“That’s My Journey”

A story of survival. A medical thriller. A legal thriller. All of these could describe Susan Mattern’s memoir, Out of the Lion’s Den: A Little Girl’s Mountain Lion Attack, A Mother’s Search for Answers. But at its heart, the book is a story of one woman’s journey of losing her faith.

And while that’s not a typical faith-journey story, for Mattern, a former nun who left the convent after six years, it’s the hard-fought truth of her experience. An experience that began on March 23, 1986—the day her 5-year-old daughter Laura was attacked by a mountain lion at Caspers Wilderness Park in Orange County, Calif.—but lasted for years as Laura underwent countless surgeries and her parents fought extensive legal battles to get the county to admit they could’ve done more to warn park guests about the known danger.

Through all that, Mattern’s faith was tested and eventually provided the basis for the book. Mattern told WD, “When this trauma happened, we just tried to live through it. And then when I lost my faith, it was just such an unusual thing, because most people do come back to God. … I didn’t want to write a book just about the trauma of what Laura had gone through, because there’s a lot of stories that are about that, and I didn’t think that was really anything that unusual or that memorable. But then the whole faith thing, that was kind of unusual. And I thought, Well, I’d like to write about that, because so many people have such a negative attitude about people who are atheists and I wanted to somehow get out the idea that atheists have morals too.”

But not everyone thought writing about losing her faith was a prudent choice. Mattern showed an early draft of the book to a friend who told Mattern it wasn’t a good idea. She remembers her friend saying, “‘I like this, but you just have to take out the part about being an atheist. That’s just not gonna work.’ And I said, ‘Well, [laughs] I know I can’t do that, because that’s my journey. …’ She said, ‘Well, you’re not going to sell very many.’ And I said, ‘That’s the way it goes. I still need to write it.’”

So how did she write about events that happened decades ago? “Piecemeal,” Mattern said, starting in 1992, with the help of journals she kept throughout her daughter’s surgeries and court documents from the extensive trial and appeal. “I don’t think I ever really thought that I would actually publish it, probably until 2014 or something. Then I thought, You know what? I’m just going to do this. And then I just put it all together and published it on Amazon.”

It also helped that by the time Mattern decided to focus on writing the book for publication, years had passed and with it the weight of the events. Instead of writing the book to process the trauma, she was able to approach it with clear eyes. “It was really interesting because by the time I wrote the book, it was almost like it was a movie. To me, the trauma was over with. The trauma was gone because Laura had recovered. She lost the sight in her one eye, and she had some residual problems, of course, but she was just a beautiful girl and doing so well, and we had gotten along so well as a family. It just worked out beautifully. So, it was kind of easy.”

Of course, more went into it, including working with an editor, who was hooked by the power of the first chapter. “I worked with Lisa Lenard-Cook. A friend of mine met her at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference—and she was a wonderful editor. My friend showed her the first chapter of the book. … Lisa called her I think at 11:30 that night and said, ‘So what happens? Does Laura live or die?’ Marsha said, ‘She lives,’ and Lisa said, ‘OK, I just needed to know that.’ So, then after that, she helped me edit the book.” That first chapter is what hooked the WD judges, too, helping Mattern earn grand prize for the 10^th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards. Her winnings include $5,000, a trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York City, and a spot at the agent Pitch Slam.

[See the list of category winners from the 10th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards.]

It wasn’t just the first chapter that lent itself to natural storytelling though. As the memoir progressed from survival tale to medical thriller to court room drama, Mattern didn’t really have to work to build suspense, tension, or cliffhangers into the story. It was there by nature of the actual events because, as Mattern told WD, “that was our feeling, too, because we didn’t know what was going to happen and what were the residual effects going to be for quite a while.”

Now Mattern, who has always been a creative writer, is working on new projects using other parts of her life as inspiration. Her award-wining second indie-published memoir, Poverty, Chastity, and Disobedience, is available now and chronicles her six years in the convent. “It’s a lot about breaking the rules and not getting caught. I have a very good friend Pam, who—we had a lot of adventures in the convent. They were daring adventures convent style. In the real world, they were pretty simple. … It kind of gives a good insight into what the convent was like in the mid ’60s.” She’s also using that knowledge of how convents work to write a series of murder mysteries set in the convent.

During her time as a nun, Mattern taught creative writing, but it isn’t writing advice she gives when asked what she’d tell WD’s readers. Instead, she tells a story: “I have a birdhouse out in the backyard, a wren house, and it has a very small hole in it. I watched a wren a couple years ago take a stick that was about three times the size of the hole, and [it] tried to get that in the hole. … it would never get it in the hole. It would just drop it. … I wanted to go over there and break the stick in three pieces so the wren would be able to build this stupid nest [laughs] in the birdhouse! And then I thought, No, they’ve been doing this for millions of years. … they know how to do this. … And after a while, they were done. Three weeks later, I heard little chirping in there, and the eggs had hatched and there were little wrens in there. I thought, They just kept going. They just kept trying and trying and they failed so many times, but they kept going and nothing stopped it. I was so impressed by the persistence of that bird [laughs]. I know it’s stupid to get impressed by the persistence of a bird, but when I saw that, I thought, I give up after I try once or twice on something. … And I thought, I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to just keep trying and trying until I finally get it, until it finally works. These birds had a beautiful nest, they had their babies, they hatched, they grew up—it was a success. So that’s what I learned from that wren—to just keep trying and trying no matter what.”