Dear Abishag: Damon writes second book about Biblical women

Roberta M. Damon, an 84-year-old Chester resident, recently debuted her second book in a series, “Dear Abishag: Letters to Little Known Women of the Bible.”

The book, which was released in December, is a sequel to Damon’s first book: “Dear Mrs. Noah: Letters to Unnamed Women of the Bible.” Similar to her previous book, Dear Abishag is accompanied by the illustrations of her granddaughter, Melissa Damon.

The book contains 30 chapters. Each is embodied with a descriptive letter to or from somewhat unknown women, such as Abishag, Jael, Keturah, Susanna and Zipporah.

“So often we think of all things Biblical as deadly dull,” Damon said. “Not so. The unnamed Bible women all have fascinating stories.”

When it comes to writing stories, Damon combines Scripture and creativity.

“I read what we knew about them from the Bible, and after that I decide to use my imagination on how they must feel or what they must be going through,” she said.

Call it old-fashioned, but Damon enjoys writing her stories with pencil and paper.

“I write all of it by hand. I can’t stand to write it in a computer. I wrote two books on the computer, but when I do something like this, it’s a letter,” she said. “So I sit down, and I write a letter to that person. So, it’s 2, 3, 4, 500 handwritten pages, but that’s what I did.”

It doesn’t take her long to complete a book.

“I mull about it for so long until I have the idea about it,” she said. “It’s just the matter of sitting down, learning everything I can find about the character in Scripture, and then sitting down and writing it all out.”
Being a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Damon and her husband, Bill, served for two decades as Baptist missionaries.

“We served 20 years in Brazil,” she said. “While we were there, I did a lot of curriculum writing in Portuguese.”

She also spent a large amount of her time devoted to her church. She and Bill attend Chester Baptist Church, where Bill served as church administrator from 2001 to 2018.

After she came back to the U.S. in 1981, she went back to seminary and got a doctorate.

“I was on staff at the First Baptist Church of Richmond [in 1988]and retired in 2000, and I’m still there [part-time as a marriage and family counselor].”