By Deborah Hilcove
Tempe journalist, author and Wrangler News editor Joyce Coronel enjoys a writer’s dream—to be approached by a publisher and asked to write a book. Daily Inspirations: Growing in Faith, due for August release, is the result.
“It belongs to a special niche market,” says Coronel, and suggests it’s ideal for daily prayer. She’s gathered more than 180 inspirational quotes on topics like joy, courage and love, pairing them with scripture verses and insightful reflections.
The devotional followed book-signings over the last several months for a novel published last November. Aquinas Press contracted Coronel in January to write a series of devotional essays. “They knew my newspaper articles and previous two books,” she explains.
Those novels, A Martyr’s Crown and Cry of Nineveh, were sparked by interviews with Phoenix-area Christians who fled violence in their native Iraq. Cry of Nineveh tells how the persecution of a Christian in Mosul impacts one family and how an Iraq war veteran is haunted by the experience.
“Many in the Western world have forgotten that Christianity began in the Middle East. There were martyrs back then [in biblical times], and we owe them a great debt. And today, there are martyrs, too. We’ve grown comfortable to be Christian here, but in the Middle East, it’s not that way. It’s difficult and it’s dangerous.”
A devout Roman Catholic, Coronel was influenced by those interviews to study Chaldean Catholicism—an Eastern rite church, founded in the time of the apostles and centered in Iraq, with more than 170,000 followers in the United States. Coronel has also learned some Aramaic, the ancient language of Jesus, to participate fully in the liturgy.
Describing her recent endeavor, she says, “This has been a totally different experience than my first two books. They were published through CreateSpace on Amazon. When you work with a publisher, you sell all your rights to them.”
The projects differ in other ways, too. She says, “One novel is about 100,000 words and the other is close to 110,000 words. With a novel, you have to develop the plot and characters. Daily Inspiration is much shorter and I expected it to be easy. But it was more daunting than I thought.
“I was given a tight deadline by Aquinas Press, so I worked at least eight-hour days at my regular job, then worked another 3-4 hours a night, 5-6 days a week for nearly two months. I started with a spreadsheet and started writing out topics.
“It’s not just surface writing. It required a lot of digging and praying my way through it. I had to go deep, contemplate and read a lot. I read a lot of Mother Teresa. It took a lot of time to find quotes, match them with scripture. It’s fairly easy to find two or three quotes on a topic like friendship, but I set 12 as my goal.
“And I had to center myself and be in a place of peace. My heart, mind and soul go into the books I write. I found myself asking, ‘What is hope? What does it mean to me?'”
A favorite section, she says, “comes from a quote my niece sent me, by Shel Silverstein. It goes,
‘Listen….Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.’ I teamed that with a quote from the Book of Mark, ‘All things are possible for God,’ followed with a personal reflection from an interview about 10 years ago with a physician in the Valley.
“He said the medical school dean told him to give it up; he’d never make a doctor. He took it as a challenge. I reflect on that. When we’re told we can’t do something, we can take it as a challenge and rely on God to help and strengthen us.”
She continues, “We live in a time of growing secularism and many people have no affinity with faith. And a life without faith can prove difficult. A life with faith can be beautiful. Daily Inspiration is set for release in August and can be pre-ordered from the website: http://catholic.cbcgroups.com/shop.jsp (ID#B3020, $5.95)
