I’m honored to be one of the speakers for the upcoming Southern Christian Writer’s Conference in Tuscaloosa, June 2-3, 2017. My topical focus is on copyright and other legal issues for writers.
Dr. David Sloan was one of my academic mentors when I was considering whether to pursue a master’s degree in journalism or a related field and, later, when I ended up enrolling in the Ph.D. program in Mass Communications at the University of Alabama.
Just about everyone in the Sloan family is a writer of some nature (at least to my knowledge). David and his wife, Joanne, are wonderful people and I’m honored to call them my friends. Daughter Cheryl Wray is the assistant conference coordinator and currently a sports writer with the Alabama Media Group and has a massive freelance writing portfolio on family, parenting and many other topics. Son Christopher Sloan is a professional writer and blogger, covering wellness and health, as well as spiritual topics.
Southern Christian Writers Conference website.
Writing Can Inspire In Ways We Don’t Expect
I first attended the SCWC way back in the mid-1990s when I was starting to do freelance writing, while still practicing law. One of the first articles I wrote was “Discovering God’s Will for Your Professional Life.”
I was struggling with vocational questions of my own at the time and pitched the article via a query to Christian Single magazine. I received an invitation to submit the article on spec. Alas, my wasn’t accepted for publication.
Interestingly enough, around the time I submitted the article, I met someone on a flight who asked for a copy, which I gladly shared.
I later received the nicest letter from the wife of that stranger-on-a-plane. She wrote to tell me that my article had made a huge difference in how she dealt with some professional or vocational challenge at the time and thanked me for writing it.
I ran across a copy about a year ago, so I need to find a place to publish on one of my blogs.
That example just goes to show that sometimes, we don’t get the outcomes we expect or hope for, but our words can still make a difference in the lives of others.