Whitney Hemsath: Types, Shadows, and Casseroles: Finding Christ in Your Daily Life

Whitney Hemsath stopped by the show to share her new book with a delicious title! It's called Types, Shadows, and Casseroles: Finding Christ in Your Daily Life and both the book and our discussion will you inspire to see Him more often and in more places.

Buy Whitney's book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1963659007

Learn more about Whitney:
http://www.whitneyhemsath.com

Learn more about Jason:
http://www.jasonfwright.com

About the book:
When it comes to finding Christ, it isn’t a matter of knowing where to look; it’s simply a matter of training ourselves to see.

Through the law of Moses, God embedded symbolic reminders of the coming Messiah into every aspect of the lives of the ancient Israelites. Likewise, everything we see and experience in our modern world can be a type and shadow of Christ. Types, Shadows, and Casseroles makes finding those symbols and connections a skill anyone can develop.

With plenty of guided examples, relatable personal stories, and fresh scriptural insights, Hemsath shows readers how to find new meaning and spiritual significance in familiar objects and stories from the scriptures as well as how to transform their daily experiences into opportunities to grow closer to Christ.

This podcast is brought to you by InkVeins, your source for book publicity, promo, press releases and more. Text 540-212-4095 for more information.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to the Book Drop Mic brought to you by Inkvains, your source for book publicity, promo and press releases. It's Jason Wright. How are you so glad that you're here? Have you caught our other recent episodes? You should, because we have covered some really great titles. I actually listened to a couple of previous episodes this week as I was preparing for today's guest, and there's some really good stuff out there and some great titles we've talked about, so give it a look. Also, do not forget, please, that Scar Dakota is finally out. I've only been talking about it for what feels like most of my adult life, but yes, Scar Dakota is finally here.

Speaker 1 0:42

You can get your copies on Amazon, barnes, noble, et cetera Audio, ebook, all the formats, that's all there. If you backed it on Kickstarter, check your inbox for an update on that as well. All right, now to the really good stuff. I am intrigued by today's guest and tell me that this is not a fantastic book. Title Types, shadows and Casseroles Finding Christ in your Daily Life. The author is Whitney Owen Hemsath and we're so happy to have her. Stop by the book drop, mike, hello.

Speaker 2 1:17

Jason, thanks for letting me come on.

Speaker 1 1:20

Absolutely All right. I love the title. We'll get to that in a minute. It's such a great title. I want to hear a little bit about where this came from.

Speaker 2 1:28

But first, Miss Whitney, tell us a little bit about you been supporting my husband through a master's program and a PhD and he defends on June 3rd. So we are very excited to be leaving this era of life and finally feeling like we're getting settled down a bit. So most of my life has been a creative one. I have a degree in screenwriting, I taught piano for a while and I dabble in all sorts of things, but storytelling has kind of been a constant in my life.

Speaker 1 2:06

When you say that, do you mean that as a little girl, you were telling stories, imagining?

Speaker 2 2:14

making movies, writing novels, that sort of thing. Yeah, Somewhere in my parents' house there's a small little bound booklet of a story of a girl whose porcelain doll comes to life and kills everybody.

Speaker 1 2:26

So I was a really cool second grader. I would love to buy that. Can we do that? Can we? Maybe we get the audio book, or? Or maybe that's your first film, maybe that is famous.

Speaker 2 2:36

We'll auction it off for charity Right.

Speaker 1 2:38

I love that. That is. That is hilarious. How old were you back then?

Speaker 2 2:43

I I think second grade somewhere around there, maybe as old as fourth, eight, nine, ten somewhere there.

Speaker 1 2:49

That's great, that's terrific. Okay, so you have been creating your whole life. Then Tell me how we arrive at Type Shadows and Castrols, and where does this book title come from? Whose brilliant idea was this?

Speaker 2 3:02

So, gosh, it was back in November of 2011. I was teaching a gospel doctrine class, and if you want to know anything about me and who I am as a person, know that I am one of those people who loves being assigned to give a talk, and sacrament meeting Like that is so exciting for me. I love teaching the gospel. I love the magic that happens when, like, you ask just the right question and all of a sudden, people in the class are giving you answers and everyone's just feeling edified and you feel connected to God and each other. I'm geeking out. I don't know. Gospel geek Is that a thing? Yeah, I think so. So, anyways, I I'm really passionate and I love teaching, and after one of my lessons, a friend came up to me. She says I love your lesson. You should consider writing a book. I've done screenplays, I've done poetry, I've done short stories, but a full length book felt a little ambitious. Couldn't leave the idea alone, though, so I went home and I started you know, saying what would I write about?

Speaker 2 4:00

And the spirit was pretty clear said you need to write about finding Christ in all things, and so that title actually was the very first working title was type shadows and casseroles, and the first chapter I wrote was called in a nine by 13 pan, and originally it started as kind of like a chicken soup for the soul style thing, where we had individual chapters that were standalone stories from my life and tying them into the gospel and everything was going great. Slow but great right. I was raising kids, teaching piano, and about 2017 I finally had the chance to not be teaching piano anymore and really dedicate to writing. I said, okay, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna crank it out, I'm gonna get this book done. And um, and one day, the spirit very clearly said no one is going to buy this book, which was really hard to hear, and sometimes as writers, you know, we get discouraged. We think, oh, my writing's not good, but I was really enjoying my book. To say, okay, why is the spirit telling me this? And yeah, I'm not a general authority. I don't have degrees in religious studies. I haven't been struck by lightning or attacked by sharks or any other experience people would consider newsworthy. I'm just your everyday mom who happens to love teaching the gospel to the point of geeking out about it and, as much as it hurt to admit it from a marketing standpoint, nobody knew who I was and therefore nobody would care what I wrote.

Speaker 2 5:35

I didn't feel like God wanted me to stop writing it. I felt like he wanted me to pivot the direction of the book, but I just didn't know where. And then, after another Sunday school class, a woman came up to me and said she loved the insights I'd shared and wish she could do the same thing. And then she said but my brain just doesn't work like that. And that really got to me. I was like you don't think you're capable of finding gospel connections in your life.

Speaker 2 6:01

And I started asking around on some Facebook groups of LDS people and the number of adult church members who said they feel the same way astounded me. And that's when I realized that's what God wanted this book to be. I wasn't supposed to write a book about how just about my life and my spiritual connections that I'd found. God wanted me to write a book that showed people how I made those connections so that they could do the same thing with their own lives. It needed to be a book for all the everyday members of the church to show them how they can find Christ in the everyday happenings of their lives. And who better to write that book than an everyday mom like me, who happens to be really good at finding Christ in the most mundane things. So there were quite a few bumps in the road, but 12 years later the book is finally published 12 years later.

Speaker 1 6:53

I've heard that story many times before. I love that. There's a lot to respond to there.

Speaker 1 6:58

I had an experience years ago when I was trying to sort of decide which book I was going to write next and I had literally dozens of ideas in front of me and I was sort of praying for some sort of guidance and I had one of the strongest impressions I'd had as sort of a direct answer to prayer was this I will not tell you what to write, but I will tell you if what you're writing is right. And I took that to mean I needed to just start writing. And if that meant that I would get a chapter in and then I would sort of hit a roadblock and say, okay, that's not it, then I would start over. And sometimes it was as simple as taking a half a page of notes and immediately knowing, yeah, that's not the thing I'm supposed to be writing either. But the idea that I could just look at some you know paint palette of ideas and have God say that's the one and point right at one didn't really work that way.

Speaker 2 7:57

Isn't it funny how we always want to be commanded in all things in that regard Like, just tell me what to do and I'll do it. God, and it doesn't always work that way. The whole book is focused on how do you find Christ in your life and once you find him, where are you in relationship to him? Because that's the whole point is not just to think about him, but think about our relationship with him and how do we get closer to where he is.

Speaker 1 8:22

That's terrific. Tell me about the cover, because it took me a minute. I had to kind of zoom in to see what you had done and of course the cover will be up on the show page and of course links to all of the good things Whitney is doing in the show notes. But tell us about this sort of silhouette of Christ and where the idea came from for all of these tiny little, mundane, as you would say, images that make him up.

Speaker 2 8:53

So about a year before the book was published, I'd been trying to think of ideas. I knew I was going to self-publish at that point and I was trying to get ideas of what I wanted to do for the cover and the. The spirit I mean I can't take credit for the spirit was very much you need if Christ can be found in all things. You need a picture of Christ in which all things are found in Christ, and, and so that idea wouldn't leave me alone. And I don't know if you've seen Anthony Sweat's book Repicturing the Restoration.

Speaker 1 9:29

Yep, I sure have.

Author Discusses Books and Future Works

Speaker 2 9:31

Fabulous book. Love the cover on that one. And I flipped the cover open to say, like, who designed this? And it was Emily Strong. Emily Strong, rogers, emily Rogers Strong I'm mixing up those last names, middle names, but she was just fabulous and I said this is the idea I have. Can we make it happen? And it took a few iterations but she painstakingly found all the little icons and helped me position and help position it. And so she's, she's the artist behind it. She's just fabulous.

Speaker 1 10:02

Yeah it's, it really is a. It's a very striking cover and I have a little bit of a cover snob because I have had of my, of my own books. I've had some covers that I thought really really worked well and I had a couple I was not really fond of and I've not. I've not generally had a great deal of control over the final product. So I really pay attention to covers and what they tell me about a book. A powerful cover is one where, with no copy at the top, no text superimposed, nothing at all, you can just look at whatever central image or scene is depicted on the cover and get a sense of what's there. And there's no doubt when you look at the cover of Type Shadows and Castrols, even without reading the title you know what's inside and that's pretty fantastic. I hope she's listening, if she's not tell her to by golly, emily very well done, I will.

Speaker 2 10:52

I'll send her a link. She's awesome.

Speaker 1 10:54

Very well done, all right. So 12 years, you said, is that right? 12 years for book?

Speaker 2 10:59

one, yeah, about 12 years in the making, a little over 12 years.

Speaker 1 11:02

For this one. So what's next? What are you going to bring the world next?

Speaker 2 11:07

Oh, you know, I would have a much more marketable career if I had, like, a genre that I wrote in, but that's just not my lot in life. So I have short stories and poems. I'm constantly writing those, publishing those. I have a middle grade epistolary time travel novel that's going to be launching, hopefully by the end of this year. The publisher is a new publisher into the subscription based story market, so more details will be coming up on my website about that.

Speaker 2 11:40

I've actually got two free e-books I'm working on getting the final edits for. One is a adult speculative rom-com. It's a little novelette and it's going to be free for anyone who wants to sign up for my fiction newsletter. And then the other one is actually you know, when God told me to pivot all those wonderful little chapter stories that I've been writing and felt inspired to write and then had to cut, those were my darlings that I didn't want to cut, but the spirit was, like you know, you can just make a standalone thing and let people read that. So that's going to be a free ebook for anyone who signs up for the inspirational newsletter. And then I've got a full length adult speculative rom-com that I'm working on as well right now.

Speaker 1 12:22

Well, boy, are you sorry? I asked, I asked what's coming next and I get it all. I love it. I love that you're busy, you know, by the way, a wife and a mom and and balancing a thousand different things. Before we let you go, tell us a little bit about your husband's doctorate and what's next.

Speaker 2 12:39

Oh, he is. He's currently teaching at BYU in the Spanish and Portuguese department and he works with student teachers of foreign language to help them know how best to teach a foreign language. So he goes and observes them in classrooms and he's a wonderful academic, fantastic teacher and just has a passion for language and learning and the way we learn through language.

Speaker 1 13:07

Terrific A book in the future for him. Maybe you think.

Speaker 2 13:11

I don't know. I mean, the dissertation is as long as one, but I don't know how much writing he's going to do after that. I think he might have been burnt out for a while.

Speaker 1 13:20

Maybe he's going to shock you one day, Whitney, and he's going to come home and say, look, I've got an idea for a rom-com and he's just going to churn that thing out one weekend. What do you think?

Speaker 2 13:29

It wouldn't surprise me a bit. He's a man of many talents. He's like I'm going to crochet and all of a sudden he's crocheting these amazing things. I'm going to do balloons, and he's an incredible balloon artist. If you ever see hollow balloons online, it's fantastic.

Speaker 1 13:42

That's awesome. Love, that Love. A talented, creative family, and I bet your boys are following suit. Anything else we need to know about you.

Speaker 2 13:52

No, just that gosh. I love Christ and I love helping anybody feel a little bit closer to Christ, and this method of how to find symbols of Christ in your life that the book talks about it's what works for me. It's not something that I'm saying is the way everyone has to do it, but whatever anybody's process is, I think there's something in this book that will help them enhance what they already have so that they can find Christ more often and in more things.

Appreciation for Writer's Seriousness

Speaker 1 14:24

Yeah, and don't we all need Christ more often and in more things? Amen to that. Well, you're the best. Thank you so much. I'm going to let you get back to whatever world you're going to change today. I'm going to try to not think about the porcelain doll for the rest of my day here in Woodstock, virginia.

Speaker 2 14:43

Am I going to read a religious book by someone who was that disturbed? I write a lot of things, all genres, but the gospel. I'm very serious about the gospel.

Speaker 1 14:54

Good, good, good. Well, it shows. Thank you so much for dropping by. We appreciate you and we will look forward to having you back on for your next project.

Speaker 2 15:03

Thanks so much, see.