If only Garrison Keillor knew: Philip Gulley’s popular Harmony series of novels was inspired by listening to A Prairie Home Companion. “The idea of creating a place [like Lake Wobegon] that felt like home was very compelling,” Gulley says. He modeled Harmony on Danville, Ind., the small town where he grew up, recreating it from his childhood memories and even borrowing many of the street names. “That idealized community became a way of retreating to childhood, a vacation for the mind,” he says of his nine Harmony books about the adventures of fictional Quaker pastor Sam Gardner.
Fourteen years later, Harmony is again the setting for his latest novel, A Place Called Hope (Center Street, Sept.). Pastor Sam gets a last-minute call to do a wedding for a couple named Pat and Chris at a Unitarian Church where the minister has suddenly fallen ill. But Sam arrives to find he’s marrying two women, and when a photographer shows up to snap the town’s first-ever same-sex marriage, Sam makes the front page. Trouble ensues, and he winds up in a new pastorate in a different Indiana town called Hope.
A Place Called Hope is the inaugural book in Gulley’s new Hope series and his first with Hachette imprint Center Street, which—unlike the FaithWords imprint--publishes books that are not explicitly religious but still “clean reads.” Gulley finds it a good fit: “I have all kinds of editorial freedom, which I like.” He is under contract to produce a book a year; his second Hope book, A Lesson in Hope, is due out next September. In it, Sam Gardner’s tiny new church inherits a million dollars, and, as Gulley notes, money always creates problems.
Although Gulley himself serves as a Quaker pastor in a small town in Indiana and, like Sam, has a very capable wife and two sons, he and his character are different: “Sam is probably a bit more anxious than I am,” Gulley says, though he admits to being nervous years ago when being a pastor was his only source of income. “I worried constantly about being fired.”
Gulley got his start writing fiction at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, Ind., a Quaker seminary he attended in the 1990s, in part to learn to become a better essayist. At Earlham, Tom Mullen, then Ministry of Writing director, encouraged him to expand his scope, and Gulley’s work broadened to include fiction, a book of inspirational essays called Porch Talk, (HarperOne, 2009), and theology, such as The Evolution of Faith (HarperOne, 2011), and Living the Quaker Way: Timeless Living for a Better Life Today (Convergent Books, 2013).
His 2003 book, If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person (HarperOne), written with Jim Mulholland, espoused universal salvation—the view that all people, not just Christians, can get to heaven. That stirred controversy, and some members of Western Yearly Meeting, the Quaker organization under which Gulley serves, tried--but failed--to rescind his ministry credentials.
Writing fiction is cathartic for Gulley, but he also hopes his novels shine a light on difficult problems in a way that speaks to readers. “If I write a story and have fun and the reader has fun, maybe it can do some good, raise kind hearts,” he says.
