221 – Are Writers’ Conferences Worth It? with Guest Grace Fox

Write from the Deep

Writers’ conferences cost time and money, so are they really worth it? Absolutely! But not necessarily for the reasons you think. Guest Grace Fox shares how God moved her to attend a writers’ conference, how many mistakes she made there, and how God miraculously provided for her and used it all to bless her far more than she ever imagined.

About Grace Fox

Grace Fox is a popular speaker at women’s events internationally. She inspires hope, courage, and transformation through God’s Word. She has served as a career missionary for more than 30 years. Grace has written fourteen books and published hundreds of articles in magazines. She’s a member of the First 5 Bible Study writing team for P31 Ministries and is a co-host for a podcast called Your Daily Bible Verse. Her book, Finding Hope in Crisis: Devotions for Calm in Chaos, won the Golden Scroll Devotional Book of the Year Award in 2021. Keeping Hope Alive: Devotions for Strength in the Storm won the same award in 2022. Her newest devotional is titled Names of God: Living Unafraid. You can learn all about her at GraceFox.com.

Thanks to our sponsors on Patreon, we’re able to offer an edited transcript of the podcast!

Erin: Welcome, listeners. We’re so excited that you’re here for another day, another show! We have a guest, which is also exciting.

Karen: Our guest is someone that you all know. She’s been here before, and we’re so excited that she’s here with us again now.

Her name is Grace Fox. She’s the writer who lives on a boat. She speaks at women’s events internationally and inspires hope, courage, and transformation through God’s word. She’s written fourteen books and published hundreds of articles in magazines. She’s a member of the First 5 Bible study writing team for P31 Ministries and a co-host for the podcast Your Daily Bible Verse. She is just so smart you guys, and she’s here to share with us about conferences and other things. Welcome, Grace.

Grace: Thank you so much for having me back.

Erin: Yes, we’re excited about it. So let’s start with our same lovely question that we just love digging into. Grace, what does the deep mean to you?

Grace: Well, that word reminds me of my childhood, standing on the diving board at the swimming pool. At the end of swimming classes, the teacher would say, “Okay, everybody, you get to jump off the diving board.”

I would just die inside because the thought scared me half to death. Getting up those stairs and standing on the diving board with a lineup of people waiting patiently behind me while I worked up the courage to jump into the deep end, that’s what I think of. In my faith journey, it’s scary sometimes when God calls me to a place where he says, “Okay, Grace, I want you to jump.”

The good thing to know is that he’s always there to catch me. Like the lifeguard, in the goodness of his heart, he’d be down there with his arms straight up going, “It’s okay, Grace, you can jump. I’ll catch you.”

Karen: That’s great.

Erin: Conference season is kind of rolling along here in the fall. I would love to hear, Grace, about your very first conference because we were talking a little bit earlier and I know you’ve got some good stories about your first conference.

Grace: Yeah, so I started my writing career thinking I was going to develop a line of greeting cards. I found a woman who could draw, because I can’t draw to save my life. I came up with the concepts and we put together ten sample cards.

Then we thought, “Now what do we do with them?”

She really wasn’t interested in doing any more than drawing. She had a little hobby farm she was busy with, and so I said, “Okay, I’ll figure out the marketing. I haven’t got a clue, but I’ll figure it out.”

I remember sitting down at my computer and Googling, like for the first time, Christian greeting card publisher. Up came the Florida Christian Writers Conference. I didn’t even know that such a thing existed. I thought, “Wow, that looks interesting.”

I scrolled through it and looked to see what faculty members were going to be there. Lo and behold, Dayspring was going to be there!

Karen: Wow.

Grace: My first thought was, “That looks so good. I should go. Oh, but that’s way beyond my reach. That’s so far. I can’t do this, I can’t afford it.”

You know. I came up with all the reasons why not. That was in August.

Erin: Where were you living at the time that it was far?

Grace: I was living on a little island off the coast of British Columbia, working at a Christian camp, and we were living on paid support, so the thought of coming up with the money to do this was just beyond me. Then the thought of getting there was another issue.

Erin: Wait a minute. That really was far. I mean, let’s just point that out for our listeners. You were far, okay, and you were financially challenged. Those were both true.

Grace: Yep. As far as distance goes, it would take me two ferries just to get to the mainland, and then I would have to fly from either Vancouver or Seattle.

If I were to go to Seattle to fly, it would be about a twelve hour trip, ten or twelve hours with two ferries.

Erin: Wow.

Grace: So it was a big deal. It was a very big deal. I remember thinking, and arguing about that, and then just kind of shutting it down and thinking, “That’s impossible.”

But the thought never really left the back of my mind. In October I went back and looked at the site again, and it was like somebody just gripped me and said, “You need to be there.”

I shared that with my husband and he just said, “If God is wanting you to go, then I will support you with that. We will make it work.”

Karen: Yeah.

Grace: God actually did make it work in an amazing way, because a couple weeks later I went to a teeny tiny missions conference at a teeny tiny church. Literally walked across the cow pastor to get there.

It was on a Friday evening. The pastor opened the service by saying, “Everybody stand up, turn around and say hi to somebody around you.”

I did that, and lo and behold, the woman behind me was there because her husband was one of the speakers for that weekend. But I’d graduated from Bible college with her more than twenty years before, and I hadn’t seen her since. I’d had no contact with her.

I went, “Lynn, so great to see you! What have you been doing with yourself?”

She told me that she was a travel agent working out of her own home. I remember saying, “Hey, give me your information because I’ll keep you in mind if I ever need to go somewhere.”

When it just seemed like God was saying, “You are going to Florida,” I phoned her up and I said, “Lynn, here’s the deal. I need to get to Florida on this day, and I need to get back on this day and you know, I need you to get me there as inexpensively as possible out of Vancouver or out of Seattle. “

She said, “Let me see what I can do.”

She called me back and said, “Grace, I have never seen anything like this before, ever, so give me your credit card right now.”

I did and she booked me a flight on the days that I needed it. It was about $150 round trip.

Erin: No!

Grace: That was a miracle. And let me tell you, I didn’t know the whole story until I met her at a women’s retreat years later. She goes, “Grace, by the way, did I ever tell you what happened after I booked your ticket? A disclaimer came up on the screen that said that price was a mistake. They’d honor every ticket purchased on that price, but that was a mistake.”

Erin: That’s God.

Grace: And that’s how I got to my first writer’s conference.

Erin: That is amazing. Look at how God provided. You stepped forward in faith each time and God gave you that encouragement along the way and that prompting, and then he made it work. Miraculously.

Grace: He did more even because we had a house that had been on the market for two years in Washington state. When we moved to Canada, we’d put our house on the market. It sold just before Christmas that year. But I was still several hundred dollars shy of what I needed to go to the conference.

About a week before the conference, I remember sitting at the kitchen table, literally crying because I felt like this was way bigger than me. I was thinking, “I’m on a white water rafting trip, and I’m hanging on for dear life, and this is way bigger than me.”

Into our mailbox came a letter from escrow that said they’d made a mistake in figuring out how much they owed us after the house sold. The amount of money they said they owed us was, almost to the penny, what was left that I needed to get to Florida.

Karen: Don’t you love how God does that? I mean, that’s amazing. I guess it’s pretty clear God wanted you there.

Grace: I think that’s another reason why I cried. I thought, “He’s in charge of this and this is bigger than me. Let’s just hang on for dear life and see where this goes.”

I went to the conference because I knew I was supposed to go.

Erin: Yes, it’s very clear.

Karen: How did that conference go for you?

Grace: My greeting cards were nicely rejected by the Dayspring editor, and they’ve never gone anywhere to this day. That would’ve been like 1999, and they’ve never gone anywhere. But it was, like I say, the carrot before a little donkey’s nose. I just followed that carrot and it led me to the Florida Christian Writers Conference.

While I was there, I went to every workshop I could possibly go to because I wanted to get my money’s worth out of the thing!

Erin: Yeah.

Grace: I went to the sessions especially about writing for magazines. That was where I ultimately broke into writing. I was just doing what the editors said. I played by the rules, and I got the Christian Writers Market Guide, and I studied it like a Bible. I did all the right things, and I was able to break in, but that doesn’t mean that I did it all correctly.

Erin: First, though, let’s go back to the fact that you got rejected by Dayspring. Like what happened to you when that happened? Obviously you said, “Well, too bad, I’m still gonna learn everything I can.” But did you also go, “God, uh, did you make a mistake?”

What did you think when that happened?

Grace: I got rejected there, but I thought, “I’m not gonna give up that easy.”

I think I went back home and I sent the samples to… I must have sent them in to Dayspring again. At that point, there was an artist named Matt Anderson, and he had a line of greeting cards called Heaven’s Unofficial Greetings, like there were little characters like Ziggy, the little cartoon character.

They were one of my favorite lines of cards. So I sent some samples in, and I got a letter back. It was kind of a form rejection, you know, “Your cards do not meet what we’re looking for at this time. Thanks, but no thanks.”

I saw the name on the letter when I got it, and I thought, “That’s not Matt Anderson. That’s not who I wanted to look at the cards”

So I got on the phone. There was a phone number on that thing. I phoned and I asked for that person. It was a name that could be either a male or a female, so I really didn’t even know who I was calling, but I called up, and it turned out to be a man.

I said, “I wanna know why these cards were rejected.”

He said, “Well, to tell you the truth, I didn’t even see them. I was not the one who looked at them. Matt Anderson did. Why don’t I have him call you? He’s a really nice guy and he will do that.”

I thought, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” But I thanked him and hung up.

Thirty minutes later my phone rang and it was Matt Anderson himself!

Erin: Wow.

Grace: He went through each card and what he thought about them gave me his opinion. Then he said this, ” Grace, if God is in this, then don’t stop until he says so.”

Karen: Very good.

Grace: I thought that was the best piece of advice, and I’ve passed that on to a lot of newer writers too, because it really kept me going. I didn’t realize you probably shouldn’t get on the phone and call and say, “Tell me, explain to me…”

But these people were gracious with me and gave me the answers I was looking for, and that’s what I needed.

As for Matt Anderson, later I was able to interview him for a Power for Living Sunday School paper article. Then we met years later at a Mount Herman Christian Writers Conference. It was great fun.

Erin: Wow. What I love is these connections that you were building, you know? Let’s go back to the conference. You get rejected by Dayspring, but you’re still, you know, moving along. Did you get rejected at the conference with Dayspring, or did that happen later?

Grace: No, that happened right at the conference.

Erin: Okay. Yeah.

Grace: I had sent them in earlier to be looked at, and so when I got the envelope back there was the nice rejection letter.

Erin: How did you feel?

Grace: I was disappointed because that’s why I went. I went thinking, “Oh, these are so cute and for sure somebody’s gonna want them.”

I had actually done a little bit of a test drive with some Christian bookstores on Vancouver Island, I had taken them in, and also had taken them to a friend of mine who owned a Christian bookstore in Tacoma, Washington.

All of them were favorable reviews, so I went to that conference thinking, “I’ve got this thing in the bag.” But it didn’t turn out that way at all!

Erin: You wouldn’t be the first person to think, “I’ve got this thing in the bag,” at a conference.

Karen: Not by a long shot.

Erin: What else happened at the conference? You learned a lot, it sounds like.

Grace: I learned a ton. Really that was the best thing I ever could have done, to invest in a conference. I know it’s costly, but it’s an investment. People invest in their education if they’re going to become a teacher or a dentist or any other career. So you know, we need to, as writers, invest as well and know that that money is well spent.

Erin: Right!

Grace: I went wanting to learn. Especially when I got my rejection, I knew that I had to pivot. That’s the big word, right? To pivot and to be flexible. I thought, “Okay, well if the cards aren’t gonna fly, I’m not gonna waste this opportunity. What else can I learn?”

And, yeah, I learned. I remember catching an editor on the sidewalk and pitching an idea on the way to the dining room and that type of thing. He actually said to me, “Yeah, go ahead. Why don’t you write up the story?”

And I did. And I got published. So that was a win for me.

Erin: You know what I love about all this is that you’re very tenacious. You were willing to not roll over and die at the first sign of trouble. You just kept moving forward.

Now, I know you and I were talking at one point about your interaction with Andy Sheer. Was that a result of this conference?

Grace: Yes.

Andy had said yes to an idea that I pitched to him as well. I went home, wrote up the article, typed it up, and I sent it in. That was in the days where they weren’t doing so much by email. It was hard copy.

I sent it in and a little while later I got a rejection letter back. I was appalled to see that when I sent this thing in, I’d sent it on recycled paper, so there was something typed on the back! It wasn’t even clean paper that I sent the article in on. I was so appalled. I just wanted to go crawl into a hole and never come back out.

I did get their form rejection letter back. Although I think it did say something like, “Try again.” It wasn’t a, “Don’t ever do this again!”

I did get a comment like that from another editor. I can tell you about that one. But this one, I don’t think I ever submitted again to that magazine because I was so embarrassed. So embarrassed.

Erin: Let that be a lesson to everyone out there. Try to use clean paper. Or in these days, hey, everything’s electronic, so that helps. But don’t send it “to whom it may concern…”

Grace: That’s right. Play by the rules. Get that Christian Writer’s Market Guide and play by the rules.

Erin: There you go. Obviously, though, you’ve had a very prolific career. Did you go to other conferences or did you just make the most of this one so much that afterwords you were mostly developing connections by submitting and getting rejections and submitting again?

Grace: I probably went to one or two conferences a year for the first seven or eight years.

Erin: Wow.

Grace: Yeah. Oh, I did the whole thing. I prepared meals for my family, and I marked on the freezer container, you know, 350 degrees for forty-five minutes. I did all of that. Just prepared, prepared, prepared so that my family wouldn’t feel like I was stepping out on them because I’d be gone for a week at a time. I still had three kids at home at the time. They weren’t little anymore. They were junior high and high school, but still.

I did that and then I think I took a bit of a break, if I remember correctly, because I felt like things were really starting to move along and it was okay to take a break for a couple years, three years.

Then my husband and I moved from the island down to Abbottsford, British Columbia, which is about an hour from Vancouver. But the ministry that we began leading at that time meant that I had to be overseas for about five or six weeks every summer and also in the spring.

I had loved going to the Mount Herman Christian Writers Conference partly because it wasn’t as far as the Florida Christian Writers Conference. It wasn’t clear across the continent for me. It was also in the same time zone, so I didn’t have to deal with jet lag. That was quite handy. Just less expensive all around for me. But they always did it in the springtime, right around Palm Sunday, and that’s when our missions staff conference was held overseas. So I missed it for many years.

But yeah, my writing career was really taking off at that point, so it didn’t hurt it so much since I had a lot of established connections.

Erin: Right.

Grace: But for those who are thinking about it, or just fairly new kids on the block with this, it is good to get your foot in the door and keep that door open by growing those relationships at conferences.

Erin: Right. I think that’s a misconception that a lot of new writers have. I know I did when I was a new writer. I was like, “Well I have to go to a writer’s conference.” But then you go and there’s so much pressure on that one because it’s expensive and you’re like, “I’ve gotta make my money back. I’ve gotta do this now, and this might be my only chance.”

But it doesn’t work that way very often. The best thing is exactly what you did, Grace: to go to as many conferences as you can year after year to meet the same people, to develop relationships.

Ultimately that’s what I ended up doing as well. That’s how I got to know people. That’s how I grew in my writing craft. That’s what happens.

Then after you’ve been going to conferences for 5, 6, 7 years, you know so many more people and those connections and relationships are far more developed, and then when the time is right, God takes you, if he has publication in the path for you, and he opens those doors and makes it happen and all of a sudden you’re like an overnight success after seven years.

Karen: After a lot more than that. There are people who’ve been overnight successes after twenty years.

Erin: Yeah.

Karen: Well, I don’t know about you guys, but I really enjoyed this whole conversation and we’ve got even better information and ideas for you about attending writers conferences in the next podcast. So be sure to listen.

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Are writers’ conferences worth it? Guest Grace Fox says YES! #ChristianWriter #amwriting
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The Latest Release by Grace Fox

Names of God: Living Unafraid by Grace Fox

Upcoming Conference

Erin will be at the Florida Christian Writers Conference, in Leesburg, FL, October 16-20, 2024.

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU!

Have you been to a writers’ conference? What did you you think about your experience?

THANK YOU!

Thank you to all our patrons on Patreon! You help make this podcast possible!

A big thank you to our September sponsor of the month, Christy Bass Adams. She’s the author of a devotional titled Learning As I Go: Big Lessons from Little People, and a middle grades novel, The Adventures of Cricket and Kyle: Imagination Checkers. She’s also a speaker and leads women’s conferences and Bible studies, and she’s a monthly contributor to Inspire-a-fire and a newspaper columnist for Greene Publishing.

Many thanks also to the folks at PodcastPS for their fabulous sound editing!

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The post 221 – Are Writers’ Conferences Worth It? with Guest Grace Fox appeared first on Write from the Deep.