CHCA Eagle's Eye 2014

44
Resiliently faithful
by Liz Bronson Rosenau ‘00
Q&A
with Liz (Bell) Young ’95
Liz (Bell) Young (pictured above) graduated with CHCA’s first
class in 1995, attended Furman University in South Carolina,
Lee University, then back home to Xavier—and eventually
went on to get her master’s degree in creative writing from The
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and UC. Along the way,
she fell in love with Ryan Young—an ROTC cadet at Furman
who’d actually grown up in the same church as Liz—and later
asked Liz to marry him and journey to Italy for his first, four-year
military assignment.
Between raising two sons (Moses, 5, and Tommy, 3) with
Ryan, working part time as a writer and creative at Crossroads
Church, serving as half of Haven (a bakery and studio run out
of her home) and doing the occasional freelance writing job, Liz
somehow found time to write a memoir. Her book, In the Wide
Country of Love, is a story about her young marriage in another
country, grieving through a war-time separation, and finding
what it means to be home.
Being a writer myself (and having loved In the
Wide Country of Love), I couldn’t pass up a
chance to interview Liz for Eagle’s Eye.
First, I have to ask: why a bakery?
I started Haven with my friend Becky Norris—
Becky’s an incredible pastry chef. She was looking
for a place to bake; I offered our kitchen.
We’re both entrepreneurs with a similar design
taste, so it felt energizing to join forces. It’s
turned into a wedding cake dreamland (happy
and chaotic), and together we do styling for
magazine and video shoots.
When did you discover your
love for writing?
When I was about seven, my mom created a
box. Inside were scraps of paper with creative
prompts, things like “Draw your favorite room in
the house” and “Write a story about a girl who
gets surprised.” My mom’s an artist and teacher;
she has a keen way of pulling creativity out of
people. I loved this box—it was all I wanted to
do for the summer. I was fairly reserved as a
child, so this box was a powerful way for me to
express myself and stir up imagination.
My CHCA English teacher, Karen Smeltzer,
was fantastic, too. She played a big part in me
choosing writing as a profession. The way she
approached literature was smart and creative
all at once, and that’s what I was craving. She
kept asking for more from me, challenging me.
It was daunting and I loved it.
What inspired you to write
your memoir, In the Wide Country
of Love?
I felt unmoored. Ryan had just been deployed
by the Army for a one-and-a-half year assignment
to the Middle East, and I was lost in the
grief and confusion of it. At that point, I was in a
writing program at the University of Cincinnati,
so the book started as a collection of stories for
my thesis. And my professors were incredible.
They understood that me writing about that
present-day experience was almost a necessity.
It gave me an anchor.
What was it like to write a book?
At first, it was fast, and came out raw and
unhinged. When I finished that first draft, my
professors saw promise in that mosaic of stories
and encouraged me to find an agent. I had
no idea how much work it would take to get
it from that hodgepodge of stories to bookready—there
were a few years when I had an
agent, spent time connecting with publishers,
worked with an editor. It was exciting and
exhausting at the same time. I loved it, but
realized going through that process means you
often are asked to make compromises and it
can take years to find the right way to tell a