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gloria was born Gloria Fern Kropf. She married and as was traditional in her community she took on her husband's name and became Gloria Fern Nafziger. In her writing life, she has been Gloria Nafziger, Gloria Kropf Nafziger and most recently she writes as gloria fern. She writes to give life to herself and to share with others. She believes deeply in the power of story to change the world and connect the peoples of the world. She is a decided optimist, believing that hope and love are stronger than fear.
Memoirs, as memoir-writers will say, are inordinately difficult to write. Gloria Kropf Nafziger in her 'incomplete memoir' articulates the breadth, the heights and the dips, alongside those 'middling-times', of a full, meaning-filled life. She manages to work through the conundrum of writing the ordinary as well as the extraordinary -- and does so with honesty, vulnerability and humour. She captures the joy, the ecstasy of life's moments with the rather meagre tools that words or images offer brilliantly. So too pain and drudgery, inextricably woven through each and every life as an essential element of the human condition, yet which can and generally does, surpass description, explanation and understanding. Saved by Love: An Incomplete Memoir is a brave and hopeful book, written by a daring, insightful and wise author who beckons her readers to join with her through her exploration of her life's labyrinth. She allows us to laugh, to weep, to question and to wonder. This memoir is an invitation to readers to lose themselves in a world that for many of us may seem vaguely familiar, yet at the same time, open all of us to novel ways of seeing the world -- both the inner and the outer -- simply because this is Gloria Kropf Nafziger's own, very personal story. It revolves around her connections to characters, those loved and those unlovely, but always infinitely fascinating. She beckons her readers to join her into new (or familiar) vistas of church and family -- in all their glory and their challenges -- as well as community, evolving or left behind. She sheds joy-filled and at times pain-filled light on notions of 'faith, hope and charity' through her poignant stories, memories and dreams; she tells of longing and belonging, hurting, forgiving and radically loving anew. This is a powerful, important book. - DORIS R. JAKOBSH, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Waterloo
