She pretty much cried for 250 miles.
It had been almost a year since Cathy Palmer had traded her “idyllic” life on a lake in Missouri for an apartment near the busy intersection of Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Buford Highway in Atlanta. Since she’d put on hold a career as the bestselling author of more than 50 Christian novels to become the unpaid founder of a sewing group for refugee women that met in a closet-sized room at the Clarkston Community Center.
Not to mention on launch day, no one even showed up at the Refugee Sewing Society. When women did start coming, they weren’t Africans, people Palmer could instantly relate to since she grew up in Kenya as the child of American missionaires. Instead, they were mostly Bhutanese.
Then Palmer’s literary agent approached her: Christian book behemoth Thomas Nelson offered a two-book deal with plans for heavy promotion. It would turbo-charge her sales figures and name recognition.
She said yes.
Then she and her husband, Tim, took a trip to the Georgia coast.
“I cried all the way to Savannah,” Palmer, 58, recalls. “I kept saying, ‘What have I done?’”
After a slow start, the Refugee Sewing Society was gaining steam by then and she was starting to see its positive impact on the women’s lives. But Palmer sensed it could do even more.
As she and her husband drove to Savannah they talked about the first novel she would develop for Thomas Nelson — a novel called “The Refugee Sewing Society.”
“It would be about a young woman who comes and kind of does what I did,” Palmer said. “I just envisioned what might happen. How it would turn people’s lives around and how it would change her life.
“I was like, ‘OK, am I writing it? Or am I really doing it?’”
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