Episode 16: Faythe Publishing Programs & Services

The speaker, Tinda Faith, introduces herself as the host of the Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge and discusses her passion for Faith Publishing, which supports the writing and creative journey. She emphasizes the importance of every voice and story, and expresses her excitement about sharing her ideas for writing programs and the services offered by Faith Publishing. She mentions the Family Folklore and Retreat program, which aims to collect and preserve family stories through interviews and photo gathering. She also talks about the Town Chronicles program, which focuses on small Kansas towns and their unique stories. Tinda Faith draws inspiration from her stepdad's family tradition of recording stories during Christmas gatherings. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to the Cup of Creativity in the Literary Lounge, a place where writing doesn't have to suck. I'm your host, Tinda Faith, and today I want to talk about me. I want to talk about I. I want to talk about number one on the... Yeah, sorry, Timmy Keith. I know. I want to talk about me. Not necessarily me. I want to talk about Faith Publishing. So I'm going to do it. I'm doing it. I am going to take this episode to talk about some of the programs and the services, and you are going to listen to me completely just freak out, and hopefully my enthusiasm goes through the little lovely earbuds and speakers and inspires you to jump on board and help me with all of this, right? I think it's going to be wonderful. But, of course, before I do, before I go on my rampage, I want to give a shout-out to the Advanced Learning Library here at Wichita, Kansas, and their wonderful AV studio. I'm really happy that they have soundproof walls so they don't necessarily listen to me sing because I will tell you, with all of these mics, I could easily, easily be a rock star. But that is for another time. That is for another time. The other thing, obviously, I want to be talking about is my passion. Faith Publishing, Inc., our lovely hashtag is supporting the writing journey. And it's more than just the writing journey. It is the whole creative journey. And one of the phrases, and it just keeps on getting better the more I say it, is that we are the audience. We are the storytellers. We are the legacy. I love that. I love that. Why do I love that? Because every single voice matters. Every story matters. Every single talent is utilized because every single story deserves to be told. We inspire, and then we, in turn, get to be inspired. Oh, my gosh. Does that not just give you, like, goosebumps? I wish you could see my, like, oh, so many goosebumps. Okay. So while I dive in and tell you about all of my wonderful ideas, and I kind of arranged my sticky notes and updated my website, I want to share all of that with you. But before I do, let's say the daily mantra. I know. Say it loud. Say it proud. Put your hand on your heart like you mean it. Okay. All right. Here we go. Today, I will face fear. Today, I will be brave. Today, I will struggle. Today, I will grow. Today, I will get through this. Huzzah! Woo! Yay! I know. I didn't totally sing, but I was close. I was close. All right, my love. So here's kind of what I want to do. I want to have a conversation twofold. I want to share my ideas for writing programs, and then the other part of it is I want to share the services that Faith Publishing is actually offering. I'm excited about not just, like, publishing and helping somebody write. Don't get me wrong. I love teaching. I love working with people. I love listening to stories. I love helping people craft a story. But I also want this journey to be self-sufficient. You know what I'm saying? I would love to ask for donations, and we can have fundraising, and we can build scholarship funds and fellowship funds, which is something I want to do. But also, I think through that, we do that through programs. And I have two, three, four, five, maybe six. Six? We'll call it six. Programs. I have, you know, more can be made. Who knows? We'll see what happens. The first one I want to talk about, and you can actually find this on our website at Faith Publishing. It's F-A-Y-T-H-E, faithpublishing.org. If you just click on the button that says Programs, it kind of gives you a little rundown of what we have going on. So the first one I want to talk about is called Family Folklore and Retreat. Now, I have been chewing on this for, oh, my goodness, years, just years. I come from a family of storytellers. I find them highly entertaining. Some of them are sad. Some of them are great. Some of them overcome obstacles. Some of them explain why my mother rearranges her furniture, right? It explains why we are the way that we are. And first I wanted to do kind of a family folklore. I was thinking about making a book, honestly. So I'm a fourth-generation teacher. I did not want to be a teacher. I'm not going to lie to you. Everybody, I'm talking like my mom and dad, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents, my great-grandparents. We're talking like everybody, everybody teaches and then they coach something. And I really kind of wanted to start gathering stories and seeing if there's some kind of connection. And that was kind of my first idea. Then I had another idea that a friend of mine, and I think I've talked about this before, a friend of mine, her husband, which is also a dear friend of mine, was just recently diagnosed with dementia. And while I find that sad because, I mean, no one wants that, and not to mention he's an amazing storyteller, I felt that maybe there's something I can do and maybe I can help collect all of those stories. And so that's kind of what's coming out of this first program, Family Folklore and Retreat. So with my friend, I have a series of questions, so kind of what I want to do with this. So I have a series of questions. I have as many as I can think of. And some of them I've done some research, some of them on most of the other books. Some of them I've talked to people. I have them in chronological order. They can be answered in any order because, hi, I've got the attention span of a gnat. I jump all over the place, all over the place, right? You know, one day I could be talking, you know, one moment I could be talking about puppies and, like, my favorite animal, and then the next thing I know it's bottle rockets and fishing. Who knows? Who knows? So I have a series of questions, of interview questions. And I've asked my friend and her family to gather up their family photos. And then what I am doing, what I am doing, and we're doing this two different ways because they're kind of like my guinea pigs, and I'm really excited about it. The first one, so these friends of mine, they have, oh, my gosh, one, two, three, four, five, six kids? Six. I think six kids. I think at least five of them. Six of them is showing up. And so we're going to have, like, an afternoon tea or a big brunch or whatever, and they're all going to drive to their mom's house, and we're going to tell stories. And so my job, or part of this program that I'm doing, is that I'm going to interview them. I'm going to transcribe all of their notes. I'm going to put all of their stories into one document for them. And then if they want, and we haven't crossed this bridge yet, we can maybe turn it into a memoir. I would be more than happy. I've got plenty of writers. We could maybe ghostwrite something. We could work on it together. The important thing is I don't want the stories to be lost, and I think it would be really special for this family to have that. So that's kind of what this retreat is. It's funny because my friends are like, well, the first time we're just going to have some food and snacks and my kids. I'm like, okay, that would be great. And she's like, there are going to be great stories, and we can talk about this. And then later on, she wants just adults. She wants adult snacks, adult beverages, and adult stories about her and her husband. And I'm really looking forward to it. And I think from that, we can actually, myself and my board members, we've been talking about actually maybe forming a retreat. It could be a group of friends. It could be a group of family. We could organize maybe a bed and breakfast, something where we could all be in close quarters. And kind of the same thing, right? We can start with some questions. We can, I don't know, see what happens with our pictures. We can put them in order. The great thing about stories is that I'm just collecting, which is something I do all the time. It's kind of like I get to research. I get to do plenty of research and learning about your family and your friends and your stories. And then as a service, we're going to put that together and then give that back to the family. So that is one really, really cool program. Oh, my gosh, there's so many. So I think that would be great. I will also, one more time, one more thing tied to this. I would love to say that this was an original idea. The first time I've ever seen this was my stepdad's family. Fascinating family, fascinating. And every Christmas they had Grandpa Joe, and he had his own special chair. And the thing is, after Christmas, everybody, you know, we had a dinner. We opened presents, la, la, la, la. And then we, everybody, we're talking like everybody. And this is a huge family. Everybody gathered around the grandmother and grandfather. And then they set out tape recorders, and they just talked about stories. And I thought that is such a cool idea. I learned so much about that family. I learned that he was in the Olympic trials, that he ran against Jesse Owen, that my grandmother was one of the first women to play a sport at K-State. I was just like, what? It was just fascinating. It was absolutely fascinating. So I kind of like to get all of these things and just turn it in together and create a service that I can help collect stories. So I think that's the one. And speaking of collecting stories, that's going to lead to my next program. The next program we are calling Town Chronicles. Now, I moved around a lot as a kid. Excuse me. But I ended up going through junior high and high school at a very, very small Kansas town like we did not. We had a flashing light. We didn't really have a stoplight. I think if you counted the town and the nearby farmers, it might have been like maybe 1,200, 1,500 people, if that, if that. So it's a town where everybody knows everybody. And you don't think that you're ever going to forget about that in growing up and what you do and what the kids do and how the community works. Anyway, I was kind of thinking the Town Chronicles, I wanted to focus on small Kansas towns. And what's kind of cool is if people look on Facebook or if they go to their local chamber of commerce, there's tons. Some communities actually have like a county museum, something like that. I was kind of thinking that similar to the Family Folklore, I was thinking that I could do something similar and create and just, I don't know, gather information from these towns. Because I know a lot of them have their own Facebook pages. Some of them have, like I said, the museums and the libraries. I would like to go to a small town or have somebody on my crew go to the small towns and create a book for them. Maybe this could be great for like a centennial or for a town celebration or something that this community does and they can use that as a fundraiser. I just think it would be great to have all of those stories in one collection. They can do this every five years, they can do such and such. The little town that I grew up in, I kind of think about like three small towns. One was really well known for having a big town square, you know, the big block. And they would have a centennial and they would have a parade and they'd have a big celebration every single year. Another one, you know, I grew up on, I went to an Indian reservation and I remember like one of the towns had this huge totem pole. Or like the first time I went to a powwow. I think all of those cultural things should definitely be shared. So that is something that I'm extremely excited about. I think it would be great to, you know, get together with the people who run the Facebook pages. Know the stories of, I don't know, the one kid who always outran the cops because he loved, I don't know, messing with the car. Or what is the one person that she never had kids but she showed up to every single high school basketball game for 20 years. You know what I'm saying? I think that's endearing. And I think that says a lot about our community and I think that says a lot about our state. So I think that would be good. And I don't want to, so my focus or our focus for faith publishing is underrepresented voices. So underrepresented voices, originally I look at homes, right? I look at students. I look at people that don't get hired. Maybe they're not going to go to L.A. or Chicago or have, you know, opportunity to talk to publishers. Maybe they don't know how that is. Maybe they didn't know that somebody was really interested in their family history, right? So it's any underrepresented voice. So originally, obviously, I started at home. Well, the great thing about traveling is, hey, guess what? There's stories there, too. There's stories there, too. And not every single story is told in English. And so the next program that I have, I've named it Global Narratives. So this past semester, the past semester, faith publishing published the first book of poetry in Spanish. And this was actually done through the Newton High School Spanish Club, or the Spanish students. They wrote their own poetry. Everything is in English with the exception of a four-word that I wrote at the very beginning. Everything else is in English. I think especially for as many immigrants as we have through Kansas and how our state has been, you know, affected or influenced with immigrants and voices of other, you know, other languages than English, I think that's really, really important. So, example, like yesterday, I just had a marvelous, I know, Maria, I'm talking about you, a marvelous conversation with a student that I had, and she's from Brazil, and she loves writing poetry. And I talked about her before, and I'm like, you know, yeah, let's do this, let's do this. I want to know about your life, and how is it the same as mine? You know, do we look at the color of, one of the conversations that we had yesterday, and we've actually done this before when we were writing poetry together, is we were talking about a certain color of blue. And so she was trying to describe to me that there is a certain color of blue in Portuguese, and it's named after a certain artist. And I, unfortunately, did not know that artist. So that's just one situation, you know, so that is one thing that she would know, whereas we were also talking about sunflowers, which of course is the state flower of Kansas, and that is something that I know. And so having these narratives, even though they're from different parts of the world, I love that it brings it together. I love that we can see that everybody, maybe we experience very similar emotions, or very similar thoughts. And I love that we can do that through different parts of language. I think that's going to, I'm extremely excited for this. So my people that are bilingual, please contact us. Please contact us. I know that where I teach, there is a fairly large Hispanic population, and I find it absolutely amazing listening to people that leave their country to come somewhere else to work and to live and to raise their families. And I think that is like, wow, so courageous and so amazing. I just, oh my goodness, how can you not be excited by those stories? And seriously, if you just listen and you are open and it's not threatening, it is amazing. I know I need to pick a different word. I need to pick a different word that I will save that for Cesar's Thursday, but just, I think the Global Narratives Program is, there's so much potential. So much potential. Okay, I'm moving on. I know. I'm on a roll. I'm on a roll. I'm on a roll. In addition to language, using a different language, being underrepresented, being in Kansas, I also want to focus on the incarcerated. And you're like, what? We started a program. It's going to be called Voices Unchained. And I would like to offer imprisoned writers free writing resources. I would like to have the mentors. I would like to provide an audience for their work. Recently, I listened to a news story, and they were talking about how newspapers, like sometimes inmates, depending on where they are, they only have certain privileges. Sometimes they can get on the computer. Sometimes they can watch TV. Sometimes they can do whatever. But a lot of times they, because everything has to be filtered and checked. And I understand that, and I'm not saying there's anything bad or, you know, whatever about that. But what I found interesting is that the information coming in, I mean, it is warranted as safe, right? So it's not going to stir up any trouble. But on the flip side, with it being, with that information being filtered or limited, that does not help the people that are incarcerated. And I firmly believe that writing is a way to rehabilitate anybody. I mean, what started for me teaching writing was actually helping students. You know, I would always, I worked in foster care for years, and it always seemed that around, well, one, a full moon, because weird as that sounds, a full moon, any, like, big weather changes, and definitely toward the holidays, kids have a hard time. And especially now, because there's so much anxiety in our, you know, in our lives that kids and adults also, they don't know how to process. It is just simulation overload. And I think there's a lot of students and a lot of young people, or elder people, seriously, they are presented with certain situations, and they don't have the skills to process that. So one thing that comes to mind is, like, children of divorced families, for example. All of these students, myself included, they are extremely loving, and they want to help their families in any way, shape, and so a lot of times, not always, but a lot of times, students will, you know, like, they want to talk to their parents, and they want to, you know, their role as a child changes, and sometimes it flips, because they feel like they have to be the caretakers of their parents or the brothers or sisters or whatever. And while that is noble, they don't have the skills to process all of that. You know what I'm saying? And anyway, why I think this is, you know, I bring this up to the Voices Unchained, is that there are so many men and women incarcerated, you know, and they don't have the skills to process what they're going through. Not to mention, there's a huge disconnect, because they are in a completely different, their own society within that building, the building in which they are housed, and then what's happening to the outside of that. And so I think having that link of those stories between the two is extremely important. I mean, I think that this will support expression, and I think will also help create their own sense of power and hope, and then, of course, rehabilitation. So, I don't know, I'm thinking, I'm really working on this. There are several programs that give, like, free books, etc. I want to focus mostly on writing and maybe, you know, publishing those writings, just so somebody can have some kind of a connection. So, I think that would be a really impactful program. My tie-in to my next one is called the Unilome Society. A unilome, as you see on our website, is that funky, squiggly, weird-looking symbol that I use for everything. It is a symbol, you can see it in certain religions, you can see it in personal quests, you can, you know, it's just, there's tons. And I like to use it when it comes to, like, writing and storytelling. You know, because it starts down at the bottom, and you have this great big, like, spiral, and it kind of starts, you know. Because, hi, when you start out, you're young, or maybe you're starting your writing, and you're young, and you don't know what's going on, and you kind of go in circles, and then you have twists and turns, and it keeps on building, building, building, building, building, until you have this nice straight line, and then a dot. And that shows you that you have found your path. And I think that kind of represents what I feel like with the creative process, what I feel like with just the building of this company, is that, yeah, I'm totally spiraling, mm-hmm, I'll own it, but I'm also going through twists and turns, and I'm learning, and I'm meeting amazing people, and I'm collecting more stories, and then soon we are going to find our path. So, the Uniloam Society is based off of that. And what I want to do with that is I want to kind of have a, just a group of writers, right? So I'm going to call it, my Uniloam Society is going to be a community of dedicated writers, and we are going to collaborate, and we're going to seek feedback, and we're going to share advice. Now, I think the way that I envision this can be kind of like a weekly, just online, it's just that we don't necessarily have to go anywhere, per se. The members can enjoy weekly coaching. We can have collaboration calls. But the thing that I also want to kind of up the ante, because I'm kind of morphing this for my P&P Writing Society, because a lot of people either couldn't show up, or they were really intimidated because like one person was talking, and the other person, you know, there's a lot to balance there. But I would like to have kind of like an online community, so we can all challenge each other. But I want to have quarterly challenges, so they can actually help meet their writing goals. You know, do they want to have a screenplay? Do they want to write about, you know, do they want to plot out the next five novels? Do they want to do such and such? And so I want to build kind of a community. So that's my society, my Uniloam Society. So that's the part I'm really, really excited about. My final program is going to be called a Free Thought Session. And essentially, it's just like a little one-on-one when you have writer's block or creator's block, right? There's a quote that Mike Rose, I believe, says that writer's block is the, quote, the inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of basic skill or commitment. Okay. You know, I get that. I've had writer's block, like maybe it's a lack of inspiration. Maybe it's depression. Maybe you're not feeling very well. Maybe you have a sense of dread. Whatever. Whatever that is. I just want you guys to know that we are here to help you. So if you're having to schedule a Free Thought Session, I can help you. I've got a bajillion ideas that I can usually help talk you through it, right? So those are my programs, the Family Folklore, the Town Chronicles, the Global Narrative, the Voices Unchained, the Uniloam Society, and the Free Thought Session. Those are my programs that I'm hoping that can help sustainability with the company. We can bring in some revenue. And that's going to also help us in our other services. That's going to help us get those scholarship opportunities and build those other writing programs. So I know you're ready. Here's the other side of that coin. So we have programs on one side, and then I have services on another. So believe it or not, it's just not me rambling. We actually do a lot of work. The first and foremost is publishing. So I have decided, because I can't do it by myself. I hate saying that, but I can't do it by myself. My company will offer anybody, it can be any kind of content, any genre of work. I will give you five hours free. I will read it. I will edit it. Any submission, I can offer you guidance. I can give you mentorship. Five hours for free for any book. I can help pretty much provide you everything that you need if you would like to have your book or some piece of work published. After that, if you need more than five hours, then we need to find other sessions. So the publishing with my company. Right now, I offer all of your products can be found on Amazon, which is like worldwide. It can be in anything. It can be on Kindle. It can also be on Barnes & Noble. And I'm hopefully in the process of getting audible or audio books made of the material as well. That's something in the works. I can't get it all done in one year, but that's okay. The first and foremost service that we do is publish books. So if you want to publish it by all means, come talk to me. I will tell you because I am brutally honest and I don't lie very well. You can read it pretty much all over my face. Every story is deserved to be told. I will tell you whether your story needs work or not. If it's worthy of being told, then let's do it. Let's just giddy up and get it done. Like I said, if you needed a little bit more work because your craft is not there. Because remember, my whole entire hashtag is supporting the writing journey. Everybody is a storyteller. Everybody is a teacher. Seriously, we learn through teaching. I'm going to have a thing called Saturday Sessions, and people can sign up one by one. And you can book at least a 30-minute session. And we can tackle any writing challenge. So get on our website. It's FacePublishing.org. And go to Saturday Sessions. You can just click the little button that says Schedule Here. And you can schedule it. We can do it online. I can do a phone call. We can meet face-to-face. And we'll just work through what you're needing. So if you're like, yeah, I have this book and I totally want to publish it, and I think it's going to be great, I'm like, okay, that's super. I'll give you five hours. But if we're not done with that, then when we are working together, that's when we can kind of fine-tune your book. So that will be kind of ñ I'm really looking forward to that as well. Another service that we do is proofing. I mean, it all goes together, is proofing and copy editing. And I kind of have a menu of sorts because proofreading and light editing and rewriting is completely different. So I range it from, let's say, developmental writing. If I'm just looking at structure or your narrative flow or just kind of like the overall content, we'll only charge you X amount per thousand words. Or if you need proofreading, like if I need to go line by line and line by line and I'm looking at every single typo or verb tense or transition, then that will also change. So it's going to be exciting because, I mean, we've helped people before. I've had previous students who are in college that just want some help editing their paper. I have helped academic colleagues where English is not their first language and they are preparing to get published in a journal. So they just needed the readability, that kind of thing. So we can actually offer quite a few. I mean, what's neat about state publishing is we're so versatile. In some cases, I almost think that it can be overwhelming because there's so many things that we can help you. So that's one. So obviously we have publishing. We have proofreading. We have copyediting. I am going to start. We wanted to do a yearly writing contest for the writers in the state of Kansas. It's going to be called Echoes of the Prairie. So that's going to be pretty exciting. My goal is to have a yearly anthology and publish that. And then, of course, the top three poems, we have an editor's choice. I just want to get that out there. I would like to get the voices of Kansas out there. So that's another service that we're going to be doing. We're hoping to schedule writing workshops this fall. And the workshops are going to pretty much, I'm going to ask for feedback first off. So far, I've asked people, they want to work on, like, children's books. I've had one suggestion, like maybe they can have a workshop on writing through grief or using writing to help you through grief or trauma. Maybe they want a workshop that only focuses on poetry. But we'll be doing that in the fall. So that is going to have a wide, wide, wide variety of topics. I think that's just going to be, oh, my gosh, it's going to be so exciting about that. And then I have two more. Two more. I want to also probably in the fall, I want to have a literary fest. Come on, that sounds cool. Literary fest. I want to have a conference. I want to have a writer's conference in Kansas. Yep, not Kansas City, Missouri. I want it in Kansas. I want to have teachers. I want to have students. I want to have poets. And I want to have storytellers and other, you know, numerous events and exhibits. And I want to have celebrations. And I want to have a place that we can create and connect and talk. We definitely have to have conversations. So that's going to be coming up. I'm really excited about that. And then my final thing that I want to talk about with regards to faith-based publishing is a movement. I want to start a creative movement, right? We're calling it Ink and Impact. And I want to focus obviously more than just writing, more than just the author. I want to positively impact communities by offering experience to the publishing industry. I want to have places, you know, opportunities for community outreach or website management or editing, writing, operations management, marketing. Oh, my gosh, teaching workshops, organizing things. I would like to create, I would like to have this impact to be one, with our writers and stories, and then two, I want to help create our industry. Because with the last I checked, there are some publishers in Kansas. There are some print, you know, some places that will print books. I have yet to find anybody that wants to grow a community. And I think that would be absolutely amazing. And finally, here's my final thing. And I came about this doing some research, and it is so absolutely perfect. And I've talked about Margaret Atwood several times. And she has this quote, and I actually put it on my website. I love it so much. And it is, quote, in the end, we'll all become stories. Yeah, that's what I want. I want us to all become stories. And I think that we can do that through our programs like Faith or the Family Folklore, the Chronicles of the Town, the Uniloan Society, the Saturday Sessions, right, the Literary Fest. All of this is going to help us become our stories. You know what I'm saying? So, I hope that you're excited. I'm excited. I hope that I have inspired you, and I hope that I've given everybody some ideas about how you would like to become involved. So, be sure to go to our website, faithpublishing.org. Send us a note. Let me know what you want to do. Really, because, I mean, hey, make this your time to share. Share and change our world. This is Good New Faith. With a cup of creativity in a literary lounge, the place where writing doesn't have to suck. I look forward to hearing from all of you. Until next time. © Transcription by CastingWords