Interview with Andrea Kuhn Boeshaar

“I don’t think I can do this, Lord.”

Less than a month before deadline, and with an already cramped schedule, Andrea Boeshaar was facing the biggest rewrite in her career, and suddenly, all her insecurities rose to the surface. After 31 releases and more than 20 years of writing, she’d created a seemingly insurmountable problem. One that sideswiped her.

Boeshaar had been juggling a lot—going to school, working part time, and writing—but felt she was handling everything well. Through hard work and diligence, she turned her book in on time, certain it was brilliant. She was like, “Ah, here’s my baby, and isn’t she beautiful.” She thought for sure her publisher would be happy.

She was wrong.

Oops! “That’s not what we were expecting.”

“I threw everyone for a loop because I’m like, ‘I’ll just kill off that one character.’” This led to a string of changes. “I was thinking, if I do that, I should do this, and then one thing led to another.” This caused problems because her idea for the remaining books in the series wasn’t what her publisher had in mind.

Had she conferred with them before making the changes, she could’ve saved everyone a great deal of work and stress. The ironic part is, her insecurities landed her in this mess, and in turn increased her insecurities when her editors asked her to revise her manuscript completely. “They didn’t ask me to just go back to the original,” Andrea said. “But sort of take the first and second versions and combine them.”

In addition, they wanted her to write a saga, which meant she’d have to use the same main characters for all three of her books. This was something she’d never done before, something she wasn’t certain she could do—and she didn’t have much time.

“I had all these school papers due, a book due, work due, my husband was in the hospital,” Andrea said. “That stress weighs on you. It was almost like I couldn’t function. It was so overwhelming it put the brakes on. I couldn’t see my way out of the fog.”

Deliverance—and inspiration—comes

Over the next week, she wrestled with her insecurities and drew closer to God. That Sunday, she turned on the television and turned to an inspirational channel where country music was playing. The song she heard made her pause. It was called “We Will Overcome” by Mo Howard, and through it, God reminded her of a powerful truth: Greater is He who is in her than he who is in the world. (1 John 4:4)

The song encouraged her so much, she contacted the artist through his website. She was struck by how God had used this musician’s creativity to bring her to a place He wanted—a place of greater dependency. It was here that she was able to answer the poignant question posed to her by her publisher: “Who are these stories about?”

“That question cut to the bare bones,” Andrea said. And the more she thought about it, the more she realized her saga was about Carrie Anne. “In looking through the years that I’m writing about—the 1860s—there’s enough change in America and the Shenandoah Valley that each story in my saga can be really unique.” She credits this realization to the time she spent drawing closer to Christ and she longs for her readers to experience that same level of divine closeness.

“I hope my writing will bring others to a deeper relationship with the Lord,” Andrea said. “I’m always grateful and amazed when God gives me a story that touches someone else. That makes it all worth it.”

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Novelist and speaker Jennifer Slattery, also writing as Jen Pheobus, uses humor, grace, and truth to inspire God’s children to live abundant, Christ-centered lives. She does content editing for Firefly, a southern fiction imprint with Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas, and is a frequent contributor to Crosswalk.com. Visit her online.