Western Writers

Patricia Raybon: Faithful Colorado Writer

By Janet Singleton, Guest Writer, 1-15-10

Pat Raybon is one of those people who is as much a Coloradan as one can be.  She was two years old when her parents brought her and her older sister from St. Louis to Denver.  And being here has made a crucial difference in her writing and perspective.  “When I go to other cities where you can’t see the horizon, I feel closed in,” she says.  “It does a writer good to see vistas.” Surveying the grandeur of the mountains imposes a healthy humility and demonstrates her own existential smallness in the scheme of things, she says.

Her accomplishments, however, are hardly small.  A former editor at the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post in the ‘80s, in the ‘90s she emerged nationally as a social commentator with essays in the New York Times and frequent commentaries on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition.  Her debut book, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love and Forgiveness, published by Viking/Penguin in 1996, gained the attention of The Today Show, where Bryant Gumbel interviewed her.  In 2005 Her second book, I Told the Mountain to Move: Learning to Pray So Things Change, made Raybon significant enough in the evangelical community to land her face on the cover of Today’s Christian Woman.  And while much of this was going on she taught advanced journalism as a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where she has been professor emerita since 2006.

While no proselytizer, she is openly and devoutly Christian and as a professor at CU felt no need to do an artful tightrope dance, traversing between the sacred and the secular without stepping on anybody’s toes.  “A colleague warned me that it would be ‘career suicide’ if I spoke of my religious faith,” she said.

Raybon did not believe her.  “When I went to the academy to teach, I had already had a vital career as a newspaper editor, and for the first time in my life I was not operating from a position of fear.” So she spoke of her religion to her students, upperclassmen and graduates, and encouraged them to talk about their own lives.  “It is important to know who you are when you are going into journalism,” she says.  “It can tell you what you want to focus on, what beat you want to cover.

“I was old enough to know that you need to walk in your own skin, and that is a place of liberation and power.  No student ever complained.  I was never reprimanded.
“When I received tenure it was largely based on my writings from NPR and other outlets.  And those essays had a faith component.”

Her two books are faith-based also.  It is easy to miss this element in My First White Friend.  Released in the post-O.J. late ‘90s, the book contemplates racism and the rage Raybon felt, groomed to be the perfect product in a high-achieving family.  In an era where the properly raised child is an anachronism, her background reveals itself in her natural gentility and soft dignity.  Still, as a young black woman, she had to navigate the subtle and not-so-subtle social signals that indicated that no matter how much better she was, she was not as good.

In I Told the Mountain to Move (2005), prayer is a focal point.  Yet there is enough self-exposure for popular Christian author Philip Yancy to call the book “daring” and “raw.” The narrative focuses on Raybon’s husband battling a near fatal illness and her younger daughter’s conversion to Islam, i.e., her going over to the competitor’s side despite her parents’ major spiritual shareholdings in Christianity.

Both books are a sequential chain of compositions that tell a cohesive story.  The personal essay form has been a boon for Raybon.  “I don’t think I would have written either book if it were not for that.  It has been life-sustaining to express my own feelings.”

Like other writers, Raybon often hears the question, “How do you do it?” And she is initiating a series of workshops.  Her maiden voyage as a writing workshop leader occurred Saturday, January 9 at Denver’s Shorter Community A.M.E. Church. It drew a crowd of 78, and she plans more workshops.  Her basic advice to would-be authors:  “Pray first.  Write second.” Also, “tell the truth.”

Janet Singleton is a Denver-based journalist, novelist, and winner of the 2002 Colorado Book Award in Fiction for This Side of the Sky (published under the name Elyse Singleton).  Currently, she works on a second novel and leads creative writing workshops.

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