Lancaster native Holly Payne will read and sign her new book, "Kingdom of Simplicity," Saturday.
Holly Payne has written a book for the man who almost killed her in the Colorado summer twilight.
He was drunk the day he blindsided the Lancaster native on a scenic mountain road, where she had pulled over to give some bicyclists a flashlight.
The driver's truck launched then-22-year-old Payne over her windshield. The bicyclists were scooped up and catapulted into a barbed-wire fence.
Payne doesn't remember the impact. But she does recall lying on the ground, unable to move or hear, and believing that she and the bikers were dead.
"They were actually awake enough to tell (the driver) he had hit a girl and probably killed her," she says.
"He said, 'What girl?' "
In the hospital, Payne's crushed femur was replaced with a metal plate, and she got 13 screws in her leg.
She also had a broken hip and pelvis, and didn't walk again without assistance for a year.
Even as her physical wounds began to heal, Payne's emotions continued festering, anger smoldering and gnawing at her soul.
Just months after the accident, the driver wrote, asking for Payne's forgiveness.
She didn't answer.
"I wasn't ready," she says. "I thought, Just let him live with the consequences."
***
It took more than a decade, but the 37-year-old Payne, who now lives in California, has finally found a way to absolve the driver — and, she hopes, to help him forgive himself.
She wrote "Kingdom of Simplicity" (Skywriter Books, $16.95), her third book, which tells the story of an Amish man challenged to forgive the hit-and-run driver who killed his five sisters.
"Holly has lived the life of the (book's) protagonist, even going as far as to study the psychology of forgiveness through Dr. Frederic Luskin's work, 'Forgive for Good,' " Skywriter Books publicist Lynn Cochran says.
"We chose to publish this book for several reasons, mostly that it hit our targets for our mission: to publish stories that awaken, inspire and educate."
On Saturday, the 15th anniversary of her accident, Payne will sign copies of her award-winning book locally and tell her own story.
It continues to unfold.
About a month ago, she tracked down the driver who hit her and wrote him a letter, offering her forgiveness and telling him about the book.
"I haven't heard back yet, but I know I have definitely forgiven him now," she says on the Web site www.kingdomof
simplicity.com. "I know this because when I say his name, I don't feel anything in my body, like I used to, like he was there somehow.
"He's gone from me, and I honestly believe that the process of storytelling and writing this novel, in some strange way, shifted him from me to the book."
The manuscript almost didn't get finished.
Payne was in the final stages of writing when the Nickel Mine shootings rocked the nation. Even thousands of miles away, she was devastated by the tragedy, which had unfolded among the Amish, whom she had rubbed elbows with as a child.
She considered abandoning the book.
"I couldn't believe what I was watching when the news helicopters were flying over the same fields and the same farms and the same schools I had depicted in the book," she writes.
Ultimately the Amish forgave the shooter, reached out to his family and attended his funeral the next Friday, while they were burying their own daughters.
"I wanted to be free from the power the past had had over me, and writing the book gave me the key; though nothing would have prepared me to see so much of the plot become real life, and affect real people," Payne says, on the Web site.
"I had to find a way to trust that it was meant to be, just as the Amish were doing."
***
Growing up in East Hempfield Township, Holly Payne remembers weekly trips to Root's Farm Market with her mother and older brothers.
Walking among the Amish vendors was a wild and wondrous experience, Payne says, and the stark contrast between the "English" and the Amish intrigued her.
Secretly, she recalls, she wanted to be Amish, so she could drive around in a horse and buggy.
Payne never envisioned writing books. In fact, she initially struggled with reading but turned the corner with help from her mother, Joan, a former teacher who retired from the Dutch Apple Dinner Theater as national groups sales director. Until his retirement, Payne's father, Ellis, worked at Calloway House, as vice president of marketing.
The Mountville Library, near Payne's home, became as wondrous to her as the Amish.
"It was such a magical experience. You never knew what you were going to get in the books and where they were going to take you," she says.
While attending Hempfield High School, Payne swam competitively and also wrote articles for the Intelligencer Journal. In 1990, Payne was named Lancaster County Junior Miss, that year called "Young Woman of the Year."
After high school, she studied journalism at the University of Richmond (Va.).
Her story after college is one of a goals delayed but realized, and unexpected doors swinging open.
After graduation, Payne spent a summer in Colorado, before pursuing a career abroad. She wanted to teach English in Hungary and had dreamed of becoming an international correspondent.
Her injuries put those plans on hold for a year.
She gradually regained her footing and achieved her goal of teaching in Hungary.
A chance meeting there, with the head of the master of professional writing program at the University of Southern California, inspired her attendance.
Payne went on to teach screenwriting and story development in California, and has been on the faculty of the MFA writing program at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco, for five years.
She authored "The Virgin's Knot" and "The Sound of Blue," and is a private writing coach and screenwriter. Despite her previous injuries, Payne remains an avid biker and hiker, and competed in triathlons from 1998 to 2004.
She married her husband Dan Weaver last year.
Even though Colorado's Rocky Mountains were the site of her accident, she calls Crested Butte, where she recuperated, her second home. She leads a writing retreat there each summer.
"It's a way of going back and continuing with healing," Payne says. "I've learned so much about the human spirit and about the ability to overcome and to have faith in other people.
"I have never answered to the tag of a drunk-driving 'victim.' I am a survivor.
"In many ways, getting struck was a gift, and it set me on the course of a writing life."
BOOK SIGNING
WHAT: