Laura Nicole Diamond

I began writing Shelter Us when my two young sons were the center of my life. Though I had chosen to be a stay-home mom while they were young, I still felt a yearning for something more. That yearning became my protagonist Sarah’s search for meaning after a tragedy. The object of her attention, a young homeless mom named Josie, was an amalgam of young moms I met while volunteering at an agency dedicated to re-housing homeless families.

When I decided to write the novel, I had two characters, Sarah and Josie, and the need for them to meet and change each other along the way. The rest of the novel was excavation.

Once I committed to writing the book, I told anyone who asked “what’s up?” and “how’re things?” that I was writing a novel so I would hold myself accountable and suffer some modest public humiliation if I didn’t finish it. I declared to myself that 2008 was “the year of the novel” – seven years later, in 2015, Shelter Us arrived.

Shelter Us captures what I experienced as the emotional terrain of parenthood, from fear of unimaginable loss to exultant joy, and all the messy in-between. It asks the questions I continue to wrestle with – how should we show up for others in need? What are we called to do to lessen their pain?