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Conference leader passes torch after 25 years
Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writer's Conference sees transition at LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center
“One part Dolly Parton. One part Mary Tyler Moore,” Morrissey smiled. “And the largest part, the hands and feet of Jesus Christ.”
Others echoed that thought, calling the diminutive best-selling author an inspirational powerhouse who represents the epitome of Southern grace and steadfast faith – with a flair for deadpan delivery and the unexpected.
Lehman is perhaps as noted for bringing aspiring Christian writers together once a year to a Blue Ridge Mountain mentoring experience as she is for her 46 inspirational romance novels and novellas.
She directed the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference for the past eight years at LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center, following 17 years as founding director of the Blue Ridge Writers Conference. In all, she ran 25 such conferences in the region, and this year announced she is handing over the reins.
Lehman passed the torch to award-winning novelist and veteran conference faculty member Alton Gansky, saying, “The main thing is I believe he’s a man of God. Since it was never my conference, he will treat it as God’s conference.”
Lehman will be turning her attention to another conference she directs, The Blue Ridge Christian Writers ‘Autumn in the Mountains’ Novel Retreat, scheduled for Oct. 5-9 at Ridgecrest. Lehman will also help her daughter, Lori Marret, plan the second annual Gideon Media Arts Conference and Film Festival next May, also to be held at Ridgecrest.
The idea of the writers’ conference without Lehman’s unique imprint had many talking about it. Her attention-grabbing entrances to represent the writer’s journey – her tiny frame perched atop a Harley Davidson across the stage one year, a camel the next – have set the enthusiastic tone for which the conferences are known.
“She plays at being such an entertaining, ditsy blonde airhead. She could be a standup comic,” said faculty member Vonda Skelton, who got her start in writing after attending the Ridgecrest conference in 2001. “But she is a wise, discerning mentor. She knows her stuff, and she has such a passion for writers. Beyond that, she has a heart for spreading the Word.
“I can’t begin to imagine how many lives she’s touched because of her books and because of this conference. She has grown so many graduates that have gone on to write amazing things for people about God,” Skelton said.
Lehman said it may not be her book, but someone else’s, which touches a life.
“I wanted other people to have the opportunity that I had,” she said. “It changed my whole life,” she said of the first Christian writing conference she attended.
“I didn’t know any better,” she chuckled about the obstacles of which she was blissfully ignorant to start a conference.
Her own writing began similarly – she didn’t know any reason not to ask that it be published. Her first attempt was a romance novel about race relations, based on her disappointing experience years before when church leaders objected to her and the girls in her Sunday school wanting to invite black girls to their class.
She draws on her personal story, which reads much like a novel. She describes her father as a con-man, though not evil. Her parents left her to be raised by her grandparents on a cotton “mill hill” in South Carolina, where she learned to be an observer, and wrote from a young age. Those grandparents also taught her about Jesus.
She talks candidly about the support of her husband of 40 years, Howard, who spent his career as a corrections officer, and who died of cancer in 2004. When their four children were small, he nonetheless encouraged her to go to school to learn what she needed to learn. A breast cancer survivor herself, in remission for the past year, her resilience, humor and optimism pervade her memories and hope for the future.
As Lehman teaches about writing novels or novellas, it is clear why her intricate plots and uplifting messages are loved by so many.
“Plan your spiritual journey as you plan your conflict, not as an afterthought that’s tacked on,” she said with a characteristic wide-eyed shrug and a wave of her tiny expressive hand, as if stating the obvious about plot planning and life in general. “Problems are solved by putting faith in God. How else can they be solved satisfactorily, after all?”
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