Jane Kirkpatrick
11 min read ⭑
“The 18th-century lyrical poet von Goethe noted that what people don’t realize is once you make a commitment to something, Providence moves. Forty books later, I still get up early and trust I’m not alone in the telling.”
A little over 40 years ago, Jane Kirkpatrick and her husband uprooted their lives and moved to a 160-acre homestead in Northern Oregon with a word from the Holy Spirit burning in her heart: “Write.”
Since then, she’s written countless published essays and 40 books, including 34 historical novels. Many of these novels have won prestigious awards and, even more importantly, have changed people’s hearts and lives.
Read on to learn how Jane leans on God and the power of community as she writes new novels, speaks internationally and cares for her beloved husband as his health declines. She also shares how she finds inspiration in the lives of real people in the past whose stories can still impact us today — and the books, newsletters and social media accounts she consumes to stay encouraged.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
The meals we enjoy are about so much more than the food we eat. So how does a “go-to” meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
We enjoy casual meals in small-town restaurants like the ones our family ate at with names like Goose Pit Saloon. Located 25 miles from our remote ranch, it was a gathering place for local wheat ranchers in North Oregon, where my husband and I began a journey of “homesteading,” seven miles from our mailbox and 11 miles from a paved road.
We were outsiders, not knowing anyone except the people we bought our 160 acres from. But in an ambiance of community, we’d meet up with my husband’s son and his family at the Saloon with the sounds of football on the giant TV in the background that forced us to lean into each other. We shared stories of our week surrounded by community. Stories from those 27 ranching years inspired my first book, a memoir that included strangers spreading food across our harvest table for a workday following our survival of an airplane crash.
Living now back in suburbia, we don’t go out very much to restaurants due to my husband’s physical health deteriorating. So I serve his meals on a tray that recently fell apart. Neighbors in our village came to fix it with a little glue and strapping tape and stayed to chat. There’s something on the television, but it’s muted and our conversations still require leaning in, in a new way. I’m reminded that the word “family” comes from the Latin famalus, meaning “servant.” Meals are servant symbols that bring a richness to our lives.
Nic Y-C; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity do you love engaging in that also helps you find essential spiritual renewal?
Turning dog walks into awe walks happened over a year or so ago. The dog walking was always a joy, seeing what our Cavalier paid attention to, who he sniffed and where. Sadly, I often mind-mumbled during those walks beside green spaces and neighborhood plantings of lilacs or, when we are in California, the desert designs of nature and neighbors.
To interrupt those mumblings, I started finding five things I could see, four I could hear, three I could smell, two I could touch and one I could taste, rotating the senses from day to day. Doing that opened my walk to luscious orange blossoms, the brilliance of white clouds rolling over the Cascade Mountains (when in Oregon) or the San Jacinto Mountains in California. Before long, I began noticing small things I hadn’t seen or heard before. The treasure of a hummingbird flitting from an olive branch to a wooden fence post as it followed us — or seeing for the first time, a piece of metal dotted with spilled paint and oxidizing hues that looked like silk screen.
Paying attention, finding awe in the everyday moments, has become a spiritual journey. Recently, I added photographing some of the awe walk moments and posting in Instagram and in my Story Sparks newsletters. My grandmother, at the turn of the last century, ran her own photographic studio. So did my grandfather. My husband was a Navy photographer. I feel a linkage to my ancestors and to my husband, who isn’t able to spend time with his love of photography anymore. I’m in awe of the lines and colors and designs that I share with strangers and read of their awe walks too.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power head-on?
If I had a superpower, I always thought it would be my competency, my ability to fix things. While heading up a mental health clinic, I once had to let a staff person go who was mismatched to the position I’d hired him for. That was as much my fault as his. Eventually, we found a direction that used his skills — somewhere else. Years later, while standing in line at a theater, he introduced me to his wife and said, “This is the woman who fired me and made me like it.”
But too often, I don’t feel skilled at de-escalating situations. Once, while heading a national organization, the board developed a schism. Nothing I did seemed to help, and I felt so responsible. We were all communicators! Why couldn’t I “fix it”?
I spend hours awake obsessing over what I said or didn’t say. Want to see me blow up? Suggest I’m incompetent using the gifts I’ve been given. I’m working on it.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
It’s the joy of my life to write about historical people, helping them step from their generation to our own to teach us and touch us with their lives. I stumbled into it. We lived on our ranch, and I read about a couple who, 100 years before us, had been trying to build a life on a remote river like we were. They were successful because they lived well with their neighbors, who were the Wasco, Warm Springs and Paiute people.
I worked for that very confederation of tribes. I thought it was a great story someone else should write. My husband encouraged me to do it even though I’d never written fiction. So I set my alarm for 4 a.m. and committed to be at the computer by 5 and write the story for two hours before I went to work. It was my first novel. It found a publisher and is still in print.
The 18th-century lyrical poet von Goethe noted that what people don’t realize is once you make a commitment to something, Providence moves. Forty books later, I still get up early and trust I’m not alone in the telling.
And based on reader responses, these stories have inspired others as well. One man told me that, because of my stories, he felt he had a community, and another guy wrote to tell me he thought he’d be a better husband, father and man because he read one of my books. These reviews are affirmations that I’m following the Spirit.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
Some people comment that writing is a lonely experience. Yet I am never less alone than when I’m writing. Partly because I have interesting characters to spend my time with. But more, when I am in the zone, I may write things I didn’t know I knew. To me, this is the Spirit invigorating my work.
When the harpies say to me, “What you just wrote is terrible. No one will give up cleaning their toilets to read that,” I can turn to that Spirit to remind myself that it isn’t my job to write the great American novel or get picked for a celebrity book group. It’s my job to show up, to assume the position of a writer, to tell the story I’ve been given the best way I know how and to trust that I am not alone in the telling.
On one occasion, as an administrator in the mental health field in the 1980s, I struggled with what I was supposed to be doing with my life, and my husband and I considered leaving everything behind to try this homesteading thing. I remember asking, “But what will I do there on that remote 160 acres of sagebrush and sand?” I felt the answer, with the word “write” written on my heart.
Up until then, I had only written wretched little poems and letters to legislators who would often reply with a phone call saying my words had informed or moved them in new ways. So I knew that words had power. I just didn’t know that when the power comes from something greater than ourselves, it truly transcends. Because it never occurred to me before to write for publication, the word magnetized meaning, and listening to it changed my life forever.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
My world is pretty chaotic right now. My husband is in hospice care at home, and I’m his primary caregiver. I’m finishing a writing contract and waiting for editorial queries to address. In a month, God willing, we are returning to our home in Oregon and flying back for the first time instead of driving. New people are in and out of our home almost daily.
The practice that helps me find that “still place in a turning world,” as the poet T.S. Elliot wrote, is poetry and prayer. It’s choosing a poetry book, selecting at random a poem, then sitting with the words, palms open, looking out across my husband’s hospital bed to the swaying palm trees and snow-capped mountains. I often commit lines of poetry to my heart to carry me through the day, to let the Holy Spirit grant me energy, wisdom and courage to set aside my insufficiencies and experience Jesus as a companion walking beside me.
My faith community also started a Poetry, Peace and Prayer gathering by Zoom, where I join others in an opening blessing and a poem our pastor selects and reads three times. People respond — or not — to how the poem reaches them. Our hearts are then open to prayers, and there’s a final blessing. Currently, it is for Lent. But we’ve done this practice for Advent and other occasions.
This gathering and the practice of morning poetry and prayer awash with the natural world has been a gift to open my heart to a living, breathing God. I’d encourage such a gathering for any group, taking advantage of technology that unites.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top resources stand out to you? What changed reality and your heart?
“Celebration of Discipline,” a book by John Foster, came into my life at a time when I needed spiritual clarity, deeper faith and purpose. Perhaps more impactful than anything — I think it is in this book of his — was when he wrote, “Prayer is how God changes us.” My husband and I were embarking on a journey I described as “stepping out onto a cloud of faith, believing we wouldn’t fall through.” Prayer became a practical tool of survival. Re-reading this book helped put Scripture into practice and helped me trust that I would never be alone despite the messes and poor choices I’d make.
Because of my mental health background, the risk we took and my writing about how God changed our lives through it, I began leading women’s and couples’ retreats. I thought I was in service to God’s people, but I was also being shaped by God’s grace with every presentation. It wasn’t only about me giving to others; it was about God using me through the challenges. The “Celebration of Discipline” book helped frame my faith journey.
We all have things we cling to to survive or even thrive in our fast-paced, techno-driven world. How have you been successful in harnessing technology to aid in your spiritual growth?
Nadia Bolz-Weber’s “The Corners” and Linda S. Clare’s “The Deep End” are faith-based Substack newsletters that stretch my heart. Susan J. Tweit’s “Practicing Terraphilia” and Bob Welche’s “Heart, Humor and Hope” bring me insights often through nature and laughter, reminding me that the way I see the world is not the only way to see it. After all, the word “salvation” in biblical Hebrew means “to make wide.” These are the technology sites that make me open to a wider faith.
The Instagram posts of Pastor Steven Koski that lead with poetry are quite often the go-to inspiration that I read. Then I take deep breaths with my palms open to receive renewal, just for the moment, with the prayer that the poetic pause will extend to the hour, the day, my life.
I’m not on X, and I don’t spend much time on Facebook, although I’m there as an author. I just recently joined Bluesky, but these tech activities — excluding the ones I mentioned above that feed me — drain me. A friend called her time with tech her hairshirt. But those substack letters and Steven Koski’s Instagram posts are food for the soul.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
Here’s my scoop: I’m muddling through the middle of a three-book series known as “The Women of Cannon Beach.” I’ve written series before, but this one came after taking a year off from writing one to two books a year since 1995.
Having written while caregiving and not feeling creative, my confidence level is pretty fragile. I hate to disappoint my publisher and my fans, and while writing, I often felt torn between the world of reality and my vivid imaginary life. I’m leaning on another time when I “felt” the word of God in answer to my prayers of fear. “I will take care of things.” And so I am trusting God will … and my dream is that my story will speak to others of that confidence. Oh, and that a screenplay I wrote during my “off writing year” based on another of my novels will find producers and that the first book in this new series will find its readers and bless them.
Leaving the life she knew to homestead 160 acres was a scary step of faith for Jane, as she details in her interview above. Abram must’ve felt the same way when he ventured out of Ur to the land God had promised him — especially since he didn’t know where that land was yet.
That kind of faith is what changes lives, both others’ and our own. It’s the kind of faith that defies despair and, as the writer of Hebrews says, “[desires] a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:16, ESV).
So how are you venturing out in this season of your life, reader? It may not be as big as moving to a 160-acre homestead. Maybe it’s helping out with a new kind of ministry or reaching out to that new person at church and inviting them to coffee. Whatever it is, no matter how big or small, trust that God is with you in it.
After taking a leap of faith to homestead 160 remote acres, Jane Kirkpatrick began writing for other people to read. She is now the award-winning author of 40 titles, including 34 novels based on the lives of historical women. She’s received the Will Rogers Lifetime Achievement Award for her contribution to Western Literature. Her novels have won the Carol for Christian Fiction, The Will Rogers Gold Medallion, the Wrangler and several WILLA awards and have been a finalist for the Spur, Oregon Book Award and Christy. Jane, her husband and their Cavalier, Rupert, split their time between Oregon and California.
