“I’m a writing teacher, so the way I understand is to write about it. I don’t wait until I understand and then write. I write in order to understand. That’s what I tell my students.” That’s how it started. Clark Moreland, an English lecturer at the University of Texas Permian Basin, wrote a couple of personal essays and then shared a few of them on Facebook with friends. As he told Ruth Campbell from The Odessa American, he never had any intention to write a book.
This past February, Moreland published a new book titled Will: Parenting at the Crossroads of Disability and Joy. It’s a series of essays that take a closer look at the physical, emotional and spiritual hardships of raising a child with Down syndrome. “Perhaps these writings will also speak to anyone who has ever tried to practice what Richard Baxter called ‘the art of suffering' or attempted to understand the will of God,” says Clark Moreland on his website.
As a writer and an academic, Moreland said that when life presents challenging circumstances, he tries to understand and study them. As a result, he wrote this book from a desire to share his experience of raising a child with Down syndrome. The book is dedicated to his younger son, Samuel. His greatest desire is that Samuel would find as much wisdom and understanding in reading the essays as Moreland found in writing them. “I thought it’s time for me to start opening up. That’s really where I got the first inclination to actually put these stories together in a book,” said Moreland. “It was written over about a two or three year period. Most of the essays I wrote before I knew I was going to write a book.”
Clark Moreland is currently writing a book about C. S. Lewis. He is a recipient of several teaching awards including the UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award. or more information about this important work visit https://clarktmoreland.com.
