@story MARLA CANTRELL
Ozark author Gwen Ford Faukenberry lives on an unpaved road just outside the city. Hers is one of three houses set on 450 acres of family land. “We call it the Triple F Ranch, because my family lives here, and my brother and his family, and my mom and dad. Ford, Ford, Faulkenberry,” Gwen says, tapping her fingers as she says each name.
Her home, built from limestone gathered from the land, sits on the crest of a hill. “It took us about six months to get enough stone for all three houses,” she says. “We were using a pickup and a trailer. Those were some long weekends.”
Long, but worth it. The three families now live close enough to see each other every day, if time permits. But time is a little scarce these days. Gwen, who just turned forty, is expecting a baby in a few weeks. Her three children, who are eleven, nine and four, can’t wait for their new sister. She’s also teaching composition and literature at Arkansas Tech University – Ozark Campus, and she’s finishing two books due out this year.
Two books. It sounds overwhelming, but Gwen smiles as she describes the scheduling it takes to keep everything in check. “If I go too long without writing,” she says, ”I feel a little crazy and I’m not too effective in the other areas of my life.”
She makes a convincing argument until she mentions she’s currently still promoting her fifth book, a devotional titled Jesus, Be Near Me.
At this point in the conversation, when others might be hyperventilating, Gwen absolutely sparkles. To be fair, there are sequins on both her blouse and her shoes, but that’s not the reason. She understands how incredible it is that she’s in this position, especially since she didn’t set out to be a writer.
She planned on becoming a doctor. Her senior year at the University of Central Arkansas, however, she switched her major to English, which is what you might expect from a writer. But then, after graduating, she earned a scholarship to the UA School of Law. After a year there, she realized her lot in life was in a far less lucrative field. “I knew I had to do something creative. I quit law school, worked as a waitress, and then landed a job at Day Spring in Siloam Springs writing mostly greeting cards.”
That was the first time she was paid to write. She was in heaven. Then the cutbacks came and her position was eliminated.
So she returned home to Ozark where she and her husband, Stone, opened a bed and breakfast. “I met the most fascinating people that I would never have met otherwise.” Eventually, she returned to school, where she earned her master’s degree, this time in liberal arts. Her project? She wrote a novel, set in Ozark, which is one of the two books she’ll release this year.
And somewhere, in the whirlwind of all that was happening, she and her husband managed several trips abroad. “While other couples were buying houses and cars, we were saving our money and seeing the world.
“After I graduated from UCA, we spent ten weeks backpacking across Europe,” she says. “We’ve been to Israel, Africa, Japan, Spain, Russia. Traveling can be an epic adventure, but it’s also filled with ordinary experiences. There are days when not a lot happens. But I noticed things, like the dust coming up in clouds around my shoes. The smells of food, the sounds all around me. And I kept journals about it all.
“It broadened my worldview, and I think that helps as a writer. We didn’t have much money, so we hitchhiked some, we stayed in cheap places with eccentric characters, we rode a lot of trains. It’s great, but I also love coming home.”
Which brings us back to Arkansas, and to the connection she made at Day Springs. A friend she made there had started Summerside Press, and he was going to publish a series of Christian romance novels set in real places across the U.S. He asked Gwen to submit a book proposal. Hers went in with at least 100 others. She landed a contract. Love Finds You in Romeo, Colorado came out in 2008.
Her next novel was Love Finds You in Branson. In both books, she tells compelling stories – the endings will surprise you – that showcase good people with good intentions looking for love (and faith) in a complicated world.
The writing is lyrical at times. “The oaks,” she writes, “which seemed to reach out and beckon her, looked in the midmorning light like a group of old ladies gathered for tea.” She describes fence posts that stretch along miles of highway as looking like a form of earth acupuncture. And she talks about Georgia O’Keefe and D.H. Lawrence lying beneath an old pine, gazing up through the verdant branches, and the painting that resulted from that ordinary event.
Gwen looks to current writers like Jan Karon for inspiration. She likes books about community, family, the inner workings of everyday life. The great writer Jane Austin also influences Gwen. She loves the idea of finding the extraordinary in the commonplace, of showing how incredible we all are when you take the time to see how our hearts and minds work.
She also loves Arkansas, and uses her home state in both books. And in the Romeo book, the main character is a professor who teaches writing.
Gwen talks about her own students. “I think writing and teaching are symbiotic,” she says. “They come in with such fresh, new ideas. I get to balance that with the classics.” She introduces them to “The Noiseless Patient Spider,” by poet Walt Whitman. “This spider is sending out gossamer threads looking for a connection,” she says. “I think about what that means to all of us. You might never know the connections you make.”
Gwen’s gossamer threads travel far. Just last year Gwen received a letter from a reader in Australia, who’d recently lost her mother. Soon after the funeral, she found herself in Malaysia, in a small shop where she picked up one of Gwen’s three devotional books, A Beautiful Life. She found a passage that brought her great comfort. “That’s something I didn’t expect,” Gwen says, and her voice breaks. “That someone from Australia would be in Malaysia and find my book at just the right time.”
Gwen tells the story while standing on the deck that spans the length of her house. Above her, the bald eagles soar above the treetops of oak and cedar. Below, the Arkansas rushes by, swishing against the banks in the exact spot where the river curves around the town of Ozark.
A few yards away, Dot, the family’s big white dog, sniffs the ground beside the pen where the goats rest. A pickup shuffles along, the sound of its muffler loud in the otherwise quiet day. Tonight, when the kids are asleep, Gwen will be back at it. There are books to write, there are editors waiting. And there might be another traveler somewhere, she thinks, looking for a souvenir, who finds instead the comfort of kind words.
Gwen’s books are available at cbd.com, amazon.com,Medi-Quik Pharmacy in Ozark, Lifeway Christian Bookstores, and Barnes and Noble.