A retired educator, Tamara J. Wanner embraces the life of a writer both in fiction and song. Her debut novel, 'Rainbow Baby: Unravelled by Loss' won the 2025 Word Award for Canadian Contemporary Christian Fiction. Tamara and her siblings Kelly B. Wiens and Sonya Braun have released their six song EP over the past five months. The Legacy Project honours their grandfather's arrival to Canada one hundred years ago. Their artist collective is called 'TogetherWithHim'. Tamara's song 'One Heart, One Mind' reflects the Father's heart for his children to love one another and abide in Him.
Welcome to 12 Minute Converse with Jesus Believers.
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God chose first to have a conversation with us, his creation.
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Our prayer is that this listening space brings growth and transforms your life forever.
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Praise God for you, Tamara.
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Yes, I'm excited to be here sharing my story with you.
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What part of the world are you in today?
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We are in Saskatchewan, Canada.
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Looks as though you've been up to a lot.
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Where are you getting all of this time?
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This has kind of been the new thing that I've stepped into after retirement and also a nudge from the Holy Spirit.
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I thought I was, you know, just going to write devotional of encouraging things from the scriptures.
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But God's like, no, you're going to be writing like a series of three novels.
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And so Rainbow Baby is the first one.
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And he wanted to minister to women who've experienced pregnancy loss through the idea of story.
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What's behind the name Rainbow Baby?
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Well, Rainbow Baby is the child that is born after pregnancy loss.
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That is a gift, a promise of life.
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Not unlike the promise of life and that judgment has been turned away from the earth, like the way God put the rainbow in the sky after the ark.
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What inspired you to write this?
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When I was about 13, our pastor of the church, he had two daughters that were expecting babies.
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And both of their babies were stillborn within two weeks of each other.
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And that really rocked our tiny church.
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So there was always a lingering question for me.
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And then when my husband and I walked through a nine-year journey of infertility, that was just on my heart, always wondering how do people process and do we take enough time to acknowledge those kinds of griefs that many couples walk through and the heartache that that is.
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And sometimes it tends to get brushed off.
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And I wanted to highlight how important it is for us to honor that grief that Salmi's walked through.
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What did you do professionally before retiring?
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I was an educator for over 30 years.
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Where did the quality of wanting to be the voice for others come from?
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I kind of think it came from little on.
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There was a song by Aimee Grant called My Father's Eyes.
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And it was I wanted to have my father's eyes when I looked at situations, and I had a heart for that.
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But things really shifted for me once I pursued an understanding, a deeper understanding of who the Holy Spirit and the person of the Holy Spirit and how He worked.
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There was a significant moment for me when I was really wrestling with lots of fears.
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My pastor just said, You really need to know that you know what God's voice sounds like.
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And he placed his hands over my ears and he prayed for me.
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And the verse that came into my head was from Isaiah 43 where it says, Child, I have redeemed you.
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I have called you by name.
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You are mine.
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And then there was like, I'm never letting you go.
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That is beautiful.
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How many children did you have?
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My husband Bill and I, we have two children, Cody and Serenity.
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They are both adults now, figuring out their journeys still.
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And we are doing lots of praying on our knees for them.
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You did the book in retirement and the music, the songs that you sung, the Together With Him, that collective.
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Was that only formed after or was that something before?
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That was after.
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It kind of came together for us in this last, in 2025.
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We had a family reunion where we wanted to celebrate the 100th anniversary of my grandfather and great grandfather's arrival in Canada from Soviet Russia.
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And our dad had set aside money 20 years prior to that at my grandmother's funeral.
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So we had that resource that we were able to access.
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All three of us are songwriters, which is kind of a fun thing.
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I think that has come out of years and years of generations of music and singing in church and choirs and different things like that.
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But that was the first time we ever sat down together as the three of us to write a song in honour.
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And we all had lyric contributions and melody motifs and different things like that that we contributed.
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And my sister Sonia, she was the one who kind of stitched everything together and made this amazing, epic narrative of a song called Plantus and Freedom.
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And it was a song of celebration and gratitude that reflected our grandfather's journey across the Atlantic Ocean to the prairies in Canada.
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Yeah, very cool.
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Actually, tremendously enjoyed it.
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Like the style of your singing, right?
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It felt, for me, a renewal on all hymnals.
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That's the style I felt from it, yeah?
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Growing up here, hearing hymnals, which was really only voice only for the most part, right?
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And then the music and what you guys put together.
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Tell me about the podcast, though.
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How did the podcast get going?
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Well, my sister said, well, we should start a podcast.
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And I'm like, what?
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So, Sonia, that was her brainwave.
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And so we've only released one so far.
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We have a couple that are just in the process of being edited.
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And so, because we wanted people to get to know who we are as people.
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And it's been a lot of laughter.
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The technology has been a great source of frustration.
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But we are growing in our understanding of how to do stuff.
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And we wanted to tell the stories behind the songs.
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Because each one of the songs that we as individuals wrote and recorded together were kind of like a first fruits of our songwriting journey.
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So, Psalm 67, Trust the Lord, and One Heart, One Mind.
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Those were all first fruit songs.
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The song Do You Know is actually my sister-in-law Lani's song that she wrote and that we recorded for her.
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Very cool.
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What's on the horizon for you?
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We are hoping to do an acapella recording of Great Is Thy Faithfulness coming up here in April.
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That's what I'm saying.
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It's the old hymnal style.
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It is what it is.
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They're back to the core.
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Yeah, no, we grew up on hymns.
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And they have been such anchor pieces for our faith journeys.
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So, we also wanted to honor that.
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Again, Tamara, a pleasure, a treasure, amazing audience.
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We'll have links in the show notes for everything mentioned so that you can simply go in there and click and connect to Rainbow Baby or even together with him, the songs that are available on YouTube, Tamara.
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Yes, www.firerunnermusic.com is where you can find links to our music as well as on www.legacyreimage.com is where you can find links to my book.
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Thank you very much, a pleasure, a treasure.
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Thank you for being what is inspired by 12 Minute Converse.
