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Best-selling “Conversation With God” author faces plagiarism claim
More articles on this topic: Neale Donald WalschBest-selling “God” author faces plagiarism claim
NEW YORK (AP) — Neale Donald Walsch, best-selling author of “Conversations with God,” said Tuesday that he unwittingly passed off another writer’s Christmas anecdote as his own in a recent blog post.
As a result, Walsch’s blog on the spirituality Web site Beliefnet.com has been shut down. The Web site said in a statement that Walsch had failed to properly credit and attribute material from another author.
Walsch had written about what he described as his son’s holiday concert two decades ago in which children were to hold up letters spelling “Christmas Love.” One of the children held the “m” upside down, so the audience got the message “Christwas Love,” according to the retelling.
Author Candy Chand said in an interview Tuesday that she stumbled onto Walsch’s post when she ran “Christmas Love” through an Internet search engine. She immediately recognized her own words, from her story based on her son’s kindergarten Christmas pageant. She contacted Walsch and Beliefnet.
[...]Walsch wrote on his blog Tuesday he was “truly mystified” about what happened and apologized. He said he had been telling the story for years in public talks and “somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”
“As a published author myself, I would never use another author’s words as my own,” Walsch wrote. “Yet I have apparently done just that — although with no deliberate intent to do so.”
Chand, of Rancho Murieta, Calif., said she did not believe Walsch’s account.
“It’s pretty difficult for me to believe that someone has a memory lapse that is word for word my story,” she said. “He deleted the first paragraph. That’s it.”
[...]
Christmas Essay Was Not His, Author Admits
Neale Donald Walsch, author of the best-selling series “Conversations With God,” recently posted a personal Christmas essay on the spiritual Web site Beliefnet.com about his son’s kindergarten winter pageant.
[...]Except it never happened — to him.
Mr. Walsch’s story was nearly identical to an essay by a writer named Candy Chand, which was originally published 10 years ago in Clarity, a spiritual magazine, and has been circulating on the Web ever since. Mr. Walsch now says he made a mistake in believing the story was something that had actually come from his personal experience.
Ms. Chand said she originally wrote the piece about her son, Nicholas, and his kindergarten winter pageant and published it in Clarity in 1999. In his Dec. 28 blog posting, Mr. Walsch, who also has a son named Nicholas, said it happened at his son’s pageant 20 years ago.
Ms. Chand’s essay was reprinted, with her clearly identified as the author, in “Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul” in 2000, as well as on heartwarmers.com, a Web site for inspirational stories. In 2003 Ms. Chand copyrighted the story with the United States Copyright Office. Last June Gibbs Smith, a small independent publisher, released the story, “Christmas Love,” as an illustrated gift book. The story has also been passed around through e-mail and on blogs, sometimes without attribution.
Except for a different first paragraph in which Mr. Walsch wrote that he could “vividly remember” the incident, his Dec. 28 Beliefnet post followed, virtually verbatim, Ms. Chand’s previously published writing, even down to prosaic details like “The morning of the dress rehearsal, I filed in ten minutes early, found a spot on the cafeteria floor and sat down.”
On Saturday Ms. Chand contacted Elisabeth Sams, Beliefnet’s executive vice president of content and community, and on Tuesday morning Mr. Walsch’s post was taken down. “This blog chain has been taken down while Beliefnet investigates the ownership of the previously published material,” a brief statement on the Web site said.
In a statement posted Tuesday afternoon on his blog on Beliefnet, which is owned by the News Corporation, Mr. Walsch said he had made a “serious error” and apologized to Ms. Chand and his readers.
“All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago,” Mr. Walsch wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized … and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience.”
[...]In a statement, Beliefnet said Mr. Walsch had withdrawn from the site’s blogging roster. “As a faith-based Web portal, Beliefnet will continue to hold ourselves and our writers to the highest standards of trust,” the statement read.
Ms. Chand said she was concerned that people would now think she had copied Mr. Walsch’s story. “How many people have heard him telling people that it’s his own?” she said. “There goes my credibility again.”
Speaking of Mr. Walsch, she asked: “Has the man who writes best-selling books about his ‘Conversations With God’ also heard God’s commandments? ‘Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property’?”
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