Meet Our New Redeemedreaders!

As Janie announced yesterday in this post, we’ve got some big changes afoot here at Redeemedreader.   We have the honor of welcoming Megan Saben and Betsy Farquhar to our Redeemedreader staff.  Janie mentioned some of the ways they’ll be impacting our site–providing more book lists and social media outlets, for instance. 

But these ladies aren’t just a means to a social-media end for us.  They are talented writers in their own right and mature Christians who share our vision for redeeming children’s literature and the families who read it.  We like what they’ve done with their site, Literaritea.com, which they began to “to continue their discussions of tea and children’s literature, always looking for Truth and Story as hallmarks of the best children’s literature.”  We think you will enjoy getting to know them better just as we have, and you can look for their biweekly posts to begin the first week of April. 

So, in order to get everyone off on the right foot, we thought we’d introduce them properly today.  Redeemedreaders, meet librarians Betsy and Megan!

Betsy Farquhar

Betsy began reading children’s literature as a child, and some might say she’s never grown up. She prefers to think that she now brings a much more well educated and intentionally Reformed Christian worldview to bear as she reads children’s literature. Her favorite book as a child? The Secret Garden (although mysteries, the Anne books, and Narnia are close seconds).

Betsy took a break from children’s literature temporarily, went to CovenantCollege, earned her B.A. in English, and collected a teaching certificate along the way. It wasn’t until her Senior Integration Paper (SIP) on George MacDonald’s fairy tales that she got back to children’s literature and the delightful realization that she could study children’s literature instead of “grown-up” literature. One of her SIP readers, Covenant College librarian Ethan Pettit, also taught a children’s literature course. She and Megan both took that course and went on to earn M.A.’s in Children’s Literature from HollinsUniversity. But it was that class under Mr. Pettit that forever changed their understanding of children’s literature. Applying the concepts of TruthandStory to children’s literature has been their chief conversation topic ever since.

Betsy has taught middle and high school English in three different Christian schools, has nearly finished her M.S.I.S. (Information Science) from the UniversityofTennessee, is happily married to her best friend, and has three young children. Her children attend a universitymodelschool, so she teaches them at home two days a week.
Megan Saben

Megan was born and raised in Iowa. She was homeschooled through elementary school and loved visiting the library where she would fill her bag with fairy tales, Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. Her poor mother despaired that she would ever read the classics, but in spite of her early literary tastes, Megan developed a deep love for great stories. She also began to explore creative writing and drama, but her early efforts are best forgotten.

She attended Covenant College where she worked in the library for three years, and staged C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces for her senior project. During that year she and Betsy took a pivotal course on children’s literature from Ethan Pettit. In it he explained the difference between Truth and truth, Story and story, and how the great Truths of God may be revealed in literature and ought to be told in the Very Best Way. Inspired by this application of a biblical worldview to the pleasure she always found in books, she earned graduate degrees in children’s literature (Hollins University), and library science (University of Iowa).

Megan worked as a children’s librarian in Illinois for four years where her major accomplishments included developing a Homeschool Resource Center. Now she is married to her conquering hero, and they are currently living happily ever after in Virginia, homeschooling three little boys who also love stories.

When not reading, writing or thinking about stories, Megan likes to knit, make bread and quilts, and indulge in homemade lattes, good tea and dark chocolate.

Welcome, ladies!  We’re so excited to have you on our team, and Janie and I pray that the Lord will bless you and our readers through you over the next many weeks and months.

If you’d like to keep up with our work, you can like our Facebook page or sign up for our RSS feed and biweekly newsletter on our home page.  And don’t forget to enter our big spring giveaway HERE.