About the Book

Book: Chasing the Blue Boat: A Novel of Longing

Author: Connie Kallback

Genre: Historical Coming of Age

Release Date: November 26, 2024

Nine-year-old Dana Foster will follow her older brother, Luke, wherever he goes. From climbing on ledges, jumping in a fish pond, and causing general mischief, Luke is fearless. But when tragedy strikes the Foster family, everything that Dana has ever known is suddenly turned upside down. When the storms of life come, will the Foster family stand firm in their faith? Or will they shatter under the pressure? Suddenly, a blue boat that Dana and Luke received from their uncle leads Dana on a journey of faith, hope, and love that she will not soon forget.

In this coming-of-age story, discover the truths of God’s grace in suffering, the blessing of forgiveness, and how to hold on to your faith when all hope seems lost.

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Author Interview

1. What is your favorite part about writing?
The writing process itself. I enjoy sitting at my PC and letting my fingers fly across the keys. I’m
not a planner or outliner because I like to see where the mind goes when I get started. It’s
usually a surprise.

2. What is your least favorite part about writing?
I don’t like to stop to do research. If there’s any fact I don’t know or can’t remember, I bold it or
insert a notation to myself and keep on writing. Then I take time to do research and nothing
else, usually on a different day.
When I was in college, I became so efficient at writing term papers, I thought I should look into
a career that involved research. In truth, I became an English teacher because I preferred
literature and the entire English curriculum above everything else. When my boys were young
and I had a part-time teaching job, I also did a spate of writing. I realized then that research
wasn’t my favorite pastime.

3. Do you have a way to keep track of your story ideas? I throw them in a folder or in a file on
my PC. I categorize them sometimes into separate files, but I’m not a great organizer.
Sometimes I wander through either electronic or paper files and find myself reading about
thoughts I once recorded that I’ve forgotten. If I were a properly organized writer, maybe I’d
have 20 books under my belt by now.

4. Where do you get your ideas for your books?
I often rely on life experiences, my own or others, as well as my imagination. Verisimilitude can
become the result. It seems like real life because it is, as far as physicality goes. Another ring of
truth comes from the characters’ emotionality and how they react. When I wrote Chasing the
Blue Boat, my coming-of-age novel, none of the characters were people I’ve known, but real-
life incidents became an important part of the book. Here’s one:
Nearly five decades ago, my friend’s son took a boat ride with his buddies on an upstate New
York lake. A wave bucked one of the boys off the side of the boat, tossing him into the water.
He lost his life. I heard about the funeral and could only imagine the sadness of all those
families. In my book, the boy who died became the brother of Dana, the main character. It
evolved as her story of trying to live without her only brother and deal with her parents trying
to do the same.
When the publisher’s staff at Ambassador International finished poring over my manuscript,
the publisher asked if I would write a short piece explaining why I chose to write about a
difficult topic. My response appears at the beginning of the book.
All this makes it sound as if the story is purely one of grief, but other characters, who enter the
plot as it moves along, bring humor, joy, and even more. The new characters become
instrumental in bringing about one of the novel’s themes of forgiveness as well.

5. Do bits of yourself/friends show up in your characters?
I think most writers emulate the habits of actual people, including emotional ones, in creating
fictional characters. I have not experienced, though, the deep grief of losing a child or sibling as
my characters do, and I was not a child of divorce. When I married my husband, my sons from
my first marriage were out of school and working, but my new husband’s children, ages four to
eight, had spent part of their formative years during their parents’ divorce. They were nine
months to nearly five years old when their mother left. I couldn’t imagine how it affected them.
In my novel when Dana understands her father is leaving to take a job in another state, she
thinks of ways to make him stay. I may have borrowed my stepchildren’s wistfulness to write
about her final conversation with him. Dana doesn’t know whether to give in to sadness or
anger. My stepchildren likely dealt with mixed emotions, too. Dana swings back and forth
between those feelings. In one scene, she runs away from the house to avoid talking to her
father on the phone.

About the Author

Connie Kallback grew up on the plains of Cheyenne, Wyoming, attended the University of Wyoming, and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. She transitioned from English teacher to publishing in New Jersey with CCMI/McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and CPP, Inc, in positions from writer to acquisitions and managing editor. Her early writing, penned while teaching, appeared in magazines, newspapers and literary journals. No longer wearing the hats of Mary Poppins or Sherlock Holmes, necessities of raising six children in two separate families, she writes in South Carolina where she lives with her husband.

More from Connie

The idea for Chasing the Blue Boat began with the memory of a dangerous escapade from my early childhood years. The thought of it scares me to this day.

I grew up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and lived one block from the Wyoming State Capitol Building. One day I followed my older brother there, up nearly 20 steps from the ground to the grand side entrance with giant doors flanked by a waist-high wall and soaring support columns. We scaled the wall close to the building and placed our feet on an architectural ledge that circled the entire structure. Hoping to follow it all the way around, we began to sidle sideways, hugging the stone.

I remember being scared, but my unrealistic stage of thinking made me hope the grass would break my fall!

We made it around the first corner – I don’t know how – and continued along the front until a woman in an office inside spotted me. Knowing we shouldn’t be there, we reversed our steps and ran home.

That’s how the fictional coming-of-age story begins. Dana, the young girl, joins her brother in many adventures before a tragedy changes her whole family and sends each of them on separate journeys of suffering, accompanied by hope and forgiveness.