The Winter Seeking [Hardcover]

Vinita Hampton Wright (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 21, 2003

Share the Journey to the Heart of the Manger.

Twenty-two-year-old Mary Georgiana Reese faces a gauntlet of pain and loss: her parents’ divorce and her dad’s remarriage, her mother’s battle with cancer, and her own recent breakup. Amidst such turmoil, she can’t imagine facing Christmas with her mom’s family in Atlanta. Then she is confronted with one more unnerving shift: her mother’s reconnection with the Christian faith of her youth.

Though Mary Georgiana has little use for religion, she attempts for her mother’s sake to understand this spiritual reawakening. In the process, she comes face to face with another Mary: a virgin heavy with child, making her own uncertain journey through circumstances that bring both fear and hope. As their two stories intertwine, each young woman travels through a season of pain and joy, with surprising results. Their dual journey of winter seeking, centered on the Christ child, invites you to an experience of the Nativity unlike any other.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This complex, interior coming-of-age story charts the spiritual awakening of a young woman, Jana Reese, who visits her ailing mother at Christmas and finds her own connection with Christian faith. As her mother struggles through radiation treatments, buoyed by a renewed prayer life, she longs to pass on a legacy of faith to her daughter, who is mired in a postcollegiate depression. Jana begins to interact with the story of Mary in the Gospel of Luke, pouring her own anxiety and suffering into a creative story about Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus. The novella recounts a quiet and touching transformation, and Wright's decision to keep the emotions restrained actually makes the story pack a more authentic and lasting wallop.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“A touching story of a woman's search for her place in the world, as only Vinita Hampton Wright can tell it.”
–Philip Gulley, author of the Harmony series

“Spiritual without being sentimental, The Winter Seeking is the perfect short read on a cold Christmassy night. I know that curling up with this novella will now be part of my annual Yuletide tradition.”
–Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath

“Vinita Hampton Wright covers a lot of emotional ground in her novella The Winter Seeking. This story evocatively depicts a refreshing and inspiring journey to faith that the reader shares alongside Jana. As a songwriter, I am always moved by fresh perspectives, and this story truly delivers a new glimpse into the nativity.”
–Jill Paquette, Singer/songwriter

“My Christmas shopping problems have been solved! I will be getting copies of The Winter Seeking for all my family, friends, and spiritual companions. This warm and deftly written novella gives hope to those of us who hold to our faith in these uncertain times. The Winter Seeking serves as an easily opened door to the world of Christian meditation, as well as being an entertaining and heart warming reading experience. Those of us who have enjoyed Vinita Wright’s other novels are not surprised to see her characters come to life on the page and enrich our lives. I didn’t want this novella to end.”
–Lyn Holley Doucet, author of Water from Stones and A Healing Walk with St. Ignatius; Spiritual Director, The Emmaus Center of Spiritual Direction, Our Lady of the Oaks Grand Coteau, Louisiana

“The novella recounts a quiet and touching transformation, and Wright’s decision to keep the emotions retrained actually makes the story pack a more authentic and lasting wallop.”
-- Publisher's Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: WaterBrook Press; 1 edition (October 21, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578568277
• ISBN-13: 978-1578568277
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,724,170 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

To see what Vinita is doing currently, you can find her posting regularly on her own blog (http://vinitawright.typepad.com)and on Days of Deepening Friendship: An Online Spiritual Journey (http://deepeningfriendship.loyolapress.com). These days she is editing, blogging, giving workshops and retreats, and working on a new novel (yet to be named and too young and fragile to be exposed to the outside world). She's also on Facebook and Twitter, although "I tweet only sporadically, which probably defeats the purpose entirely--sorry about that, Tweetlings!" She's begun building a book shelf on Shelfari and hopes to connect with like minds through the books people are reading.

Vinita Hampton Wright has been a book editor for nearly two decades, currently senior editor at Loyola Press in Chicago. She leads workshops around the country on the creative-spiritual process--The Soul Tells a Story grew out of this work. Of her full-length novels, Velma Still Cooks in Leeway won a Logos Book-of-the-Year award, and Dwelling Places was selected by Christianity Today as Best Fiction of 2007.

Wright recently published an updated edition of Simple Acts of Moving Forward, and her most recent nonfiction, Days of Deepening Friendship, focuses on the spiritual experience of women. She now leads retreats on this topic (contact her at [e-mail]).

Vinita loves to cook, walk the city of Chicago, and watch movies. She and photographer/designer Jim Wright have been married 18 years. They share a bungalow on the far South Side with 2 cats and 2 dogs, all of them rescues, all spoiled, and--depending on the day--helpful or not to Vinita's creative process. Vinita is finally learning to garden and now adds homegrown tomatoes, peppers, and herbs to her little feasts.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4 1/2 Stars...Comfort and Hope, December 19, 2003

By 

Eric Wilson "novelist" (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Winter Seeking (Hardcover)

As Christmas neared, I decided it was time for a holiday novella. Grisham's "Skipping Christmas" was a humorous escape last year, but this book looked a bit more serious.

"The Winter Seeking" is a concise and wonderfully rendered tale of a woman dealing with many of the emotions we confront during the Christmas season. She struggles with her parents' divorce and her mother's illness. She also wrestles with her own issues of faith. When, at the suggestion of another young lady, she decides to read the Christmas account and put herself into the story, her perceptions begin to change.

In some emotionally-charged, yet understated, final scenes, Vinita Hampton Wright wraps up a story that adds depth to the season. It never sugarcoats, but it does bring comfort. It never preaches, yet it offers hope. Sometimes laughter is a great medicine; in this case, a few tears clean the soul.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Christian Book Previews, July 22, 2004

By 

Christian Book Previews "Christian Book Previews" - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Winter Seeking (Hardcover)

In The Winter Seeking, Vinita Hampton Wright presents the story of Mary Georgiana, known to most as Jana, a college student searching for something, only she doesn?t know what. Her parents are divorced, her father remarried, her mother struggling with cancer, and Jana must deal with the pain of her own recent break-up as she spends Christmas with her mother and aunt. On top of everything, her mother has returned to her childhood faith.

When a therapist at her aunt?s church suggests journaling events in the Biblical Mary?s life from her own perspective, Jana accepts the challenge. As her questions about God and faith find answers from her fictionalized characters, the Christmas story becomes much more than a story.

Beautifully written, this novella brings a unique twist to the old saga of stable, shepherds, and stargazers. Women of all ages will enjoy a cozy yet thought-provoking read that settles deep into the heart as two Mary?s reach the object of their seekings, the Christ Child. -- Katie Hart, Christian Book Previews.com

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Refreshing and Well-Written Story, January 24, 2004

By 

FaithfulReader.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Winter Seeking (Hardcover)

Sometimes delightful gifts come in small packages. Sometimes that delight is found in a short novel that one can read in one or two evenings, from first-page storm to last-page resolution.

For Advent inspiration or a Christmas gift, Vinita Hampton Wright's new seasonal novella fills the bill. After the opening Colorado blizzard that maroons "postcollege, prejob" Jana, the book's wintry scene has less to do with cold weather --- most of the December action taking place in balmy Atlanta --- than with the chill in Jana's heart.

Jana's faithless life is fragmented: her parents divorced, her boyfriend out of the picture. "She had just survived Thanksgiving with Dad and his wife," whom he had met "at some conference about reclaiming life's positive energy." Until Jana slid off the road and into a ditch, "she had been gratefully alone and headed across the country, toward Christmas" in Georgia with her mother, currently undergoing distressing cancer treatments in the care of Jana's aunt.

Jana "wasn't especially looking forward to Christmas either." But "when both parents had left you, you'd broken up with your boyfriend, and you had no job or money, well of course the thing to do was go have a Happy Thanksgiving and then top that off with a Merry Christmas." Such were the expectations she placed on herself and anticipated from others, notably her aunt Cheryl, who, in Jana's view had two strikes against her: Cheryl insisted on calling Jana by her full name, Mary Georgianna; Cheryl was also "very tight with 'the Lord.'" Jana mentally summarized her cross-country trip: "I'm making a pilgrimage from New Age freaks to Holy Rollers." Even her unchurched mother was talking about God since she'd taken sick.

In the second of the novella's three parts ("The Journey, "The Encounter," and "The Gift") Jana reluctantly attends Cheryl's "rather well-to-do" Southern Baptist church, where "people were way too friendly, considering they hardly knew her." But there she meets a middle-aged woman named Sandra, whom Jana recognizes as someone "she might actually like to talk to."

A spiritual director trained to listen well, Sandra befriends Jana and gently challenges her to read Luke's account of the Christmas story, imagine herself as a character and journal her experience. "Enter the story and walk beside Mary, and talk to her. Ask her any questions you like...God meets you in that story and tells you what you need to understand."

In this fashion Jana --- whose real name, you remember, is Mary --- encounters Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the Christchild. Over several days she reads, up through the account of Simeon and Anna, who intuitively know the baby's identity. Jana journals conversations with young Mary, musings about old Anna and herself: "Would I ever recognize the Jesus child? Would I know what to look for? Would I care enough to notice?"

In the company of Luke's characters, Jana's maternal family and their Southern Baptist friends, Jana receives a gift that sets her on a new journey. As Jana hears at Christmas dinner, "This is what faith gives us, celebrations of what has already come true and celebrations of what will someday be true."

Wright dedicates her book to "every young woman who needs company on the journey." THE WINTER SEEKING is very appropriate for young women who are struggling to find their place in and way through life. But it is more than a young adult novel; it is a refreshing, well-written story that shines hope, like warm light, into any winter season.

--- Reviewed by Evelyn Bence