Author and Editor, JoHannah Reardon
This post marks another installment of my “7 Questions With an Author…” series, where I ask published authors an unchanging set of questions and share their responses here.
Today’s featured author is JoHannah Reardon and her latest book is titled Proverbs for Kids.
JoHannah Reardon is the author of several books as well as the managing editor of ChristianBibleStudies.com, a division of Christianity Today. She blogs about life and faith at www.johannahreardon.com. Here are 7 Questions With an Author: JoHannah Reardon:
1. Tell us about your book?
It’s a family devotional from the Book of Proverbs, designed to be a platform for parents to talk about the issues that 8-12-year-olds face every day. They are designed to be short and simple so that you are more likely to read them as a family consistently throughout the year.
2. What led you to write it?
I wanted to create something that I could use with my own kids to help them talk about the pressures they were facing. Much of what our children see on television, at school, on the internet, and so on shows us how much we need the Book of Proverbs. All we have to do is watch people around us to figure out how to do what is wrong. It is much harder to find those who will tell us what’s right. King Solomon does just that in Proverbs. It’s amazing to see that people really haven’t changed much in 3,000 years.
3. Who is a writer that inspires you and why?
I’m an editor at Christianity Today International, so I have the privilege of reading a plethora of articles from wise and varied people. But to feed my own soul, I never tire of reading A. W. Tozer, C. S. Lewis, and Oswald Chambers.
4. What was the biggest challenge you faced writing this book?
Getting it done! It is 234 pages of material on the entire Book of Proverbs, so it was a daunting task.
5. What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?
Write a little every day and make it a consistent discipline. Even an hour a day will add up after a while and will hone your writing skills.
6. Where do you get your ideas?
For the devotional, I drew them from everyday experiences from my own children’s lives and from their many friends who constantly invaded our home. I also have a fiction line, and the ideas for those also came from my real life experiences as well as from my often too-active imagination.
7. Anything that you’d like readers to know that I haven’t asked?
I love to hear from those who use and read what I’ve written, and I try to always answer. You can contact me at my blog, www.johannahreardon.com.
=====================================================
Question: The book of Proverbs in the Bible is a collection of wise, poetic and profound sayings. What’s a proverb or saying (not necessarily biblical) that you try to live by?
