The Writer's Torch: Alison Winfree Pickrell

This marks the beginning of a new thread that I'm excited to share. It's called The Writer's Torch, and the purpose of this thread is to showcase Christian authors by allowing them to share with you their stories of how God called them to be a writer. Here, they will share their testimonies of using the gift of writing that God has given them--the written word is their torch and they are striving to be a light in the world. I hope their stories bless and inspire you, as they have me.

First off, I would like to introduce Alison Pickrell, the author of four books, including her latest release, The Last Cordate. Alison writes, "I believe that God put a desire to write in my heart from a very early age. I grew up in Winston-Salem in the beautiful state of North Carolina. My parents didn’t buy us kids a lot of expensive toys but they did make sure we always had a supply of paper, pencils, crayons and markers. My brothers, sister and I would make books, stories, plays and illustrations which we would share with our mother and anyone else we could get to read them. This instilled in me a love for words, stories and, of course, reading books. That love burned in front of me like a light I couldn’t take my eyes off of.

I loved the fantasies by C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, E. Nesbit and others. At age sixteen, I wrote a fantasy of my own. I made a list of publishers without doing any research and had my father wrap the manuscript in brown paper, tie it with string and send it off to New York City. Thus, began the first of what would be three bulging volumes of rejection slips! This early experience with the publishing world only whetted my appetite and desire to get published.

I grew up, got a teaching degree in special education, and moved to Statesville. I married a wonderful man, Brian Pickrell, and inherited his three sons (twins, age 5 and a 6 year old). Being a teacher and a stepmom should have filled all the empty gaps in my life. But there was still this burning desire not just to get published, but to make a difference in the world through my writing. I couldn’t forget it. It was like God was tapping gently on my shoulder reminding me of that early desire. I joined a writers group in Statesville and wrote five novels from 1984 to 1988 that I believed God had given me."

Her books reveal the call on her heart for those in need. Her titles include: As Eagles, a novel about an older woman and an abandon child who desperately need eachother, and The Den of Lions, a novel about an asthmatic librarian who rescues a severely handicapped man from the circus. Alison says, “There is a little bit of hero in each one of us.”


"In 1988, I decided to give up writing for Lent (usually I give up desserts) which meant during that period of time I couldn’t do anything that had to do with writing. All during Lent an idea for a book kept coming to me and I had to push it away and refuse to think about it until Easter Sunday when I bought a composition notebook and wrote across the cover: My Religious Epic Pilgrimage Novel. I began taking notes and the book that resulted, The Last Cordate, flowed so easily and was such fun to write I believe the Holy Spirit told it to me.

Each of these books was about things I strongly believed in and I thought they could be a light for readers in a dark world. I even had an agent who believed in me and my writing, but by the end of the eighties, when she hadn’t been able to sell a single one of them, we parted ways.

I began to question God. Had I heard Him correctly or was this just a selfish little desire on my part? I decided to move forward by faith and began sending out the manuscripts on my own."

With larger publishing houses closed to first-time authors, Alison sent her five manuscripts to smaller houses, but her rejection collection grew and grew.

"At last I reached the realization that God was saying ‘No’ to this little desire of my heart. I believed he was telling me to focus on my REAL life, that of being a wife, a stepmother, a special ed teacher and in later years a jail minister. I needed to leave the pretend world of pretend stories behind. This was one desire I just couldn’t have. I put my manuscripts in the attic, left the writers group, dropped my writers’ magazines and tried to focus on The Real World. I succeeded to a certain extent but the desire was still there.

So, in 2004 I said to God, ‘God, I heard You. I know what You said, but I just want to see if I can still do it.’ I hadn’t written a book since 1988. So, I wrote Unto the Least of These, a mystery where the detective is a Christian and the only eye-witness to the crime is a little boy who has cerebral palsy and can neither walk nor speak. This child is based around two boys I met in my teaching days. I always wanted to make one of those boys a hero and Jody is the hero of my book."

After submitting her work to The Writer's Edge, Alison shares what happened next.

"The little summary of my book appeared in the Feb. 2006 issue of the report. It was New Year’s night—January 1, 2007 and I couldn’t sleep. I checked my email and there was one from Capstone Fiction saying, “We were intrigued by your summary on Writers Edge…” What? It had been almost a solid year! Capstone would have had to wade through months and months of reports to find my tiny one inch summary. I couldn’t believe it.

God hadn’t been saying No. He’d been saying, Wait. The publisher He had in mind wasn’t even in existence until 2006. The best part is that Capstone (which later became OakTara) wanted to see everything I’d ever written, so I started sending them those old manuscripts I wrote in the eighties.

Isn’t God good? I am reminded of the line from the 23rd Psalm, “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” I feel like goodness and mercy went back into my past and brought all those stories forward to my present. I just hope that my books will be part of that blazing light that God has sent out into the world to enrich, encourage and bring joy into the lives of readers!
Alison's Website