Inspiration for the next 25 years

Chip MacGregor is president of MacGregor Literary, a full service literary agency specializing in commercial fiction and non-fiction properties. He’s been a faculty member for more than one hundred U.S. writers’ conferences, but he didn’t make his first visit to Write! Canada until the 25th anniversary conference in 2009. His site is MacGregor Literary

We asked Chip why he believes so fervently in supporting writers’ conferences.

Here’s his reply:

In the Scriptures, it says that God’s going to judge everybody at the end of time. Which means, (depending on your eschatology) for instance, that Adolph Hitler has not been judged yet.

Hitler was an evil man who caused the deaths of millions of people. Why hasn’t he been judged yet? It’s because the full extent of his evil isn’t apparent. It’s going to be at the end of time when judgment happens, because his ideas are still influencing people for evil.

As Christians, we sometimes can’t know how the things we do influence people for good. We’ll have a writers’ conference and we’ll think, "you know it was fun and we learned some stuff but the fact is, I don’t know that the world really changed because of it."

Let me tell you a story: I was once part of a book that I did not want to do. The book was about abortion. I thought, "Nobody’s going to buy this book." But the publisher wanted to do it because it was an important topic. So we went ahead and, sure enough, nobody bought the book and it bombed.

But, one day, the phone rang and I heard this story: there was an actress, who had just found out she was pregnant, and she was flying across the country from New York to L.A. She sat down in her seat on the plane. She reached into the seat pocket in front of her for a magazine, and found a book had been left there. It was this particular book on abortion.

She had a four-and-a-half hour flight from New York to L.A. She read the book. Through the ministry of the words in that book—that book that didn’t sell and that lost money—she decided to keep her baby.

In other words, sometimes, we just don’t know, long term, what’s going to happen when somebody gets inspired and writes something.

And that’s why putting on a conference like this is important. Who knows how the world becomes a different place because of what somebody got inspired to do, or was taught to do, and is then able to write later—words that will change the world.

In the big picture, there is always the reality that God is still at work and still using us. So we continue to do this, knowing our plan is to serve Him in hopes that our words will go out and change people.

We live in a world that badly needs change.