Books by Janice Elsheimer

Janice Elsheimer suspected she had a talent for writing from the time she was a little girl. A voracious reader, she learned the secret at an early age of assigning actors she liked to the characters in novels, thus allowing her to enter into the stories immediately, watching, as it were through her mind's eye, the characters act out and speak the lines of the story.

But it wasn't until her friend from Mountainburg, Arkansas, Marylinda Farris,insisted that her Christmas letters were works of art and that Janice really was a writer and should put some energy toward developing that talent that Janice began to seriously consider trying to write as a vocation.

The very word vocation harkened back to Janice's Catholic upbringing, with the emphasis on "praying for a vocation" or "calling" to the priesthood or the convent. Although she never seriously thought she would be one of the "blessed" ones who would receive a religious vocation, she never stopped hoping that God would call her to great work. Teaching was such a vocation, and even today, as a part-time teacher of gifted students in a public elementary school in Florida, she practices her gift of teaching, although not wearing the veil, wimple, and habit of a nun. But this writing thing: it kept coming back to haunt her, like a ghostly tap on the shoulder and a whisper that said, "You are called to other things. You are meant to be a writer."

Since that time when she began to consider the possibility that God had other ways to use her talents than through teaching, she has published three books, all of which have to do in some way with how God calls us to use our artistic and creative talents to grow personally and spiritually. Her first book, The Creative Call was released when Janice was 51 years old. Her most recent offering, Garden Graces: The Wisdom in Growing Things speaks to the idea of gardening as a metaphor for life. Word Weavers, written with another award-winning author, Eva Marie Everson, teaches writers how to form and maintain their own successful writers' critique group.

Check out her books and keep checking back for her next release, her first novel, coming out in 2012.