Author Spotlight: Karissa Sovdi

We are pleased to introduce Karissa Sovdi. Karissa was our 2024 Braun Book Award Non-fiction Winner for Surviving Christianity Unmarried. (Now available for pre-order through the Word Alive Press Bookstore, and available soon everywhere fine Christian books are sold.) We asked Karissa to share a little bit about her book and her writing. But first, a little bit about her.

About

Karissa Sovdi has always been playing with words, though her parents and four siblings would likely just call her a chatterbox. From school plays and church choir solos as a child to keynote speeches and improv comedy as an adult, her wide-ranging interests have always had a common linguistic denominator and creative flair.

Karissa Sovdi

 

Karissa grew up as a pastor’s kid, and experienced home school, private school, and public school all before the age of ten. A rather naïve and artistic teen, she was a pretty typical theatre/band nerd in high school.

Moving from B.C. to Alberta after graduation, and originally intending to be a teacher, Karissa pursued a bachelor of arts in English and music from Augustana University College but decided not to continue on with a bachelor of education after a short stint as an educational assistant revealed some disillusionment with her career choice.

A reluctant punchline to the many truth-adjacent jokes about a liberal arts education, she turned to pursuing singer-songwriting opportunities while working as a church administrative assistant for four years. During this time, she was an active worship leader and launched and maintained a young adults ministry, which involved leading and writing curriculum for a consistent weekly Bible study reaching about two hundred people in three years.

Later in life, she relocated back to B.C. where she spent time working in government and administration and took some time to pursue music and travel before being led to pursue grad school and further career development.

In addition to her masters degree in counselling from City University of Seattle, Karissa now holds certifications in several psychometrics and facilitation tools, including workplace restoration, restorative justice, critical incident debrief, cultural intelligence, conflict styles, and personality theory. These allow her to lead workshops and group discussions informed by research and best practice in the fields of mental health, leadership development, and adult learning theory.

She currently enjoys life in Victoria where she draws on her diverse background leading a team of human resource specialists in leadership development, team engagement, and conflict resolution--or, as she likes to say, she helps people with emotions at work. She also enjoys a wide circle of friends, has dabbled in comedy, served on her church board, and delivered speeches for local and national conferences.

Whether composing songs for special events, scripting lines for drama club, winning a poetry contest, publishing articles, performing standup and improv comedy, submitting a thesis, delivering a sermon, reframing a therapeutic problem, facilitating a workshop, developing curriculum, or creating content, writing has been the consistent through line of Karissa’s creative life.

Q&A

Q: What do you hope people take away from your book?
A: That you are more than your relationship status. That God’s plans aren’t limited to romance. That it’s possible to unhook the gospel from “happily ever after.”

Many Christians overspiritualize the idea of marriage to the point that romantic partnership is often billed as spiritual completion, and the mythology of a romantic ideal harms more than just singles. I think lots of coupled people wonder why the romantic partnership that was supposed to be “it” for them isn’t enough.

We’re supposed to put our hope and faith in Jesus, not in marriage. If we do this, we will have so much hope to offer a world that’s lonely and looking for love in all the wrong places.

Q: How did this book come about?
A: In many ways, the story of the book is the book itself because part my own wrestling with the life and topic of singleness includes the process of realizing that important topics aren’t being shared. Because singleness is my lived experience, and I’m a creative person, I had lots of content. I’d written songs, jokes, blogs, a paper or two, and had even roughed out a one-woman show at some point.

The turning point was an unpublished essay which sat on my desktop for a long time—until the pastor of my church preached a sermon about sex that I thought really neglected the single demographic. I sent him a copy of the essay as a means of illustrating how he could expand his teaching. That turned into a coffee meeting, which turned into me co-preaching with him on Valentine’s Day on the topic of singleness.

I started wondering if that topic might be a book someday but was in the middle of grad school and submitting my thesis. A couple of years later, I signed up for a writing retreat and worked the bits and pieces into a pitch of sorts. After creating an outline over the course of a week, I gave myself a year to finish the manuscript on evenings, weekends, and vacation days. I’ve also repurposed some of that content for Christian magazines and a podcast interview. They’re all linked on my media page.

Q: What is your creative process?
A: Most of my work starts as an spark that occurs randomly while I’m interacting with the world. I somehow capture it and return when I have time to flesh it out. If a new idea has legs, I treat it like a research project. That’s probably the academic in me. When I’m working on a project, it’s pretty common for me to pause someone in the middle of a random conversation to write a note in my phone or record a quick voice memo to capture it.

I have a lot of extroversion in my personality, so my best thinking happens out loud. Since writing is a private and reflective process, this means I tend to need to talk ideas out with someone before I commit them to paper. I’m blessed to have a wide circle of friends and family who let me think aloud and bat ideas around.

But my silly hack for when they’re not available, or I don’t want to burden them, is that I pretend I’m being interviewed for a podcast and do a bit of Q&A with myself. I find the words as they come out of my mouth and then rush to write them down. So my confession is that I’ve become okay with talking to myself in the shower and on commutes to find my flow.

Q: Have you won any contests before the Braun Book Awards?
A: Contests seem to be a source of God’s grace in my life. Most of my creative and professional success has come through competitive processes. In elementary school, I won a poetry writing contest through the legion, a Bible bee in private school, and earned silver in a singing competition. I’ve always done well academically and brought home plaques and trophies. I ended up paying for about a quarter of my education with bursaries alongside cool student leadership experiences. As a young adult, I won music talent competitions on several occasions and enjoyed opportunities as a result, including radio exposure, cash, a demo, and a fully produced concert. I’ve had lots of failure and many disappointments along the way too. In fact, I attempted to publish this book multiple times over five years without success--that is, before someone suggested the Braun Book Awards.

Q: What’s the best advice you’ve been given as a writer?
A: Two pieces of advice I received from my mentors have carried me through all my major long-haul projects.

First, pick a topic that you are prepared to spend a lot of time with. A big project can take a long time to complete, so it has to be a topic you won’t bore of easily. This doesn’t mean you’re already an expert, but you must be willing to become a student of that subject for a long while.

Second, fight perfectionism. There’s an adage used in academia: “the best thesis is a done thesis.” How many people have an incomplete manuscript collecting dust because they’d rather have it perfect than done? The creative writing parallel of this advice goes like this: “inner critics make good editors but lousy creators.” A good something is better than a perfect nothing.

Connecting Points

If you’re facing the stigma of singleness, find and follow Karissa online for content and support about how to follow Jesus, desire marriage, and thrive as a single—all at the same time.
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