Catholic New World: The Interview

Grace leads suburban author to pen angel stories

Author Joan Wester Anderson believes in angels.
It’s a belief she shares with millions, including readers of her six books (with a seventh to be published in August) about people’s interactions with God’s divine messengers. Her Web site, www.joanwanderson.com, offers more stories of divine intervention as well as occasionally offering more than 30,000 readers the chance to be “earth angels” by finding ways to help others.

Anderson, who attends Holy Family Parish in Inverness, shared her story with staff writer Michelle Martin.

The Catholic New World: How did you start writing about angels?

Joan Wester Anderson: We had a little house with five children in it. It was what they happily called a “handyman’s special” when we bought it, and my husband was not a handyman. I needed to make money, but with five kids, and I hadn’t finished college at that time, what could I do? So I started writing.

TCNW: Why writing?

JWA: I always tell people if you want to know what you’re good at, ask your friends. We have a tendency to push aside things if we enjoy them, because somehow it’s not a worthy profession. I could get any letter in the world published, but I didn’t consider that a gift—that was just something that I did. Finally, people started saying, “Why don’t you take some of these and develop them?”

I think that very often we are pushed into something that God wants us to do, and we don’t recognize it. Our lives now are portrayed as if something is difficult, hard, negative, it’s bad. And yet, there are many people that go through things because they have to, in order to do what God wants them to do. Actually, it’s grace that’s making them go through the hard times.

That’s the way I look at my writing. It’s something I had to do because I didn’t have any other talents. It was difficult to be rejected a lot—you get rejected a lot by your children and the world as it is, and then to get those darn rejection slips. … I did it because I was waiting for when God would reveal to me what he really wanted me to do with the rest of my life after I was done raining the kids. I did not see at all that I was already doing it. It didn’t connect at all.

TCNW: How did that lead to angels?

JWA: Our son Tim went to work for the Defense Department. It was Christmas of 1983, and he was driving home with a couple of friends to spend his first Christmas as an adult with us. He was only 21. Anybody that was here in 1983 remembers how cold it was—there were all the warnings about don’t go out, don’t be driving, don’t take out your garbage. But of course, the kids just laughed at us.

His car broke down—actually the engine froze—about 10 miles outside Fort Wayne, Ind. There was no place to go, no place to run, no lights. The two of them thought they would freeze to death. It was 35 degrees below zero at the point when this happened, so your chance of living very long was not good. Then all of the sudden, there were these headlights right on their bumper. The guy got out of the truck and said, “Need a tow?”

Tim gave him the address of the place where they had dropped the third member of the group in Fort Wayne. [The tow truck driver] didn’t ask for directions; he just said fine and hitched them up like you would a wagon and drove them back to the street and around the cul-de-sac. The boys got out and went to the door. Tim said, “We need to borrow some money to pay the tow truck driver.” And the people said, “What tow truck?”

Tim was so astonished that he ran outside and saw the tracks coming around the cul-de-sac, but the tracks stopped in front of his car.

Later on, after we’d talked about this, I remembered waiting up because he was hours late, and crying out to God that night like I never had before. That was my moment when I saw myself in relationship to God, and I saw that I had nothing without him. Every breath I took, every thought I had, was his. When you can’t rescue your own child, then you know that you never were in charge of that child to begin with. I just began crying out, “Send someone. Please send someone.” I couldn’t help him myself, and I didn’t know if I was ever going to see him again.

I didn’t find out all this until a week or two later. That was when I asked him what time it was that the tow truck came. He said “It’s funny, but I looked at my watch by the light of the headlights, and it was exactly quarter to two.” I had looked at my watch too when I cried out, and it was quarter to one—but he was on Eastern time. So at the very moment I asked for God to send someone, he did.

TCNW: How did that experience lead to books about angels?

JWA: I didn’t tell it right away. It took me another three years at least to convince myself that this was an angel. Then your next thought is “Who am I, do I have a right to go out there as if I’m somebody special and write about angels?” I just decided that if God was sending angels at the beginning of time, and if they occurred in Scripture more than 300 times, then they must be a significant part of creation. God doesn’t change, so if it was significant then, these angels must still be appearing. What has changed is us. We don’t expect to see them, and so we don’t.

I felt I wanted to so something for God to thank him for saving my son. So I thought, if I can find enough stories, I’ll put them together into a book. I’ll sell the book. No one will buy the book—I figured, a couple of nuns, my mother, who else would buy it? But it would be a gesture of gratitude to him. Because at that time, I had entered charismatic renewal and my own spiritual life was blossoming.

So I started asking people after my talks. I would say, I’d like to tell you what happened to my son. Has anything like this happened to you? It was interesting, because you could see the ones who would roll their eyes right off. I could hear them going home and saying, “You know Francine, she was fine until she started going off on that stuff,” but there were always a few who knew what I meant.

TCNW: Was it easy to sell?

JWA: My Jewish editor for a magazine was the only one who thought it was a good idea. She was wonderful. I was telling her about this, and she was telling me later that the hair on the back of her neck stood up. She and a friend were starting a publishing company of their own, and she said we didn’t know what kind of a book we were going to start with, but we’d know it when we saw it. She sold her silver teacup collection to finance the first printing of “Where Angels Walk.” She and her friend and I became the Company of Three.

Honestly, we did everything wrong. We couldn’t get the book in the stores because we didn’t have the financial track record. So I sold it out of the back of my car. This was in 1992—there was no Internet or anything.

I would call these talk radio stations in southern Illinois and ask if they could put me on after the hog report, and they would say, “We’re not a religious station.” Then there was blurb in the Wall Street Journal about a woman who had written a book about angels, and it had gone through 16 printings of 3,000 copies. She had scooped me, and at that point, I didn’t know if I should give up. My spiritual life had grown during these five or six years, to the point that I felt whatever God wanted was fine.

That afternoon, in the mail, there was a little box from a pen pal on Prince Edward Island. She and I never corresponded except at Christmas, and this was July. She said, “I was at a garage sale, and I saw this and thought of you,” and it was a little angel with her chin in her hand, like she was saying, “What do I do?” The message I got was, “I have plenty of angels for everyone.”

I think that was the first message I ever got.

We went ahead, and because of that article, I was able to call these stations and say this topic is very hot right now. It was on the Wall Street Journal front page. I bought a fax so I could send this article. Then they started putting me on. At first it was strictly a mail-order thing, then Random House called and wanted it as a paperback.

We sold a million copies in a year, with 55 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

After that it was reader-driven completely. People would write in and say, “We were reading our angel books to our children but it’s a little old for them. Do you have anything for kids?”

TCNW: Were you surprised by how popular angels became?

JWA: By then we had a smaller pice of the pie, but by then the pie was huge. There were angels everywhere. Over 200 stores that opened up in the mid-90s stocked nothing but angels. I think of all the crafters who developed careers because of this. … But it was just moving from grace to grace. People would call and say they had been angry at God because he wasn’t there at some point in their loves, and reading the books, they came to realize he was there, just not in the way they had wanted.

Anderson’s seventh angel book, “Guardian Angels: True Stories of Answered Prayer,” is scheduled to be published by Loyola Press in August.

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