Wendy Nelles » Hot Apple Cider Books

This is an excerpt of Part 2 of an interview done by Janet Sketchley with the co-editors of A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider. Read both parts of the interview at Janet's blog, God With Us: Finding Joy.

Janet: I’m not sure where you found time to write, but you each contributed a piece for the anthology as well. Was it difficult editing one another’s work without that second, impartial editor?

NJL: We tried to get at least a first draft done before the submissions deadline because we knew how swamped we’d be after that. I actually tried writing about four other short stories before I hit on the one that we used in the book.

I have two terrific concept/substantive editors who live close-by, so they always read my work first anyway. (My #2 son and my husband, in case you’re wondering.) They give me very honest and often annoying feedback. So I don’t think editing our own pieces was a huge problem. I think I was as tough on Wendy as I’d been on everyone else.

The real problem was that we kept leaving our own pieces to the last to edit, which wasn’t good.

WEN: Yes, we were tough on each other’s pieces too, and we went through a number of revisions just like everyone else. But it was hard slogging because we were completely exhausted by the time we focused on finishing our own pieces at the end.

I deliberately chose to write someone else’s story, because I think too often writers who are Christian focus only on their own experiences when many other people have wonderful stories others would benefit by reading. But writing a 3,500 word human interest profile is a huge amount of work, because you have to get to know the people, do lengthy interviews, ask the right questions, transcribe everything that was said, organize the material, condense it all, focus on the story aspects, get the answers to any missing details, retain the other persons’ voices… and make sure that you have represented them fairly, accurately and compellingly.

Read the rest of this interview

Read Part 1 of the interview

Recently, Wendy Elaine Nelles, co-editor and contributor to both Hot Apple Cider anthologies found out you don't have to go very far to get to the other side of the world. Here's what happened:

What a small world! My parents and I were at a little country restaurant in the middle of nowhere, attached to a butcher shop called De Koning Meats, near Jarvis/Port Dover. (Wednesday afternoons they offer a special roast beef dinner for five dollars.) The restaurant was packed with patrons and summer cottagers from Port Dover.

We saw a group of seven people come in and take two tables, but didn't pay attention. Much to our surprise, two of the people came to our table while we were eating our homemade beef vegetable soup.

Turns out, the people are almost like family to us. The great-grandfather, Les, now deceased, had worked as our farm foreman for 40 years. His son Reg grew up with my father and is a close friend of my dad's. Reg's son Steven Willson, his wife Jacquie (DeBoer) and three teenaged daughters had just flown into Toronto a couple of days earlier from Tokyo. They are missionaries who work at the Christian Academy in Japan, where Jacquie is the director and Steve is the property manager.

They came home to Ontario for a short unplanned furlough this summer to get away from the stresses of the tsunami that had plunged Japan into a lengthy crisis. By pure coincidence, the Willsons came for the roast beef special before heading to the family cottage on Lake Erie for a few days of much-needed R&R.

Having heard a great deal about Steve and his family, but not having seen them in years, our conversation was a delight.

During the tsunami and radiation crisis in Japan my mother was fervently praying for a young cousin on her side of the family, Keri, from Seattle, Washington, who married a Japanese-American Christian named Richard Nakamura. Richard, Keri and their five children are serving as missionaries in Tokyo.

Richard mentioned in one of his emergency prayer letters that he barely had enough gas left in his car's tank to get his oldest children home from the Christian Academy the day the tsunami hit and Tokyo traffic was gridlocked. We made inquiries, and only then realized that the grandson and great-grandchildren of the man who had worked his whole life on our rural southwestern Ontario farm were actually good friends with my mother's relatives from Seattle, thousands of miles away in Tokyo!

Of course, they had absolutely no idea they had one common denominator (in addition to their shared Christian faith) — the Nelles and Miles pioneer farming families in Ontario. Kind of a Six Degrees of Separation thing.

I went to my parents' car to get Hot Apple Cider and A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider to give as gifts to Steve, Jacquie, Lauren, Rachael and Caitlin. I asked if they had room in their suitcases for a little piece of Canada. They said they already had book one (I vaguely recall sending one over in 2008 when Steve's parents flew to Japan to visit) but they were delighted to get book two. They all plan to read A Second Cup of Hot Apple Cider, then they will donate it to the library at the Christian Academy in Tokyo. (As a matter of fact, a tired missionary needing some encouraging stories of hope is probably reading A Second Cup with his feet up at the cottage right now.)

Finally, the Willsons' eldest daughter Lauren will move from Japan to Ontario to attend Redeemer College in Ancaster this September, and was very keen to hear about the evening school writing course that N. J. Lindquist will be teaching there this fall, where I will be the guest teacher on November 2. (Of course, last year's writing course at Redeemer College was where Mary Ann Benjamins heard about The Word Guild and Hot Apple Cider for the first time, and decided to write and enter her true story. Her chapter "Holding God's Hand" was only the second time she'd been published in her life, and she is now working for The Word Guild!)

Further proof of our small world and divinely-orchestrated "coincidences"… and A Second Cup is enroute to Tokyo.