In this episode of “Books that Spark,” we interview Jean Matthew Hall about her new adventure in publishing StarLight Magazine – a new magazine for children and families.
Our Guest: Jean Matthew Hall
Jean The Writer
As a pre-teen Jean dreamed of being an architect or an interior decorator. As a high school student she dreamed of being anything BUT a teacher. As a college student she dreamed of being a vocalist. As an “over-fifty” woman she dreamed of writing stories for children.
And so, her God-venture to be a writer began. Website, blogs, conferences, webinars, courses… hundreds of hours of studying, writing, learning. Hundreds of manuscripts sent to dozens of publishers. Hundreds of rejections.
All for the call to write and show children the love of Jesus, the beauty of God’s world, and the joy of loving relationships.
In 2016 Jean signed her first book contract with Little Lamb Books for the Bountiful Blessings series of four picture books about the seasons. The Blessings of Fall was released in September 2019.
Sometimes God makes our dreams come true in ways we couldn’t imagine. Jean’s have.
Jean The Teacher
Jean spent twenty-six years teaching children and teens–and loving it! And twenty plus years teaching women’s Bible studies. Now she teaches at writers conferences. What fun!
Jean has spent most of her adult life singing songs, reading books, playing games, cutting, coloring and gluing with children of every age. And she has loved it! Creating encouraging board books and picture books is another of her ideas of fun, but her favorite times are those she spends with her own eight grandchildren.
All of these things have been HUGE blessings!
Jean The Christian
It is Jean’s daily prayer that The Christ within her shines through the cracks and broken places of her dreams, and that Christ shines through the things she writes to uplift, encourage and inspire others through
- Poems and devotionals for adults and children
- Fiction and Nonfiction Picture books and board books
- Stories and poems for children’s magazines
- “Slice of life” essays for anthologies like Chicken Soup for the Soul
- StarLight Magazine, her newest God-venture
Philippians 3:10 Amplified Bible, Classic Edition (ABCE)
For my determined purpose is that I may know Him – that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly, and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection which it exerts over believers, and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed in spirit into His likeness even to His death,
StarLight Magazine
Transcript with Links:
Terrie:
Welcome to “Books That Spark,” a podcast for parents and caregivers, celebrating books that help us with everyday discipleship every day, sparking important conversations with our children. Today we have a special guest with us, Jean Matthew Hall, and she has some exciting news to share, and I’m excited for her to be here today. Thank you, Jean, for joining us today.
Jean:
Thank you.
Terrie:
Well, we’re glad to talk to you again, and I’m excited to talk about your new adventure, and tell us about this new magazine you’ve started.
Jean:
The title of the magazine is Starlight, and it is an online magazine at this time. It is free, no subscription cost, and it is designed for children ages 5 to 10 years. Of course, there’s a little wiggle room in there, but that’s our target group right there. And our point is to shine God’s truth through children’s literature, stories, games, puzzles, poems, any form of printed literature for children.
Terrie:
And how often will the magazine be available?
Jean:
At this time, we’re putting it out quarterly as we go along. We may eventually make it six times a year. We’ll wait and see how God provides, because everything costs money, you know.
Terrie:
That’s true. That’s wonderful though. And I do have quite a few listeners who are writers themselves, so can you give us some information if we want to write for the magazine?
Jean:
Sure. Our website is www.starlightmagazine.com. And on the website we have our writer’s guidelines, our themes, what we’re looking for, the kinds of things, and we are kind of pointing at two age groups, which is all explained on the website, but we are looking for all kinds of submissions. And next magazine comes out in March, so you’ll see on the website that our themes are about Spring, and Easter, and Lent, and New life, those kind of things. But I hope everything’s clearly spelled out on that website page, but we are eager to get submissions. Yeah, we need lots of them.
Terrie:
Okay, wonderful. Okay, and tell us a little bit about the heart of this. What caused you to want to do this, and what is the main purpose behind the magazine?
Jean:
What caused me to do this? For the writers who are listening and the illustrators, the publishing business can be very discouraging, and it changes every few years, it seems like everything turns upside down. I’ve been writing for children in some form or another for 20 years, and the past year, basically most of 2021, I was discouraged, downhearted felt like I was beating my head against a barn door and just ready to quit, just throw in the towel and say, okay, God, I must have misunderstood. This is not what you wanted for me, obviously, since I am not being very, I hate to use the word successful, but I was not having very much publishing success at all. And so I was pretty much ready to just quit and learn how to quilt or something like that, you know? To pass the time. But in January while I was lying in bed, mollygrubbing, complaining, whining to God about how horrible the whole situation was, and He spoke to me. And I don’t mean that I heard a voice out loud, but most of us who are Christians know what it means when we say God spoke to me. He impressed something on my heart and my mind, and he said, “Well, why don’t you publish your own?” And I said, “God, I don’t have the money and all that stuff to publish books, and you know, I’ll probably only sell 10 copies.” And then He said, “No, no, create a magazine. Make a magazine for kids.” And I thought, “I don’t know how to do that. Do you want me to do something brand new that I don’t know how to do?” And God said, “Yeah, you can do it. I will help you.” So over the most of this year, I’ve been praying and thinking and marketing the idea. God sent me a wonderful partner, Helen Weigt, who is just a wonderful creative designer. And He has unfolded one thing after the other, giving me the theme and the purpose of the magazine and so forth, which is actually twofold. One is to encourage children by shining God’s truth through the stories and games and puzzles that they enjoyed reading and doing, and the second purpose is to encourage writers who, like myself, keep plugging away, writing, writing, writing, and seeing very little success. This magazine is one more venue, one more opportunity for you to write things that glorify God and submit them. And so I really encourage writers of all levels to send your materials to us. No, we’re not going to publish everything that we receive, no. But we see that as a ministry to help encourage you who write for children. So that’s how Starlight began. And our purpose, as I keep saying over and over again, is to shine God’s truth, that’s it, and every story and every poem doesn’t have God’s name in it or doesn’t have the plan of salvation tacked onto it, but they illustrate truths about how much God loves us and how important we are. And I hate to use the word special, but each child is a special creation of God, and we just want to show them that they are the apple of God’s eye, that they are dear to Him and dear to His heart, and show them that Jesus loves them. And that is why Jesus came to die. We will mention salvation, and sometimes we will even put a little simple plan of salvation or a salvation prayer in there, but not everything. Not every story, not every issue, and one reason for that is we’re trying to partner with parents. Your child cannot go and subscribe to our magazine, we need an adult to subscribe, and then that the adult make that available to the children. We still believe that parents are the gatekeepers. Not the publishing world, not the schools, but the parents. God designed it for parents to be the gatekeepers for what their children read and hear and experience.
Terrie:
Well, that’s fantastic. I think that’s wonderful, and I’m excited to read the first issue and see what all you have. I just, I feel your heart because I sense so much that this is needed in the publishing world today. My heart breaks with what’s being published and given to children today, and we need more wholesome and godly material out there. And like you said, we need to read good things that honor God, whether they give the plan of salvation in every word or not, but that help children just to get a Christian worldview and an understanding of who God is. I think this is wonderful. I’m so excited for you.
Jean:
Oh, we are excited too. It’s like Christmas morning, you know.
Terrie:
I bet. That’s so cool. So how many people are working on the magazine now?
Jean:
Right now there are two of us who are working on it, I’m going to say full time. I’m acting as the editor, I receive all the submissions and go through them and all that sort of thing. And then Helen designs, I send her all the material and she does the designing, but we have other volunteers, people who are editing for us, many people praying for us. We have some illustrators who have sent us some material that they have created themselves. And it’s just, I want to involve as many people as possible, but right now I’m handling like the administrative end. Helen is doing all the cute things and the creativity and all the lovely photos and things like that that go into the magazine.
Terrie:
That’s awesome. And I do love this too, because it is such an opportunity for illustrators in the Christian market. You don’t see as many opportunities for illustrators to do something freelance to just jump in and submit something. Every now and then there will be a contest or something, but this is an opportunity that they can submit their work and see it possibly published in a magazine. I think that’s fantastic too.
Jean:
I do need, I forgot, I need to throw something in. We’re brand new, and at this time we’re a non-paying market, but one of the things I learned over the years was that non-paying markets are an opportunity to minister to people, an opportunity for creatives to tithe of their time and talent and ability. Hopefully, eventually, yes, we will be able to pay for the submissions and the illustrations we receive, but right now it is a sort of a pro bono thing, but I’m not apologizing for that. I just want to make it clear so everybody doesn’t get all excited about they can make some more money, you know.
Terrie:
Yeah, but it does give you a publishing credit, and that is sometimes worth its weight in gold.
Jean:
Right, right. And even though it’s an online magazine that is still a publishing credit. And yes, if you need a physical copy of it, you can print pages from it right now. Technically the whole magazine isn’t legally copyrighted yet. It will be, but anyway, the idea is right now to make it available to as many people as possible,
Terrie:
To make it available, we just need to send people to your website where they can subscribe, and you said if there’s a need for it, you can resend it if they missed the copy, or will we be able to access the copy If we go to your website?
Jean:
You have to have the link in order to access the copies. At this time, we only have one issue on the page. Of course, in a week or two, I will probably collect all of those new subscribers names and email addresses, put them into a separate file and send them the link, probably next week.
Terrie:
All right. That’s awesome.
Jean:
But eventually, yes, you’ll be able to go to the page and click on, you know, the various issues.
Terrie:
Okay. Tell us again the website address so that we, and I will have the link in the show notes for people just to click from there.
Jean:
It’s www.starlightmagazine.com. We appreciate everyone’s prayers. You know, maybe you’re like me, my grandchildren are, my children are definitely grown, my grandchildren are all in high school and college now. So you know, I don’t really need to access the magazine, but if you can pray for us that God will direct each step, that that is so powerful. And I’m going to throw this pitch in. If you work in the children’s division at your church, or perhaps you are on staff at a Christian school, or you’re a part of the parent teacher organization at Christian schools, please share the information with them. It would thrill us to have a lot of churches in Christian schools who, you know, make the link available to their students. If you have 500 students in your Christian school, we’ll send the newsletter to the person you designate and then they can pass it on to the children and the parents in your school, that would be thrilling. I hope, you know, so many people subscribe in this coming year that we have to find someone else to handle all of that, that I won’t have enough time to do it. So that would make me very happy.
Terrie:
That would be fantastic. Yeah. Oh, that’s a great idea. So yes.
Jean:
Thank you, Terrie.
Terrie:
Well, Jean, it’s been so great to talk to you. I really am so excited about this venture and I just wish you all the best and pray that God just blesses, blesses, blesses this magazine. I think it’s so needed and I’m just thrilled.
Jean:
Thank you very much.
Terrie:
Thank you for joining us for “Books That Spark,” where we encourage each other to live out everyday discipleship, helping to equip our children to follow Christ with their whole hearts. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and share on social media so people will know we are here and can also join us on this podcast. We truly appreciate you and appreciate your help in doing that. If you would like to connect with Jean Matthew Hall, you can reach her at jeanmatthewhall.com, and you can also connect with the magazine from there, or you can go to www.starlightmagazine.com. There, you can also find out how to subscribe to the magazine, how to share it, and how to also submit different articles and stories to the magazine for possible publication. If you would like to connect with me, you can reach me at terriehellardbrown.com. On my website, I have many freebies that you can download, and if you sign up for my newsletter, you get access to even more free items that are just for you. We love to hear from you, and you can comment on the podcast episodes by going to the transcript and commenting below the transcript. We will answer and respond to every question and every comment. Now, we are taking a short break. Today is our last episode until the New Year, but we will be back in the New Year. This is our third year with “Books That Spark,” and our first time to take a break, and so we are looking forward to a nice little break over the holidays. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season. We will be posting what we call “Legacy Versions” of our podcast during these four weeks. Of course they’re reruns, but we have links for you to be able to listen to some you may have missed along the way and some that we don’t have on the website that you can listen to once again, and so please check it out even though we aren’t here for the next few weeks. Our prayer is that you feel encouraged and empowered as a parent and caregiver to walk by faith and to embrace everyday discipleship every day with the children in your life.
Your Host: Terrie Hellard-Brown
Terrie Hellard-Brown writes and speaks to help children and adults find God’s purpose and plan for their lives. She teaches workshops and writes devotional books, children’s stories, and Christian education materials.
Her podcast, Books that Spark, reviews children’s books that spark imagination, emotion, questions, and discussion leading to teachable moments with our kids. Her podcast posts each Tuesday morning.
Her blog posts discuss living as a disciple of Christ while parenting our children. She challenges us to step out of our comfort zones to walk by faith in obedience to Christ and to use the nooks and crannies of our lives to disciple our children.
Terrie uses her experiences as a mother of four (three on “the spectrum”), 37 years in ministry (15 in Taiwan), and 32 years teaching to speak to the hearts of readers.
Her motto is “Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be WONDERFUL” and keeps her childlike joy by writing children’s stories, delighting over pink dolphins, and frequently laughing till it hurts.