When I
asked what he thought about Hurricane Isaac, Jason said, “I
kept thinking this is going to fizzle, it’s going to run out of
steam before it ever got anywhere close to the coast. I don’t know
if that was my heart talking because I didn’t want to see a Katrina
2 or if I just wasn’t paying enough attention to the news.”
Jason
Wright is a New York Times Bestselling author. Along with
'Recovering Charles' (2008), he has written many bestselling novels,
including 'Christmas Jars' (2005), 'The Wednesday Letters' (2007),
'The Cross Gardener' (2010), 'The Seventeen Second Miracle' (2010),
and 'The Wedding Letters' (2011). Jason has also been on CNN, Fox
News, and C-Span, and writes the weekly column 'Wright Words'.
"My
first reaction was I didn’t have a reaction,” he continued,
“because I just kept thinking it’s never actually going to come
to this. Now that it has, it’s been very surreal.”
I
asked Jason what inspired 'Recovering Charles'. “I watched (the
storm footage) for hours and hours and hours. Before, during, and
after Katrina. It was more gripping to me than 9/11. It was just so
heartbreaking.”
I
was working in a town in northern Virginia called Fredericksburg at
the time, far removed from Katrina, and there were some people I ran
into that had the attitude that the people in New Orleans could have
left but didn't, and so deserved what they got. Jason ran into that
sort of attitude too. “Some were talking about how the people down
there should have seen it coming and that’s what they get for
living down there,” he said. “I was just hearing so much of
that, how they weren’t prepared, they should have left, all that
kind of stuff, and I just didn’t see that. I just saw the
tremendous human suffering.”
It
sometimes seems that when we're far removed from a tragedy, the
impact of it doesn't seem as real to us as those who have to go
through it. Jason decided to go there, to New Orleans, and see
first-hand what recovery there was like. “So many people think
Katrina was just so clear cut,” he said. “The reality is a bunch
of those people are generations in the gulf and didn’t have
resources to leave. They didn’t have access to funds and cars.
For most of the people who were there when the city flooded, they
didn’t have resources to be anywhere else. For me, Recovering
Charles was a chance to tell a little bit of a human story. I
thought the city was treated unfairly.”
We
then talked about his book 'The Cross Gardener', which was my
favorite of his novels. It's a story about a man who, after his
mother is killed, is adopted and raised on an apple orchard. After
his adopted father dies, his wife is suddenly killed in a car
accident, and he is left to mourn her at a small cross he erects on
the road where she died. There he meets a mysterious stranger caring
for the roadside memorial, a man he only knows as the Cross Gardener.
“It’s
not a doctrinal book,” he said. “I’m not suggesting any of
this is how it works for everybody. I just thought that it would be
interesting to just invite readers to think about what that process
of stepping from this life to the next might be like. If you’re by
yourself at 2 o’clock in the morning on some remote highway, are
you really alone or is there someone there to help with that process?
The book was kind of a way for me to ask myself some of those
questions.”
I
finally asked him about the movie adaptation of his novel, 'Christmas
Jars'. “There’s a kind of a good news bad news thing,” he told
me. “We have one script partner we thought was just about to
happen and it looks like it’s fallen apart. On the other hand
their option is up in a couple of months and we have another team
quietly waiting in the wings very patiently, and have been for quite
some time. They have expressed to us that they are further down the
path than we might realize in terms of their preparations if they get
another chance, or if they get a chance at all, and that they’ll be
in a position to move very quickly. That happens in November, and
we’re hopeful that something will happen there.” Jason said that
on many occasions they had been very close to beginning the movie.
“We’ve been within days of production,” he said.
Most
of Jason's books are stories of recovery from tragedy, of triumph
over trauma, the very spirit of what this blog is all about. They
are truly inspirational, and may provide comfort for those who are
recovering themselves.
You
can find out more about Jason and his novels at www.jasonfwright.com