Last week I attended the big Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This is a wonderful biennial writers’ conference that happens to occur in the hometown of my publisher, Zondervan. So I had a great time meeting the team there, signing books, appearing on a couple of fun panels, stalking Eugene Peterson and Kate DiCamillo, and otherwise enjoying the chance to hang out with writer friends.
If you are a writer or dream of someday getting published, mark April 2012 on your calendar right now and plan to attend.
But despite all the inspiring and challenging stuff that happened at the festival, one of the highlights of my time in Grand Rapids was the opportunity to spend time with the Crowley family and my cover twin, Drew.
Yes: the kid from the cover.
As I mentioned in that post, thanks to the wonders of the Internets, I was able to track down the identify of the scrawny, fierce dude on the cover of my new book. He lives in Grand Rapids, and I had the pleasure of sharing a meal with the Crowleys on Friday night. We had pizza. We signed books for each other (I signed a couple copies of O Me of Little Faith for them, and had Drew sign a book cover for me, too.)
And then we took pictures. The cover for O Me of Little Faith was shot in the Crowley’s yard, right in front of their little green house in East Grand Rapids. So clearly the two of us needed to recreate the shot, right?
Here we are in a regular pose:
And here we are approximating the cover shot (only with more muscle flexing and without the band-aids):
My apologies for showing more skin than you probably wanted to see, but it was too good to pass up.
Drew proudly took the book to school yesterday to show his classmates how famous he was. So fun.
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A handful of OMOLF reviews are starting to show up online, if you’re interested:
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