I’ve spent years asking one question in different rooms.

In my theological writing, I asked it about women and the church: what is lost when half the image of God is overlooked and marginalized? This led to my book What Didn’t Learn in Sunday School: Women Who Didn’t Sit Down and Shut Up. Now I’m asking the question in the kitchen and garden: what is lost when we forget that making things is a holy act?

The thread connecting both is the same. We are made in the image of God — and the first thing we learn about God in Scripture is that God creates. That means creativity isn’t a hobby or a talent reserved for the gifted few. It’s woven into who we are. Every quilter, every woodworker, every person who has ever shaped something from raw material and said “it is good” — they are, whether they know it or not, doing something theological.

This conviction is at the heart of the nonfiction book I am researching and writing, The Maker’s Makers. It makes the case that to be made in the image of God is to be, by nature and by calling, a maker. I don’t mean just artists and craftspeople who make a living creating: I’m talking about all of us. This book will trace that argument through Scripture, history, and the lives of ordinary people who have always known, even when the world told them otherwise, that what they made with their hands mattered.

My essays on here on ShawnaAtteberry.com and Substack explore the same territory in smaller, more personal ways: why craft communities have historically been centers of resistance and hope, why making things with your hands changes the person making them, and why the world genuinely needs what ordinary makers bring to it.

My fiction takes that conviction and runs with it. The novels I am writing are about ordinary people — a weaver, a knitter, a gardener, a barista — who discover that their craft is precisely the thing that equips them to push back against the darkness in their world. Not with weapons or violence, but with the quiet magic of skill, patience, community, and the stubborn refusal to stop making beautiful things, they push back the evil pushing in on their world.

I’ve been a writer for over 30 years. I hold an M. A. Theological Studies. I live in Nebraska, and I am an ESL Teacher, cooker, baker, gardener, crocheter, and knitter.

If you believe, as I do, that the act of making something is an act of hope — you are exactly the kind of reader I’m writing for.