PHOTO: Lorilyn Roberts sits thoughtfully at a desk surrounded by books, pen in hand, capturing the quiet intensity of her writing process.
Exploring Spiritual Worlds Through Storytelling
Award-winning author Lorilyn Roberts discusses faith, imagination, and resilience in her work, blending memoir, fantasy, and suspense to inspire readers with hope, redemption, and emotional depth.
Lorilyn Roberts writes with a quiet intensity that lingers long after the final page is turned. Her stories traverse both the seen and unseen worlds, exploring faith, loss, and redemption with a sincerity that is rare in contemporary fiction. Whether through the fantastical realms of the Seventh Dimension Series or the tender reflections of Children of Dreams, Roberts invites readers into the intimate spaces of human longing and divine promise.
Her work is marked by a profound empathy, a sense that every character’s struggle mirrors our own search for purpose and understanding. In her short story collection The Night Cometh, for example, the ethereal and the everyday intersect, revealing glimpses of eternity while never shying away from the fragility of life. Roberts’ narratives often emerge from personal experience, yet they resonate universally, offering both solace and challenge to the reader.
A skilled blend of imagination and spiritual insight defines her novels and memoirs alike. From her meticulously crafted fantasy worlds to her deeply reflective nonfiction, Roberts demonstrates that storytelling can be both a creative art and an act of devotion. Her dialogue, honed by years as a broadcast captioner and ham radio enthusiast, gives voice to characters who feel entirely real, navigating extraordinary circumstances with authenticity and heart.
In every book, Roberts balances suspense with hope, adventure with faith, and the temporal with the eternal. Her writing reminds us that even amid uncertainty, restoration is possible, and that the pursuit of understanding—both human and divine—is a journey worth taking.
In God’s Good Works: Stories to Treasure and Tales to Ponder, you blend memoir and devotion. How did you balance personal reflection with broader spiritual themes?
The stories in the book cover about 15 years. As a Christian, I know God will keep His promises, and I try to capture those moments, no matter how small and insignificant they might have seemed at the time.
As we mature in our relationship with Jesus Christ, we learn to trust Him in the unseen. Blending memoir and devotion in these anthologies reflects God’s Good Works and my longing for the redemption promised to us on the cross. If that redemption doesn’t come here, I know I will witness it in the world to come.
Your short story collection The Night Cometh offers fantastical glimpses of eternity – which story challenged you most to write and why?
The hardest to write was the last story, Twinkling. My aging cat, Twila, died of heart failure as I was finishing the book. She held on as long as possible because she loved me and didn’t want to let go. If it were not for my hope that I would see her again in heaven, I would have mourned as those who have no hope.
I wanted to end the book on a fantastical journey to heaven and reveal a glimpse of God’s future with us as His Bride. That made it the hardest to write because of my emotional response to His promises as I anticipate my eternal future with the one I love.
The Door, the inaugural Seventh Dimension novel, introduces a richly spiritual fantasy world. How did your background in biblical translation shape its cosmology?
The concept for the six-book series came from an AW Tozer quote in The Pursuit of God: “A spiritual kingdom lies all about us, enclosing us, embracing us, altogether within reach of our inner selves, waiting for us to recognize it. God Himself is here waiting our response to His Presence. This eternal world will come alive to us the moment we begin to reckon upon its reality.”
Tozer says it much more succinctly than I do, but that is how I got the idea for the spiritual fantasy world of the Seventh Dimension and its cosmology.
Shale Snyder in the Seventh Dimension Series faces both supernatural and secular dangers. How do you maintain young adult relatability amid apocalyptic stakes?
Much of Shale’s character is me, so it’s easy for me to maintain the YA POV. God created me with an apocalyptic worldview. I was drawn to God not because someone witnessed to me, but in supernatural ways that I can’t explain except that God had His hand on me from a very young age.
My greatest spiritual influence as a child came from my Jewish friends in school. I wanted their God. I wanted the community that they had. Since I was from a broken home, I longed to be loved, and those Jewish kids and mothers reached out to me in a way that I can’t describe as anything other than supernatural.
You’ve penned memoirs like Children of Dreams and fantasy epics. What distinct discipline does each genre demand of you?
Prayer. Perseverance. Patience.
Your nonfiction work, such as Children of Dreams, touches deeply on adoption and loss. How has that influenced your portrayal of characters facing adversity?
I always look for the redemption in every story. God is a God of restoration. He always wins.
As a broadcast captioner and ham radio enthusiast, how do these communication skills inform your narrative voice and dialogue?
My newest book, Eighth Dimension—Frequency, will be released on September 5, 2025. It draws directly from my ham radio world. The reader will learn a lot about ham radio and CW (Morse Code). I hope to attract more young adults to the hobby.
Broadcast captioning came from my skills as a court reporter. Captioning has helped me see the world through others—sports stars, reporters, doctors, experts, laypeople, old people, and young people—and those hundreds of thousands of hours of listening to people talk has no doubt helped me write dialogue and develop complex characters in my novels.
What one piece of advice would you give aspiring authors hoping to write faith-based fiction with genuine emotional resonance?
If you are meant to write, write for the glory of God. Don’t let others discourage you. The battle is not against others—it’s against the unseen powers that hold this world captive. Keep looking up above the chaos, and give God all your emotions—the pain, the toil, the tears, the joy, the failures, the successes—and imagine standing before the throne of God and hearing these magnificent words: “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”
