Anew car - and the concomitant car payments - kept Jerusalem Jackson Greer in Arkansas. Otherwise, she’d likely be living in Oxford, Miss., after earning a degree in Southern women’s studies at Ole Miss.

Instead, says Greer, she put her talents as a Southern storytelling woman to work to bring together three of her favorite topics - her faith, her childhood and her passion for cooking, crafting and home decorating.

The result is “A Homemade Year: The Blessings of Cooking, Crafting and Coming Together,” released April 1 by Paraclete Press. The success of the book - and Greer’s blog, The Jolly Goode Gal - has added another layer to the life she describes as “a wife, a mama, a yoga fan, book addict, reluctant gardener, crafter, author, former pastor, blogger, nest-fluffer, speaker, World Class Pinterest Pinner (OK, I made that title up) and farmgal wannabe.” Now, she is also a public speaker, traveling to events like this Sunday’s Books in Bloom.

The literary festival, held at the Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, is sponsored by the Carroll and Madison Public Library Foundation. Now in its eighth year, the free event brings together authors from many genres to sign their books, meet their fans and discuss topics as wide ranging as how the publishing industry continues to evolve and how an author’s life changes with success.

“Who has received the most buzz around here? Craig Johnson, for sure,” says Jean Elderwind, administrator of the Carroll and MadisonCounty Library System and co-chairwoman of the festival.

“He was a favorite before the Longmire TV series, but now, everyone is reading him.

“Also, having an author come with 70 million books in print - Catherine Coulter - is amazing, too.”

Although she’s on just her first book, Greer went fromblogger to author because she wanted to share her faith with families like hers. She liked the idea of something that focused on the days of the liturgical year, but everything she found was either “very old-fashioned or very country,” and neither suited her.

The books also assumed the reader was rooted in aparticular faith tradition, she adds, and she sought something broader. She also wanted a vehicle to talk about growing up in Juneau, Alaska, with “Christian hippies.” (Her father, a Southern Baptist preacher, is Johnny Joe Jackson Jr., and she and her siblings all got biblical names starting with “J”: Jerusalem, Joshua, Jemima and Judea.) Faith and storytelling, she says, were in her DNA, having come from a long line of Southern preachers. The rest came from Martha Stewart.

For Greer, events like the festival provide what she calls “validation that what I’ve been writing really does speak to other people.” What readers latch onto, she says, isn’t the lighter side of the crafts and recipes but the idea that perfection isn’t success.

“Oftentimes, especially within the Christian faith and culture, there’s this idea that we all have to be perfect and we have to look a certain way and be a certain way,” she says. “There’s no room for mess;

somehow it’s failing.

That’s not a failure; that’s just real life. I hope people find community in that.”

Whats Up, Pages 13 on 05/17/2013