A Mother’s Thoughts: The Power of the Pen

Well, hello again everyone, Dick Foth here, and stories to make sense of it all. I have the great joy today of talking to one of my favorite women in the whole world, and that's our third daughter, Susanna Foth Ottman. This is the week after Mother's Day and this month of May, I'm going to be having conversations with several women, and so this is a wonderful way to start, and I'd like you to meet here. Here she is. Hello Susanna. Hi. Here we are, and I'm having a conversation with a, what I would consider a young mother, but you're the mother of whom and how many? I have three boys, Jack is 21, Will will be turning 19, and Addison is 16, so maybe not young mother. So there's an incredible amount of testosterone that has come through this space in which we're sitting at your home in near Boise, Idaho. I'm trying to hold my own. You're trying to hold your, and you're married to a guy named Scott, who's in business with a company here. As I mentioned before, Susanna is our third daughter, and we moved from Illinois to Santa Cruz, California, from corn and soybean fields to surf, if you will, back in the late 70s. I think Susanna was just seven years old, and it was a hard transition because they had friends and all of that, and then they had to make new friends, and so at first they didn't like it. But along the way, in that whole time frame, even as she was in her younger years, she discovered something about herself, and it was writing. Here are her thoughts on writing. When did you first know that you wanted to or liked to write? Can you remember the first thing that you wrote? Yeah, I was little. I think I was in second or third grade when I started writing poems. And stories. Also, the school that we went to in Illinois Yankee Ridge had us start storytelling when we were in first grade. They had us write our own books and illustrate them. Really? Yeah. So, I liked that process of kind of putting pictures or putting words down on paper, and I was an avid reader. So I loved reading. So I think my love of writing comes from my love of reading. And when you say writing, you really mean writing because this is pre-computer, so you actually did cursive. I did cursive, yes. I think cursive and number two pencils are on the way back. They may be, maybe. I don't know with who, but someone is going to start using them soon. Right. Yeah, so I started when I was a little kid and then in junior high, more bad poetry, I did a lot of storytelling or writing stories. It's more about poetry, is that what you said? More bad poetry. I thought that's what you mean, more bad poetry, considered a bad book. Well, okay. We're not talking my Angelo here, and you know it's pretty rough stuff back in the middle grades, so. But I also, we weren't allowed to wear makeup when we were in junior high, and so I had several stories featured with heroines that wore all the makeup, like so many, oh yeah, like layers. So many layers. And I would list out in my stories, and she went to the store and bought teal mascara and purple eyeshadow, and it was just basically a list of all of the different kinds of makeup that that character would buy. And so you can tell I was a child of the 80s since teal mascara was my go to. It also may be coming back with number two pencils, isn't it? It's already come back, see? It's come back around. There we go. Yeah, so I think, and I wrote all the way through high school stories, and then my favorite class in high school, I took an elective creative writing, and I think that was where I kind of locked in like, oh, this is, I like this. So you have now authored a number of books, several of which have been published. One of which is called Expectant Blessings, prayers, poems, and devotions for you and your baby to be by Suzanne Fotha, but very cute, it's got a, what do you call this little one? It's like a felt applique. It's a felt applique. First time I've ever used those words together, it's a, it's a homework book, it got licensed by homework, so that's why it looks so cute. So it's called Expectant Blessings, this is for pregnant moms, right? Yeah. And you wanted to call it belly blessings, and the publisher said really? I know, they felt like a lot of people had bellies that they didn't want, and I just thought, well, that's a cute name. Belly blessings sounds good, but they liked Expectant Blessings better. So one of my favorite pieces of prose, or free verse, or poetry, which I don't think is bad poetry, I think this is really good stuff. Thank you. I love the picture, is something that you wrote called Pumpkin Round Baby Sweet, and I'm just going to read a little part of it, then we're going to talk a little more than I'm going to, okay? Okay. So here it is, Pumpkin Round Baby Sweet. Here we are now, just the two of us, the me of us, and now the you of us. Sitting outside on the park bench, singing you and my belly round, pinging and pinging. I am the brand new mom of you, touching and hugging and loving you. Feeling you move is you're stretching and growing, rubbing the tummy that you made start showing. Hearing my voices, I'm laughing and talking, feeling me move is I'm dancing and walking. You are my Pumpkin Round Baby Sweet, my safe and my belly round baby sweet. I love that. I'm going to read more of it, but let's just jump in here. Talk to me about writing as a discipline, or as an art. I mean, art takes discipline. We joke about starving artists because they express their feelings on paper and word or video or whatever, and they don't get any money for it, right? So talk to me about writing a little bit. Well, that poem I wrote when I was pregnant with my first Jack, and it was such a new and exciting experience, and we were so excited that he was going to be a part of our family Scott and I were, and I was actually working at a tech company in the Silicon Valley during that time, and that phrase kind of hit me. And so on my break, I was on my work computer, just typing ideas of what I wanted to say. And so I think a lot of times writing or art starts with an inspiration, like inspirational moment. Like a feeling? It could be a feeling. It could be something that you see and insight. It could be a word that you hear for a writer. It could be anything that elicits emotion that makes you start thinking about things in a new way, and you want to figure it out, and how I figured things out is by writing about it. So that's kind of how I process it. Even in conversations, I feel like I can write a clearer email or a better letter than I can have a conversation sometimes, because the process of me moving my fingers helps me put my feelings into words. And so you're like your mother. Yeah, high five, mom. My mom is sitting adjacent to us here. Yeah, so I take a much longer time to process than my husband, Scott does, who processes verbally, and also as you do. Yeah. He's like to talk your thoughts out loud. That's how you come up with that. I just like to talk. Well, that yeah, there's that role there is that thing. Yeah. So I think for me, it started with that inspiration and then thinking like, well, I can only write when I'm inspired. But once I decided that this was a career that I wanted to pursue, you have to kind of marry that inspiration with like the grind of a real job, because you have deadlines and you have work that actually has to be completed. It just can't be like a fly by the seat of your pants. Like, if I feel it, I'm going to do it. Now it's you're sitting down every day and you're putting, you know, pen to paper mostly fingers to keyboard. So you're pregnant with Jack and this piece of poetry goes on. Here we are now, just the three of us. You of us, dad of us, me of us, head on my tummy. His whispering giggling, loving you, baby, he's feeling you jiggling. He is the brand new dad of you, touching and hugging and loving you, holding me closely feeling you jumping, reading you stories, feeling you bumping, dreaming his dreams of you, running and playing, filling his mind with you, hoping and praying. You are his pumpkin round, baby sweet, his head near your head round, baby sweet. The discipline of writing in terms of getting up and doing some each day, because now you're a coach, you're a writing coach is part of what you do. So mom and I have been encouraged to think about doing another book we've done a couple and you're coaching us and one of the things you said is, you know, try doing what 500 words a day, just doing or a page a day or something, just tell me about that. We can do 100 words a day, as long as you're getting something on paper, Scott was listening to a podcast about one writer and he said that he forces himself to sit in front of the computer for an hour and he can't do anything but write. If he doesn't write anything, that's okay, but he just makes sure that that's the only thing that he's focused on. But I can hold my number two pencil for an hour, that'd be equivalent, because Patterson that mystery writer, James Ben, he's number two pencil. However you're getting your story down, you can be recording it on your phone if you want to. If that's how you write or that's how you get your ideas down. But I think it's just putting in the time, there's not anything magical about it, which I think is opposite of how we think of art. I always envision myself like in a white flowing dress, like in a field of poppies. I could see that. Do you have Tiel Mascara? Zero poppies or white dresses involved in any of my book writing, mostly a lot of sweats. So what I'm hearing from Susanna here is that inspiration is one piece, if I can put it, perspiration is the larger piece, she would call it sweats, that anything that we do that has quality to it, takes a high level of investment of just going after it, just the work of it. One of the things before I write a book, it's always an overwhelming prospect for me. So I usually sit down in front of my computer and cry. Oh, what's the thought? Five minutes. Just give it all out. You're worried, you're nervous. It's going to be a complete and utter failure, just like just get going. So I think that it's okay, I love Anne Lamott's book, Bird by Bird, and how she just talks about, you're just taking, it's not this overwhelming project, it is, it's putting those first four sentences on the page and getting the rhythm started of writing. And just get your words on the paper, you can go back and edit later, just get started. It may be horrible, but just get started. You're never going to write a book or anything if you don't actually start to make it. Yeah. That's like that guy who's speaking at the university commencement, and he said to all the graduates, you will hold in your hand a diploma that costs somebody a hundred thousand bucks, so I have two words for you. Do something. Exactly. So, who do you like to read, or what genre, that's my only French word, besides restaurant, what genres do you like to read? I think that my go to, if I want to read for fun, is going to be fiction, historical fiction. I love mysteries, I love, because I like reading as an escape, and whereas Scott, my husband, likes to learn from reading, and so he reads a lot of nonfiction. And so I write nonfiction, but I prefer to, yeah, slip into someone else's shoes and get to experience what their life is like. It's like your mother, another high five over there. Love it, high five mom. Whoops, that was bad. I was like a high two, that wasn't great. It wasn't solid. No, but I just think for me, that's wrong, Scott learns from nonfiction, but I also learn from fiction. I know a lot of really random facts about Victorian England that I could share with you at any moment. You know, I think I know that author, and Perry, how many times those rich people change clothes in a day, just to stop by and say hello, once you've sent your card. It's amazing. Holy moly. I'm also, a lot of times, I'd attracted to reading about female characters or heroines just because it's easier to slip into those shoes and wonder what that would be like. So I think that was anchored as a kid when I read the Anne of Green Gables series. I just loved that kind of, my love of reading came from just a lot of reading of middle grade fiction when I was growing up, and I still read middle grade. That would be my other genre that I love reading. Middle grade. Middle grade fiction. Six to ninth grade. Six to seven. No, it's like eight to 12 year old. Eight to 12 year old. Yeah, that's what middle grade fiction is, and so many amazing authors. Really? Oh, yeah. Like so many great authors in that genre. So when I was in junior high, in Frick Junior High, Oakland, California, I think I read three to five books a week, and of course they're, you know, they're quick when they're strict in another, but Howard Peeze was my favorite author. His main character was Todd Moran, who was a guy who was on freighters around the world. And I had come back from India with my parents in 1949 on a freighter, five weeks on the open sea from Sri Lanka to Boston with eight passengers, you know, and coming out across the Indian Ocean up through the Red Sea. So as Canal take a hard left, go out through the Med, go through Gibraltar, straight to Gibraltar and on across the Atlantic. So I identified with that character, and at this point you're making about your read books often about people or situations with whom you identified, right? Or you write books, like if you are writing fiction, a lot of times you'll take pieces from your own life and use that as fodder for what you're about. Because you tend to write what you know or what you imagine. I think so. And you can go outside of that because obviously people who are writing historical fiction, they're not going to be writing about their own experiences, but you can still, you know, play with characters and things like that. Part of your own experience is this piece of poetry that I'm reading when you were pregnant with Jack. Yep. So I continue. Here we are now, just the four of us, you of us, we of us, Lord of us. Right in the garden laughing and hugging, touching the belly, you're kicking and tugging. He is the one who created you. He shaped you and loved you created you. He's molding your body small, perfect and growing. Your personality, happy and glowing. He knows the soul of you, joyous and pleasing. He likes to hold you close, loving and squeezing. You are his pumpkin, round, baby sweet, his heart near your heart, round baby sweet. You're good. Oh, thanks. I'm just saying. You're not biased at all. I love that. Well, then I should be getting royalties. Do I get any royalties from this? Well, I don't think I have. So you're definitely not getting. So I'm on the minus thing in the world. Okay. So you have written for guidepost of oceanals called Mornings with Jesus for how many years? It's like, I think it's my, I was thinking, possibly the last 13 years. Okay. Yeah. So you're one of a cluster, if you will, in a changing cluster of women who write these devotionals essentially for women, guys, you know, I read them with mom. Yeah. But that's because I read them with mom. That's our deal. Right. And we always look for yours. But what is your response to that kind of writing? Because it isn't like a book, it's only a page or three or four paragraphs. They're usually around 300 words. Okay. And so, and there's a specific way that we're asked to write with guideposts where we're writing from our own personal experience. And then connecting that with a lesson that we've learned about who Jesus is in our lives, what he's doing in and through us, what we're learning about his character. So it's actually been a really neat exercise, writing exercise because you have to be really concise about the message that you're trying to get across. And I think the coolest thing for me about writing more news with Jesus is the connection that I've had with the readers. It has a really wide readership. And so I will regularly get emails or Facebook messages from different people who will just tell me, oh, what you said today really touched me, you know, it's speaking to me. I have several readers who email me and let me know that they're praying for me on a regular basis. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's so awesome. And then I've gotten real letters in the mail, too. Really? Yeah. Number two pencil letter. Pen's, but also from men. From men? Yeah. Who, like, different gentlemen who have been reading it and have just said they, you know, that it's touched their heart or, you know, encouraged them. And I think that with mornings with Jesus, that is what it's about as encouraging people on a daily basis. What's interesting to me, you know, to Jesus, that's serious, but you're funny. So you have this humor, you write with humor, whether it's your first, but I will call a big book published by Baker or Revell, all I need is Jesus and a good pair of jeans or your second one, my bangs look good and otherwise I tell myself. Yeah. You help me come up with that title. I love that title. That's why I keep saying it. But how do you make humor fit with serious subject? I think that's how I process serious subjects with humor. Yeah. Because I think it lets me breathe. If I can laugh at myself or at the situation that I can, you know, find space to kind of navigate it a little bit better. So and that's how I kind of view my life through that lens. I'm in our house. We have a high value of humor here. Yeah. I was talking to my son, Jack, and my sister, Erica, was saying her kids don't really teaser that much. They don't give her a hard time and that they're nice to her on a regular basis. This is your older sister, right? Yeah. Erica, the oldest, and she has four kids and she said they're all nice to her and I was like, what in the world, like, what is going on? How did I miss out on this? Like, as soon as I'm in the presence of my kids, they're like, oh, they're messing with me constantly. Yeah. And so I called Jack and I said, Jack, and Erica's kids treat her nice every day. And he just said, Mom, she raised her kids nice, you raised us funny. That's true. But I was shooting for both. I was hoping, like, kindness and humor could, you know, be joined together. If you bat 500 in baseball, they pay you millions of dollars. One, two. It is not bad. We're going to wind this down here. Mentors. Did you have a mentor in writing or a couple of folks? I've had a lot of different people speak into my life about writing. I think that seeing you a mom write a book was, that made it seem possible. And then also, you took me, you were speaking in a writing conference and that was my first time going to a writing conference. And so in California? Yeah. And just being exposed to that, I just thought, like, oh, this is what I want to do. And so from that conference, I have people that I connected with, that I still connect with on a regular basis. So the process in the writers conference is that you would submit a story or something to people who are from publishing houses or editors, and they look at it, then you can sit down and talk to them about it. You have a little slot. You can pitch your story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And for a writer's conference, I had submitted a children's book. And then after going to two or three sessions, you have to submit a couple of weeks in advance. I just realized, oh, Lord, I did everything wrong. Like, I didn't know what a proposal was. Like, I tried to do my own illustrations. Like, I was just cringing, but I had just really cool connections with different people there who said, I remember Joanna Weaver, who's, she's awesome. She wrote, having a marry, her and a Martha world. She read my kid's book, and she just told me you have a voice. That's a wonderful phrase. You have a voice. In a day of cacophony, that's a huge word, that means everybody shouting over each other. To know that you have a voice, that whether it's soft or loud or written is a really significant thing. I think all of us in our whole lives look for a place and a time in which we have found our voice. Some people call it a groove, some people call it a sweet spot. Somebody might call it a gifting, but I like the idea of finding one's voice. Even though I didn't have a book to speak of, she said I had a voice. So that gave me the kick and the pants that I needed to like, okay, I'm going to try to do this. So it was from that point until the time I actually got published was 10 years. Okay. Wow. Yeah. Last question. Yeah. Do you have somewhere deep in your soul or up in some prefrontal cortex of your brain or somewhere, the dream book that you would like to write? Oh, yeah. It would be middle grade fiction. So it's, I've been thinking about it for the last, I don't know, 25 years. Do you have a character? I have several ideas. Well, there's one book that I started writing probably maybe like 10 years ago. Lola Mae, she's a pretty naughty preacher's kid who gets into a lot of trouble, very similar to myself. I was going to say, this is mirror on the wall, like, no. So I have a book, a series in mind for her and for her, her friends. And then I also started when my niece Allison was born, my first kid's book that I ever wrote was about a fairy or a trillie named Nisola. And that story is still percolating. Was that the one that lived in Buttercup? Yeah. Yep. Trillies in Buttercup. And I think for me, probably since that was such formative years for me as a kid, the books that I read formed how I saw myself, how I saw the world. I think that would be a pretty cool way to be able to interact with people as through those kinds of books. So let's hear your voice one more time as you wrap this up. Here's the clothes of pumpkin round baby sweet. Here you are now, just the one of you, the perfectly wonderful one of you. Soon we will meet you all brand new and rosy mom and dad love you from soft head to toesie. You are the dream and the joy of us, the sweet little girl or fun boy of us. Full of our happiness, full of our dreaming, full of our love and so full of our beaming, full of our praying, full of thanksgiving, full of our hoping and wishing and living. God bless you, pumpkin round baby sweet, our wonderful pumpkin round baby sweet. I love you Susanna, you're the best. I love you too dad. We're done. Hi Fadmom, you did it. I have to tell you, I just love chatting with our adult children and what a fun thing to do that with Susanna. I admire writers because it takes work to put it down, just like anything quality. I think it'd be appropriate to end this with a thought of another female author her name is Madeline Langolan, she's gone now, but she wrote this, you have to write the book that wants to be written and if the book will be too difficult for grownups, then you write it for children. That's it. We're out. I'm going to say goodbye and catch you next time. Thank you for listening and if you wish to write a couple of sentence review on any platform in which you're listening, that'd be fantastic. But until next time, this is Dick Foth for Stories to Make Sense of It All, we'll catch you later.