First-time Author Faces Questions with No Easy Answers
At the time, Leasa Brouillard didn’t know why her father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, why the illness became terminal, or why she was writing down the entire sequence of events. Looking back now, however, it all seems to have a purpose.
In 2005, Brouillard and her family had just made the annual Christmas trip from their home in Arizona to see relatives in Iowa, when they learned that Grandpa Roger, Brouillard’s father, had been diagnosed with cancer. After an extended holiday stay, they eventually returned to Arizona. That’s when Brouillard’s daughter, Chloe, who was just three years old at the time, began to ask questions. “Although she was so young, she knew what was going on,” says Brouillard. “She has an amazing awareness of things for a child.”
Questions for God: Are You Listening?
Chloe wanted to know how she could help her Grandpa, so they began praying simple prayers, first at mealtimes, and then throughout the day. “Chloe had already developed a relationship with God, so it was natural to pray with her,” says Brouillard.
When her prayers were not immediately answered, Chloe began asking her mother some deep questions. “She would ask if God had heard her prayers, and if he would answer them,” says Brouillard. As she didn’t always have a direct answer, Brouillard began writing Chloe’s questions down, along with the story of the whole situation her father was facing, without knowing how it would end.
One evening after Grandpa Roger passed away, Chloe went out to the patio and yelled for God. “She says ‘I want Jesus to come to dinner; he’s not listening to me.’ She wanted to ask some direct questions,” says Brouillard, who was also searching for answers herself. “After my dad died, I had some of those same questions too. He was so young, only sixty when he died, and I really thought he would get better. Of course, I had a different level of understanding, but we both went through the grieving process.”
As part of that process, Brouillard began rewriting the story of her father’s illness and the myriad questions she and Chloe had raised together. “Rewriting the story was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, because it was like reliving all the aspects of the cancer,” says Brouillard. “But once it was done, it was so liberating, so freeing to have the story down.”
Taking the Next Step
A few months later, Brouillard attended an entrepreneurial authoring seminar, in hopes it could boost her pottery business. “I took a class in entrepreneurial writing, and I realized the story I had at home, written on scratch paper, could become an actual book,” says Brouillard, who wanted to provide a resource to help parents deal with the tough questions and emotions children raise when faced with the death of a loved one. “That’s when I got serious about Chloe’s Prayer and looking for a publisher.”
A large publishing house that wanted to buy the rights to the story originally accepted Chloe’s Prayer, but they could not publish the color book in hardcover format. “It was always my dream to see this project in hardcover,” says Brouillard. “But because they were going to own the rights, we wouldn’t have been able to take the book to a local printer to do a hardcover run.”
Brouillard passed on the deal, and continued to search for a publisher who could fulfill her vision for the project. “I researched many different publishers, as the first few we tried didn’t work out,” she says. “We found AuthorHouse, and realized that we could both keep the rights and print the color book in hardcover runs.” After a few months of careful consideration, Brouillard chose to put her voice in print with AuthorHouse.
“We had spent money in the past with companies who wanted to do everything over e-mail,” says Brouillard. “I wanted someone who would discuss the project with me over the phone, and my author services representative, Jennifer, was a godsend. She was a great help to me, and skilled enough at her job to get me the information I needed to make decisions about the book.”
Marking the Milestone
Brouillard ultimately published Chloe’s Prayer as well as an interactive companion workbook. “I believe Chloe’s Prayer can be a useful tool to parents whose children face the same pain and confusion that Chloe did when her grandfather took ill and passed away,” says Brouillard.
The book is not only significant to Brouillard, but also marked a milestone for AuthorHouse as well. “Chloe’s Prayer is AuthorHouse’s 50,000th title. Since publishing our first book in 1997, we have empowered thousands of authors to realize their dream of publishing a book,” said Kevin Weiss, chief executive officer at AuthorHouse. “This milestone is a tribute to the leadership we’ve exhibited in the self-publishing industry.”
“It’s no coincidence that Chloe’s Prayer is the 50,000th book,” says Brouillard. “I remember one of the last days my dad was in the hospital, he said, ‘All this is happening for a reason. I don’t know why, but there is a reason.’ Now that the book is nearly complete, it’s obvious none of this would ever have happened without his situation.”
Though it may not be the answer to all of her prayers, Chloe’s Prayer is a testament to Brouillard’s ability to face a tragedy and transform it into a positive opportunity. As Chloe has learned, God can work in mysterious ways.
