Faith, Fiction, and Space for BIPOC Women: An Interview with Jenny Erlingsson

This essay was produced by students in the course "Publishing in the 2st Century" at Kennesaw State University in the summer of 2025. Students were encouraged to contribute articles to The Headlight Review focused on literary culture in the South, particularly in Georgia where THR is produced.

From the student editors: Sometimes faith plays an unacknowledged role in our writing processes. Our experiences in faith communities subtly impact relationships characters play out in our stories. Some of us altogether avoid faith in writing, separating our religious or spiritual beliefs from the literary moves we make and even our choice to review another author’s work. In this article, writer Jenny Erlingsson explains the way faith intersects her craft.

Jenny Erlingsson

There’s so much about Jenny Erlingsson you don’t know. That’s probably because she’s a freshly minted novelist, author of the 2024 contemporary fiction title Her Part to Play. Before the book’s summer 2024 release, you would have needed to travel to Iceland to bump into Erlingsson in person, or you would have needed to be a part of her Milk and Honey collective of women writers.

Her journey to traditional publishing is anything but traditional, but maybe stories like hers are becoming more common. She didn’t complete an MFA. Her grad degree is in social work, and she worked a fully different career for years, writing curriculum and working in high school and junior high ministry. The only thing she may share with other traditionally published authors is the ability to be patient and persistent.

Erlingsson wrote two proposals, one for fiction and another for a nonfiction book, and submitted them to agent Barb Roose of Books N’ Such. She chose the agency because she enjoyed fiction by other authors they represented. She kept tabs on the agency’s activity, taking note when they signed Barb Roose as an acquisition editor in 2020. Shortly thereafter, Erlingsson approached Roose with her first proposal, asking for her representation.

The fiction proposal, Roose told her, was not marketable, and regarding the nonfiction proposal, her platform wasn’t large enough. After a nine-month back and forth with Roose, receiving feedback and making revisions, Erlingsson was seemingly no closer to a book deal, but she kept at it. Her hope grew when she noticed that some publishers were interested in shorter fiction books. She and Roose must have been on the same wavelength because within days, Roose (after praying about it) contacted Erlingsson telling her to try again with her fiction work. In response, Erlingsson wrote the first draft of Her Part to Play, producing 55,000 words in only six weeks. After she submitted the manuscript to Roose, things moved quickly. Soon, the duo targeted a publisher of shorter fiction, but the manuscript was rejected for its Hollywood subject matter. Both Roose and Erlingsson were disappointed after that rejection, but it led to the next step of increasing the manuscript by 25,000 words. Erlingsson signed a contract to publish Her Part to Play within just a few months of the rewrite. Today, she is already at work on the second of the three novel she sold to her publisher Revell, an imprint of Baker Books, an independent Christian publisher.

But for a seasoned Christian minister, achieving the goal of signing a fiction book deal was not without risks: “I didn’t want my audience to think I was less spiritual because I was writing a novel.” Erlingsson expressed what many may have been thinking, but she refutes the idea that developing a message through storytelling and character building is any less serious or less spiritual than telling a message through other means.

In a June 2024 interview on the In Courage podcast, Erlingsson underscored this point, “Storytelling points back to Jesus and his parables.” She realizes that some readers don’t take fiction seriously. They consider nonfiction to be the only way to make an argument. They wonder what fiction writing can contribute to their spiritual growth. For those readers, Erlingsson has an answer:

My life has been impacted by seeing God work through characters. If you think of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and how much [their writing] impacted people—that speaks to me about the significance and the importance of story because yes we can receive truth from teaching and preaching and imparting, but [fiction] makes things so immersive for us.

Although Erlingsson’s fiction writing reaches back to her adolescence, her nonfiction writing through Milk and Honey was a wide-reaching passion project she was most known for. Under the Milk and Honey umbrella, she self-published her first two books, Becoming His and the Milk and Honey Women’s Devotional Journal. Through Milk and Honey, Erlingsson supports women in their writing journeys, nudging them to take the next step and publishing devotional essays she’d solicited for the project. Erlingsson, has experienced nearly all aspects of self-publishing from designing book covers to acting as editor on the devotional journal.

Speaking of her self-publishing labor, she notes that her experience as a traditionally published author was quite different. From the suggestions and feedback from her acquisition editor to the designs of her marketing team, she said, “They put it through so many hands. Some of my favorite scenes are the ones where my editor said, ‘I want to know more. You left off this scene. They’re going somewhere. I want to see what happens.’ So, I wrote out additional scenes just based on that desire for it.” Summing up her experience with the team at Revell, she says, “They made me a better writer.”

But before signing with Books & Such, she was also connected to writers in Georgia in a significant way. Erlingsson joined the Entrusted Women Facebook group when she moved to Eyrarbakki, Iceland, in 2018. Wanting a connection point (while perhaps feeling isolated in a village of roughly 600 people on an island of just over 300,000), she said it was the “very warm, very interactive, organic” networking that attracted her to the group.

Georgia-based author Kia Stephens, founder of Entrusted Women (EW), remembers the racial tension in the air when she founded Entrusted Women in 2015. Through the Black Lives Matters movements and the riots, it was impossible to ignore the subject of race in America. Maybe it was because the nation and especially African Americans were still reeling from Trayvon Martin’s controversial murder in 2012, or maybe it was because Stephens was routinely one of only a handful of BIPOC women writers at the Christian writing conferences she frequented in search of knowledge that would lead to a book contract of her own.

Stephens founded EW to meet the needs of BIPOC women in Christian communities who were in search of representation at these conferences and in search of mentorship in their writing journeys. Jenny Erlingsson was one of those women. Although she was already supporting women, she recognized EW as a resource she could point to as she mentored others, and she also touts the necessity for groups like EW to connect women of color and help them feel like they belong in evangelical writing circles.

Erlingsson’s debut novel features an interracial relationship between a recognizable Italian-American Hollywood actor and a Black, Southern make-up artist of Nigerian descent assigned to him. She says that her decision to depict this relationship was rooted not only in her own experience of being an American born Nigerian married to an Icelandic-heritage man (her happy Viking), but also it is inspired by her experience being part of a church in Northern Alabama where many different ethnicities and races intermingled regularly in a very normative way.

But Her Part to Play doesn’t highlighted that racial difference. It’s treated matter-of-factly. You won’t find clashes between white and black, no references to confederate flags or repurposed plantations. What you will find is integration and connection through food, community support, and the conditions of being human, whether by lending a helping hand to the sick or talking through the pain of the absence of a parent from loss or abandonment.

According to Erlingsson, “In traditional publishing, books are not reflecting what the church looks like now, or the intention for the ‘Big C’ church [the Christian church worldwide] of a multi-tribe, multi-language, multicultural, ethnic group of people.” So, while Her Part to Play is not a colorblind book, racism or race relations isn’t the focus.

“I didn’t want racism to be a focus, but I wanted to get the reality of couples all around us who for this book are unified through their faith. And they’re from all walks of life, different statuses, different backgrounds and they show that proximity. In a lot of romance books, that proximity is where things begin to bloom.”

One thing Erlingsson does talk about explicitly is the cover design of the book: “I really wanted readers to see her face and not just wonder is this an African American female heroine. I wanted them to see, and that made me nervous because I didn’t want some audience members or readers to look at the book cover and say immediately, oh it’s not for me because she’s black.”

Finishing her thought about the ways race and culture interact with publishing decisions and changes that have taken place since the summer of 2020, Erlingsson says, “Things are shifting in publishing where [gatekeepers] are like, Oh dear, we need to be more intentional about the authors or the stories we’re looking at and not just thinking about who we can market this to…but what voices do we need to be sharing.”

In addition to the interracial dimension that she says the traditional Christian romance genre has lacked, Erlingsson’s newest title also adds a cultural splash of interest by tapping into the “Hollywood of the South” phenomenon that is familiar to film enthusiasts. If that milieu wasn’t enough, in her story, faith and romance are inextricably intertwined.

Her Part to Play depicts co-workers in the entertainment industry who journey from enemies to romantic partners. While the story is mostly light, the main characters’ struggles with healing after loss challenge readers to assess their own mental or spiritual health.

In her writing process, she prioritizes having a theme tied to faith to begin with or which emerges in her novels as her stories unfold. For Her Part to Play the verse is Isaiah 43:19, “I am doing a new thing. Do you not perceive it?” Explaining her process, Erlingsson says,

The verse is usually an anchor for me. Writing from that anchored place, tucked under God’s cover…” she continues as if speaking directly to God “…God, I know you’re going to begin to guide my words and maybe guide the scenes however you want to guide them and you’re going to touch people’s hearts.” Now directly speaking to me again to answer the question she says, “So, I definitely want something to be rooted in scripture because then the Lord can begin to do whatever he wants to do with that from there.

When we probed to get just a little more technical about her writing process, she added, “Just to be real, my personal time writing in my journal, writing with God and just asking questions, seeking for answers. That cultivated this for me, for sure.”

We continued probing, “You said, you felt like God gave you permission to do this?”

“All my life I’ve dealt with the fear of man, and really wanting to please people, and approval.” Erlingsson admitted that her role in ministry in support of her husband or as a co-leader with him made her push writing to the margins of her priorities. It was then that she had a conversation with God that she says went something like this: “I’m longing to write and to write intentionally. But can I do it in a way that other people can read it? Do I have permission to do that?”

After the prayer, she describes how God answered her through friends’ unexpected phone calls and through a speaker’s words on stage during a women’s conference. The message was unmistakable. “Jenny you need to write. You need to do the things that you were doing that gave you life.” Those words came unexpectedly to Erlingsson from a friend. Continuing that theme, she said, “It’s almost like my breath…” “And I recognize in seasons where I feel like I’m suffocating it’s because I’m not operating in this thing that God gave to me.”

“It’s my self-care. It’s my act of worship. It’s me doing it along with God and so it’s important. And it’s important for all of us.”