Today, I’m delighted to sit down with author, Liz Adair and discuss her thoughts on writing and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Liz was born in the Southwest sixty-six years ago but has lived in the Pacific Northwest for the last thirty-four years. She has seven children (four biological, three adopted) and seventeen grandchildren. Liz has been married for forty-five years to a wonderful man. She taught school for several years and was a stay-at-home mom for a decade and a half, during which time she and her children ran a specialty bakery. Now, Liz works with her husband in healthcare construction management, and will probably continue to do so for several more years. 
Liz has been writing seriously for about twenty years and has published five books with another coming out this fall. She just finished a stint of four years teaching early morning seminary, but has just been called as choir director for her ward. Candace: As a very well-known author in the LDS Fiction market, will you please share with us what drives you to write? Liz: I don’t know that I can explain it. It’s just part of who I am. I dream in narratives. If I see a beautiful sunset, my way of appreciating it is to try to put it in words. To spare bystanders, I do this mentally. Writing is simply an extension of that facet of my personality or character or being–whatever you call it. Candace: Elder M. Russell Ballard, a living apostle, charged Mormons with battling the onslaught of anti-Mormon sites on the internet. He asked us to blog and gently but firmly set the record straight. Will you please share with us your thoughts on this and what you’ve done to answer that call? Liz:know, I’m not much of a crusader. I don’t do well with programs, because I can’t stay the course with a program. I peter out. I’m much better at being who I am. I am a writer. I write, and I write as genuinely as I can. I have five blogs that I contribute to regularly. One is connected with yourLDSneighborhood, www.sezlizadair.blogspot.com where I write about things under the heading of service. Another blog I do is about family history, www.familywriters.blogspot.com. I love family history and use it in my fiction writing all the time, and this blog is an expression of that. A third blog is a pure, factual, family history blog, www.ronnietootie.blogspot.com. My brother and I use it as a means of identifying old family photos and getting down family anecdotes, a project we’ve been going to get together and do for years, but never accomplished until we decided to do it via blog. It would be of interest only to our family and, perhaps, historians, but it’s there so anyone who wanders by can take a gander. The fourth blog I participate in is one made up of LDS writers, www.anwafounder.blogspot.com. This is the forum where I would be most closely following Brother Ballard’s admonition. We speak very openly there, because we’re speaking to each other, about our faith in Christ and how it colors everything we do. We demonstrate by our postings and our comments the love we have for our Savior and our commitment to each other. It’s a very warm, comfortable place on the internet, and we’ve had people stumble onto the site and comment about how they can feel the positive spirit of the site. The fifth blog, www.lizadairwrites.blogspot.com is a place where I can log the progress of my new book, Counting the Cost, as it comes out this fall. However, I’m doing it for a secondary reason, one perhaps more important than the first. Several months ago I made a promise to myself that I would make an effort to review books written by my fellow LDS authors and post them on the internet None of the other blogs lend themselves to that purpose, so this fifth blog will be my forum for book reviews. Did I set out to follow Brother Ballard’s counsel? No, but in my own serendipitous way, I’ve managed to set a parallel course. Candace: What is your favorite scripture and why? Liz: My favorite scripture is almost a throwaway line, a fragment of 1 Nephi 16:29, “…And thus we see that by small means the Lord can bring about great things.” I’m a pretty ordinary person, but I’ve had some experiences where small, ordinary things done by small, ordinary people have brought about great things in other people’s lives. It seems that if we just keep putting one foot in front of another, doing the best we can, the Lord will magnify our efforts, and the good we do will reverberate around and extend far beyond what we could have done on our own. Candace: Who is your favorite prophet and why? Liz: I’m a very fickle lover of prophets. My favorite prophet is generally the one I’m studying right then. I love Joseph Smith because he translated the Book of Mormon and was so steadfast in defending it. I love Isaiah because he’s a poet and uses language so powerfully and gave us such beautiful windows on the coming of the Messiah. I love Thomas S. Monson because he’s our prophet today. Candace: Will you please share with your conversion? All of us, whether we are born into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or not, have a moment of conversion, please share? Liz: My conversion story starts before I was born, when my Uncle Curtis met the missionaries and listened to them. This was a very unlikely beginning, because, as my Uncle Buck used to say of his brother Curtis, “He was wild as a snake.” Curtis had been a cowboy, but had married and was now working construction. He lived through the lot from my mother, and as he joined her every morning for coffee, he’d say, “Lucy, be a Mormon!” Curtis gave up coffee and set his baptismal date, but before he could be baptized, he was hit by a car on his motorcycle and was killed. Seven years later, missionaries knocked on my mother’s door. She had been having troubling dreams of her brother, and when she realized that these young men were Mormons, she told them about Curtis and how he died before baptism. They told her about the temple ordinances, and as they helped her fill out the paperwork, they taught her the gospel, and she was baptized when I was seven. She was troubled by dreams no more. My mother was a person of profound faith who had been actively teaching me about God long before her conversion. In the face of a disapproving family and an uninterested spouse, she clung to the Gospel and made sure we attended church, no matter how long the drive or how bad the roads. I’ve always had a testimony of Joseph Smith, of the restoration of the Gospel, of the Book of Mormon, of the Plan of Salvation, but I remember with singular clarity the moment everything snapped into focus around the Savior. I was about thirty-six, doing the usual Mormon Mom thing with Primary and Young Women’s values and Duty to God and all the programs that fill our lives as we raise families. I was trying for yet another time to have a consistent personal scripture study time, and was reading the Book of Mormon at the dining room table. I had read it several times before, but had always been looking at the language or the geography or cultural clues, and, all of a sudden, I realized that there was hardly a page where Christ’s name wasn’t mentioned. Hello, Liz? Another Witness for Christ? It was so elementary, but my busy life had been focused on all the minutia of the programs of the Church, and I had forgotten the central figure. I say I forgot, because when I was about nine, I had a profound personal spiritual experience calling me to Christ. That study session at the dining room table was a life-changing experience. Whereas before, I did things because I was a Mormon and had a testimony of the Church, I now do them because I have taken upon me the name of Christ. As a Mormon, I set my sights on the Celestial Kingdom; as a Christian, I become uncomfortable when people talk about rewards for righteous living. I only want to please my Savior. I only want to be what he would have me be. I’m not saying that the programs of the Church get in the way. They’re a great teaching tool and lab experience to prepare us to understand about the Savior and his mission. It just takes some folks longer to graduate than others. But, I think that’s all right, too. We all mature at different times. Candace: Will you please share your personal testimony of our Savior, Jesus Christ? Liz: I don’t know that I can say it in words that haven’t been used so much they may sound trite. He’s the way. He’s the truth. He’s the light. His words require faith to follow, but in exercising that faith, you find that there’s power in meekness; people do respond to a soft voice; it is better to give than to receive; we do need to reach out to the weary and support the hands that hang down. I believe that he took upon himself the sins of the world, my sins, and paid the price in suffering required for those sins so that I should not have to. I believe he knows my name, knows the desires of my heart, and will be my advocate with our Father. I believe he will come again as he has promised. I look forward to that day, and hope to do my part, my small thing, to help bring it to pass. Candace: Christians across the globe face an ever-increasing battle against those who would destroy and erase all that our Savior has done for us. What would you say to them, given the chance? Liz: Keep the faith. Your little candle of light may be small in the grand scheme of things, but it’s capable of kindling others, or lighting the way to the next small candle. Keep it lit. Hold it high. Candace: Please share your testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the hope it brings to every human soul. Liz: I have a friend who had a personal relationship with the Savior long before she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She is a student of the Bible and studied in college to go into the ministry. It was interesting to talk with her as she read through the New Testament in the first few years after her conversion. “Why didn’t I see that?” she would ask. “It’s right there!” The Gospel of Jesus Christ is like your genealogy, your family tree. You know where you fit. You know where you came from, why you’re here, where you’re going, and that’s comforting. Hope comes with a knowledge of the atonement. About the time you get to be my age, you realize you’re not going to achieve perfection; it just ain’t in you. But, you realize that’s all right, because our Savior will do for you what you can’t do for yourself, as long as you do the best you can and keep trying. Candace: You stand, as it were, on a world stage. In that circumstance, what message do you have for this troubled world? Liz: When I look at this old world with all its suffering and inequities, I remember the story of Alma in the Book of Mormon, when he led his people into the wilderness, heading for Zarahemla, and they fell into the hands of Amulon and his followers. Amulon had an ax to grind against Alma, and he made slaves of Alma’s people and made them, even the women, into beasts of burden. Forbidden to pray aloud, the people prayed in their hearts, and the Lord heard them. Though they weren’t delivered right away, the Lord made them strong so that they could bear the burdens they were forced to carry. And when the time came, they were given a way to escape. That’s my hope and my prayer: Whatever our burdens, we can be made strong to bear them. I pray for this for the innocents of the world. Liz, thank you so much for taking the time to express your thoughts and beliefs on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is my prayer that your words will touch the heart of someone seeking just what you had to say.
A visit with Author Liz Adair
