Author Interview (and a Giveaway!): Harriet E. Michael & Prayer Warrior Confessions

As part of the Celebrate Lit tour for Prayer Warrior Confessions I am pleased to welcome one of the authors – Harriet E. Michael – to the blog today! She co-wrote the book with her lifelong friend Shirley Crowder whose parents served as missionaries in Nigeria, West Africa. Their friendship has spanned across two continents, numerous states, and many, many years. Learn more about them at www.WriteIntegrity.com/authors.

You can connect with Harriet specifically on her website and Facebook.

Come along with other prayer warriors and read their stories. Some of the stories will make you cry while others will make you laugh. Each story ends with a confession from the writer in which he or she shares an insight about prayer or something new they learned through their experience.

Readers of Prayer Warrior Confessions will learn more about prayer as they enjoy the true and candid stories of other people’s experiences with prayer. They see the stories through the writers’ eyes and glean the insights the writers learned.

True stories of prayer in action that will make you cry, laugh, sigh, smile, and stand amazed.

Hi Harriet! Welcome to the blog!

Harriet: Summer, I suppose. Certainly not winter, though I think I like autumn best of all.

Carrie: Autumn is one of my faves (and winter)

Harriet: Coke, definitely! Diet Coke, actually. It’s my only addiction and one of my few vices, especially McDonald’s Diet Coke. 

Carrie: We are kindred spirits on this – McDonald’s Diet Cokes are the best!

Harriet: Lakes. Maybe I’m being difficult. Lol! I like bodies of water, so I suppose oceans, but my preference is lakes, whether they are surrounded by the mountains or not. 

Carrie: I’m with you on mountain lakes – so beautiful. Not a fan of lakes without mountains though 😛

Harriet: Can I have both? I love a bowl of soup with a sandwich of some kind, especially grilled cheese. If I have to choose, I’ll go with soup. I actually spend many days in August making big pots of soups of different kinds to freeze so I can pull them out over the fall and winter.

Carrie: oh that’s a great idea! (And soup & sandwich totally go together)

Q: Around here I like to say that reading is my superpower. If YOU had a superpower, what would it be?

Harriet: Doing laundry. I realize it’s not a very exciting superpower, but I do it well and often! When my (now grown) youngest child was in kindergarten, he filled out a Mother’s Day book for me where he answered questions about me. When it asked for his mother’s favorite activity, he wrote, “Laundry. My mom does laundry all the time. She LOVES it!” (I had four kids and one husband, if that explains why I was always doing laundry.) But I can do it well. I like to iron too and love the look and smell of clean, folded, or pressed clothes. 

Carrie: haha! There’s just my husband and me – and we still are always doing laundry!

Q: Tell me some good books you’ve read recently.

Harriet: Probably my favorite book of all time is Lorna Doone. It was published in 1869 by R. D. Blackmore. It’s a romance set in the 17^th I first learned about it as a child when I studied using the Calvert Correspondence Course. I grew up in Nigeria, West Africa as the child of missionaries. All the Nigerian MK’s used the Calvert Course for our curriculum. In about the 4^th grade, a very abbreviated version of Lorna Doone was part of our literature class. My friends and I loved it! It grabbed our hearts and danced in our heads for a long time. We played like we were Lorna Doone for many weeks after reading it. I read the unabridged version a few years ago as an adult, after seeing a grown MK friend post that he had re-read it and loved it all over again. (Yes, it was a male friend who, like me and many others had been so struck by it as children that it had left lasting impressions on us.) When I read it again, I liked it even better than I had the first time!

But you said, “some” books. I have also read several written by friends and other writers published by Write Integrity Press, the same company who publishes me. We have some great authors and I highly recommend our books.

Carrie: I love that!

Q: What do you enjoy most about writing?

Harriet: This is a hard question to answer. I love everything about writing! Writing is my first language. I write better than I speak. I write mostly nonfiction—both books and short pieces like articles, short stories, and devotions. Nonfiction comes more naturally for me and I do it with ease. Writing nonfiction feels like a calling, like I have a message to share. But I have also written a little fiction. I have one novel which was so much fun to write! Writing fiction feels like I’m a child playing make-believe all over again. I hope to do more fiction writing in the future.

Carrie: Yay! Fiction is where my heart is ♥

Q: Why is the theme of your book important to you? 

Harriet: “Prayer Warrior Confessions” is the fourth in a 4-book series about prayer. The first book titled, “Prayer: It’s Not About You” was written by me, the second, a study guide to my book was written by my friend and co-writer, Shirley Crowder, and the third, a devotional about prayer is written by both of us. This 4^th book, Prayer Warrior Confessions” is an anthology compiled and partially written by both of us. It is a collection of true stories about prayer. As is evident by the books in this series, the theme is prayer which is hugely important to me. A quote I stumbled across in some of my writing research that was attributed to having been found in the hand-written journal of a Civil War soldier goes like this, “Prayer moves the arm that moves the universe. It is the greatest privilege man can have.” That sums its importance up well, I think. 

Carrie: That’s a powerful quote!

Q: What is something that surprised you the most while researching your book? 

Harriet: This book did not really require research like some other book might. I was nonetheless, amazed and sometimes surprised by some of the stories, written by contributors, and the things they experienced and learned about prayer.

Carrie: They sound incredibly moving 🙂

Q: What do you most want readers to take away from Prayer Warrior Confessions?

Harriet: I hope readers will grow in their understanding of prayer through this book. I hope it will inspire them to want to pray more.

To celebrate their tour, Harriet and Shirley are giving away a grand prize of a $50 Amazon gift card and the whole Prayer Collection set: Prayer It’s Not About You, Study Guide on Prayer–A Companion to Prayer: It’s Not About You, and Glimpses of Prayer, Prayer Warrior Confessions!!

Be sure to comment on the blog stop for nine extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.

This giveaway is hosted by Celebrate Lit, not RimSP
Follow along with the tour for more chances to win!