About Jen
Media Bio
Jen Pollock Michel is an author, speaker, and mentor in the MFA in creative writing at Whitworth University. She is the author of five books: A Habit Called Faith, Surprised by Paradox (winner of Christianity Today’s 2020 Award of Merit for Beautiful Orthodoxy), Keeping Place, Teach Us to Want (winner of Christianity Today’s 2015 Book of the Year), and In Good Time (winner of the Word Guild’s Best Book of 2023). Jen holds a B.A. in French from Wheaton College, an M.A. in Literature from Northwestern University, and an M.F.A from Seattle Pacific University. After eleven years of raising a family in Toronto, Jen now lives in Cincinnati with her husband in a near-empty nest. You can follow Jen on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube @jenpmichel. You can also subscribe to her Monday letters at jenpollockmichel.substack.com.
Unofficially . . .
I’ve loved stories since childhood: the intrigue of my dad’s boyhood adventures with his dog, Chief; the friendship of books when I was—yet again—the new kid in town. I followed stories into university, then graduate school where I studied literature and later, creative writing. After I became a mom, I spent years with my children crowded around picture books and reading good stories. In my work now as a public writer and thinker, I endeavor to tell good stories—stories which help us understand ourselves, our relationships, and our moral commitments.
Because I am a Christian, the stories of Scripture have interested me most. In the Bible, we come to discover that the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are the climax of a much longer narrative arc. Though many imagine the Bible exclusively as a rule book, I’ve come to think it offers us something even more expansive and beautiful and imaginative. It’s a story that locates us within a larger story of ultimate meaning.
I think the Bible re-stories us.
What does it mean to be re-storied by the Bible? I think it looks like the obedience of Abraham, climbing mountains with hope and dread. I think it looks like the pluck of Hannah, praying so indecently that someone takes you for a drunken woman. I think it looks like King David, finding grace to catch you the moment you fall. Most of all, I think it looks like Jesus, Son of God, wending his way to a cross for an invisible joy set before him. To be re-storied by the Bible is to discover a God who is the very air in which we live and move and have our being. To take this story seriously is to trace twists and turns and find surprise.
“However many be the days remaining to me, I will do all things for the love of God.”