Slugger, Albert’s buddy, was showing a second-grader what they’d done to a stray dog in the rail yard.  “Bull said this here dog is shivering, let’s get it warm.   You shoulda seen that dumb dog dance.”   And I shoulda told Dad, Leo thought, except he woulda told me to quit making up awful stories.  And to quit trying to get my brother in trouble.  The bile rose in his throat again.  He had to swallow hard to keep his breakfast from coming up.

Leo gazed unseeing at the rough terrain as the Great Northern labored into Idaho.  His thoughts were in Billings, on what he’d been doing before Sunday turned bloody.  His mother made him go to Mass but she didn’t care what he did the rest of the day as long as he was home for supper.  Leo liked to ramble in the woods, moving up mountain trails and down steep ravines.  Sometimes he sat on a rock, breathing the pine-scented air.   Sometimes he’d see a shy animal go by.  Occasionally he caught sight of a doe with her fawn or a buck with a great rack of antlers.  Once he’d even spotted a mountain lion, the most elusive of creatures.

On that terrible Sunday, two weeks after his thirteenth birthday, he’d paused at the top of a ridge to look around.  He picked up a pine knot, turned it this way and that, looking for the face hidden in it.  He thought of pretty Alice, who sat in front of him in history class.   Leo’s face flushed, remembering how embarrassed he’d been after splattering egg yolks on her pretty green dress. Maybe he’d carve a gnome for Alice, something to make up for his clumsiness.

He balanced the pine knot on his left palm and had just slipped the blade of his jack-knife into a seam when he heard something that made his ears stand straight out.  It sounded like an animal in pain.  Leo heard it again.  The scream split the afternoon. Oh no, only a wounded creature makes a noise like that.  Just yesterday he’d heard a customer tell Mrs. Mac that her beagle had disappeared.  “I can’t imagine what happened to my little Buddy,” the woman said.  She’d looked so sad.

He snapped his jack-knife shut and headed toward the trouble.  Dodging branches on the ridge and sliding feet-first down a rocky chute, Leo gave no care to his britches.  They were old, already torn at one knee, now ripping in the seat.  The closer he got to the shriek, the faster and higher it came.  Not just caught in a bear trap, he figured, but tortured somehow.  The more the screams increased in pitch and intensity, the more frantic Leo felt.

Bursting into a clearing, he gasped to see his brother bent over a small dog, one boot on its hindquarters.  He saw the flash of a knife and a quick spurt of blood.  “Stop!”  Leo shrieked in a high, girlish voice.  But Bull did not stop.  He slashed again, carving deep into the dog’s belly.  Leo kicked the Bowie knife away and slammed his body against Albert’s, powered by adrenalin beyond the strength of his medium frame.  Leo pummeled his huskier brother until Slugger pulled him off.  By this time the dog had shuddered and gone quiet.

“What is the name of this boy, your brother’s friend?” Sheriff Bowen asked the night he picked Leo up.  He spoke in a calm, even tone despite the gory details he’d just heard.   To Leo, his words felt like boulders cracking the sidewalk.

“Sam Tucker, but he tells everyone to call him Slugger.”

“Ah yes, the Tucker tribe.  Time to make another visit out to their place.”

“You won’t say it was me that told, will you?”  Leo’s voice trembled.

“No, son, I protect my sources. But I will be coming to see your folks.  I need to have a little talk with Albert.”

“I was afraid of that.”  Leo blinked back tears.  He suddenly knew that nothing would ever be the same.   My life will never be the same.

 

Review of Colum McCann’s Trans Atlantic

By

columMcCannTRANS ATLANTIC

By Colum McCann
Random House, New York, 2013
Hardback, 305 pages   $27.00

Reviewed by Judith Favor.  Published in Friends Journal, September 2014, pp 42-43

I yearn for writing that is transformational, and this beautifully crafted novel met my longing.  Colum McCann braids together the passions of publicly acclaimed men – abolitionist former slave Frederick Douglass, WW1 pilots Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown and peacemaker Senator George Mitchell—with the private stories of feisty fictional women.  McCann brings his characters to life through exquisite prose, gifting the reader with story lines that arc across the centuries and crisscross the Atlantic, interweaving Irish and American views and values.

Memorable scenes pulse with Quaker testimonies.  In 1845 Irish maid Lily Duggan crosses paths with Frederick Douglass whose integrity and commitment to equality inspire her to escape servitude, sail to America and nurse wounded soldiers on a Civil War battlefield.   The novel follows her daughter Emily and granddaughter Lottie whose journeys mirror the progress and shape of history.   In 1919 they are influenced by two aviators who set course for Ireland, attempting a nonstop trans-Atlantic flight in a bomber they modified for peaceful means, a flight designed to heal the wounds of the Great War.

In 1998 Lottie encounters Senator George Mitchell in Belfast as he labors to negotiate the historic Good Friday Peace Accords.   Mitchell granted the author access to his inner reflections, making para bellum a profoundly moving chapter, worthy of repeated readings.  Mitchell’s inner light shines through McCann’s poignant portrait of the contemporary peacemaker who embodies simplicity, equality and integrity under intense international public pressure.

TransAtlantic is not a quick read.  McCann’s truthful, tender pages invite pauses for deep thinking, remembering past peacemakers and imagining a more simple, just and equitable future.  There is so much goodwill, humor and pure life force in every chapter that this book will lift the spirit of Friends and meet the hunger for transformational fiction.

Judith Favor is a member of Claremont Friends Meeting in Southern California.
Literary fiction seeded with Friends’ testimonies feeds her hungry soul.
 

About My Writing

By

What would you call this category of writing?
The Edgefielders is my great-grandmother’s hidden story. Public records show only birth, marriage and death dates so I composed a biographical novel to knit imagination into these bare facts. I invented scenes and dialogues to illustrate what happened before and during her four years at Edgefield.

How does imagination work with facts?
Margaret Mary was born in 1869 in rural Ontario and erased from family lore after she died in 1938 at the Multnomah County Poor Farm. I’d not heard of her until Aunt Margo handed me a stack of genealogy documents including a death certificate. Place of Death: Multnomah County Poor Farm. What? How could this be? Who sent my elderly ancestor to an institution for paupers?

Stories hold us together but hers had been deleted. I had to find out, even though it felt risky to probe into family shadows and secrets. Remaining elders had erased memories of Margaret Mary and they resented my questions. Shame went deep, it seemed, the shame of allowing Grandmother to end her life on the dole among strangers. I hate to stir up conflict but could not let this go. Someone had to bring Margaret Mary out of the dark and into the circle of light.

What did you hope to accomplish here?
Beyond telling a good story, my real purpose was to capture the truth of Margaret Mary’s soul and to illustrate the power of mutual spiritual care. The Edgefielders’ tales show how each person – no matter how poor – can contribute to compassion and generosity in the wider community.

And how did you do that?
Soul-seeing is tactile so I sat with my dearly departed ancestor and kept quiet, waiting for “something” to arise. The song of a canary evoked one story. The sensation of fingertips on a tiny golden cross brought forth romance. Cold bacon grease beckoned me into her melancholy, keeping watch with Margaret Mary where “the ocean moaned, tossing eternal waves of sadness against the shore.”

Where do meditation and imagination meet?
In stillness. And in love. Meditation offers a way to be with dread and fury, anxiety and confusion, to stay present to all those vulnerabilities we usually try to avoid. Meditation invites us to see through the surface of things to the light source of everything. Imagination arises from the power of love, the force of love between the generations. In this book, meditative imagination is the active, conscious practice of finding my way – with Margaret Mary – to the heart of Presence and recording what is revealed there.

Image link to Powell's Books The Edgefielders order page

Silent Voices

By

Silent Voices bookcover image

But this is not the story of a life.
It is the story of lives, knit together,
overlapping in succession, rising
again from grave after grave.
Wendell Berry, from “Rising”

From the start, the stories of Leo James Wright and Cordelia Davis Wright were never solely their own, but continuations of lives that began long before they were born. And how did I come to discover what happened to my grandparents in events preceding my birth? Where does such information come from?

A curious child, I learned to listen between the lines when the Grans spoke, guessing at what they were trying to hide. I watched the way they looked at each other, held my breath during false starts and sudden silences. I waited patiently for bits of truth, sensing emotional codes hidden beneath the social ones, wondering what was beyond regret. I tried to imagine a family where it was safe to ask questions and to tell secrets of the heart, but that was not the world in which I grew up. Leo and Cordelia maintained order through silence. As a young adult I wished I could be part of a less frustrating family, one with fewer conflicts and hurts, maybe one that knew how to have fun. Over the decades I’ve come to realize that most of us cannot go out and form the kind of family we think is ideal. I have had to accept being part of a long chain of wary ancestors. No amount of wishful thinking can change that. Now that I am growing old, I have also grown more curious about genealogy and genetics, more interested in the forces of history, economics and DNA that shaped my forbears. I see this happening all over America, people my age getting interested in family history. You’ve got to start where you are, with the ancestors you’ve been given. So I asked the Grans for their stories. Leo and Cordelia obliged, offering their lives in bits and pieces, hints and glances.

Silent in life, the Grans now rest in eternal stillness, but in these pages they do not stay dead. As far as Ancestry.com is concerned, the lives of Leo and Cordelia Wright are a closed book, but I brought them back from the grave by “hearing them into speech” and composing their stories from a combination of intuition and imagination. Family memoir, like fiction, requires the reader to act as if things really happened this way and each act of reading SILENT VOICES brings Leo and Cordelia Wright back to life. Essayist James Wood terms it “an allowable resurrection” in his New Yorker reflection titled “WHY?” He insists that it’s never too late to listen for untold family stories and to put them on record even if the writer wasn’t there when they happened. I would add that it’s never too late for compassion, either. If a grandchild can offer any gift to her ancestors, let it be an allowable resurrection.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT SILENT VOICES

 “Silent voices” is a fresh idea, a truth-filled story (almost a long parable) inviting us to really listen to our own families.  Judith Wright Favor made the characters real and the times familiar, reawakening details of food, décor and events with my own grandparents.  Not only did I enjoy accompanying her grandparents through their lives, I made mental notes of what I might say if ever I set out on the same journey.  In the family tree, the seven sections, the reminder that the sheriff is fictional, the influence of dogs and birds, this book modeled a way to write about my own grandparents.

Nan Cooney, Grandmother / Author

I enjoyed Silent Voices because I can envision the people while reading it.  I love that about Judith’s writing.  I was glad to know more of the story about how her great grandmother ended up in the poor house, the difficult decision her grandfather had to make, how he and her grandmother had to live with that decision, and how it affected their lives.  I really look forward to reading more books by this author.

Deb Noll, Pastry Chef

 Reading Silent Voices brought to mind my patrician paternal grandparents behind their polished masks, and my maternal grandmother deserted by her philandering husband and left penniless with four young daughters.  Here Judith Wright Favor has dared to inhabit her own grandparents and those with whom their lives intersected, vividly describing and giving voice to the loves and losses that impacted their lives.  Silent Voices is part memoir, part meditation and part masterful story; I think the author has invented a new genre!

John Denham, Pastoral Counselor, Retired

 I was drawn into this story from the beginning.  Having previously read The Edgefielders, the thread that kept drawing me along in Silent Voices was the author’s unspoken hope for her grandparents.  Near the end Cordelia asks herself “How long does hope live?” then responds “For an eternity.”   The Wrights remind me of my grandparents and leads me to reflect on what may be hidden in the crevices of my own family story.

Joan Stock, Spiritual Director

 

 

Do you think about your relatives and wonder what experiences shaped them and contributed to their particular personality characteristics?  In this engaging story Judith Wright Favor has found a way to understand and develop compassion for her kin.  Drawing upon memory, imagination and intuition she gives Leo and Cordelia Wright new life through poignant vignettes in this highly readable memoir.

Judy Leshefka, Meditation Instructor / Psychotherapist

 

Silent Voices gives a glimpse of the lives of a man and a woman, from their difficult early days, to their coming together in the bloom of young adulthood, to raising their family.  The reader is linked to Leo and Cordelia amidst the story of our nation, Depression, WWII and Hiroshima. It is a captivating read.

Peggy Deal Redman, Professor of Education, Emerita

 

 

I saw this as a story of redemption, was very caught up in it and read the book in one sitting.  I appreciated the author’s desire to speak to the silences and secrets of our lives.  Silent Voices is imbued with the person Judith has become, including her spirituality and her understanding of what people do to make meaning from difficult circumstances.

Lynn Rhodes, Seminary Educator

 

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