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In Profile
From
Publishers Weekly
June
17, 2002 issue
WILLIAM
CUTRER, SANDRA
GLAHN
Tackling
Wrenching Issues
In
a third medical thriller, a pair of writers--one an M.D. and the other his
former patient--dare to broach one of the most divisive subjects in American
life: abortion. Says Glahn,
"We're expecting a lot of heat, sure. That's why we would never have done
it as a first book."
False Positive (May) is the team's first book for WaterBrook, after two
novels and a nonfiction title for Kregel, which released the coauthors from
their contract to allow them to seek a crossover audience through a bigger
publisher. The earlier thrillers were the Christy Award finalist Lethal
Harvest (2000), which focused on human cloning and embryonic stem-cell
research, and the sequel, Deadly Cure (2001), which took up end-of-life
issues and adult stem-cell research.
Cutrer and Glahn
make an unusual fiction team. William Cutrer is an obstetrician-gynecologist who
specialized in infertility treatment and now teaches bioethics and spiritual
formation at the Southern Baptist Seminary (he no longer has an active
practice). Glahn
is a journalist who edits the Dallas Theological Seminary's magazine, Kindred
Spirit, and serves on the school's adjunct faculty. Initially doctor and
patient, they became friends on medical missions trips they took with their
spouses to the former Soviet Union.
When Glahn
and her husband, now adoptive parents of one child, encountered reproductive
problems, she was frustrated with the limitations of books with evangelical
Christian perspectives. So she and Cutrer, then also living in Dallas, wrote
one: When Empty Arms Become a Heavy Burden: Encouragement for Couples Facing
Infertility (Broadman & Holman, 1997). They followed it with Sexual
Intimacy in Marriage for Kregel, published in 1998 and updated in 2001. The
coauthors had begun to emerge as evangelical voices on reproduction issues when,
while flying back to Dallas from a cancer workshop, they started discussing
stem-cell research. A nonfiction approach would be too dry--what about fiction?
Lethal Harvest was released the day it was announced the human genome
project was almost complete, Glahn
says, and Kregel published Deadly Cure the same month President Bush
announced his stand on adult stem-cell research.
Even before Cutrer and his wife moved to Louisville, Ky., three years ago, most
of the novelist pair's work was done via e-mail, with editing and feedback from
their spouses. Though Cutrer provides more medical expertise and experiences and
Glahn
is more the writer, their back-and-forth leads to true collaboration, they both
say. It doesn't come without pain and conflict. But, Cutrer tells PW,
"We always realize the finished product is better than anything either of
us would have done on our own."
Cutrer says False Positive is set in one clinic where abortions are
performed and in another clinic that encourages other options. The central
character is an ob-gyn resident. Though both believe that human life and
personhood begin at the one-celled stage, Cutrer and Glahn
tried to put compassionate, skilled characters on both sides of this complicated
issue. Glahn
says they expect to be accused of compromising their beliefs by seeing any good
at all in people who provide or condone abortions.
Glahn
and Cutrer say they work to write complicated people, some with problematic
pasts. "We wanted to also provide some healing and hope for people who've
made the decision to abort," Glahn
says.
While they await inspiration for the next thriller, Glahn
and Cutrer plan two nonfiction books Zondervan: one on fertility for 2003 and
one on contraception for 2004.
--Juli Cragg Hilliard
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