for the key.
And I have spent my life learning what it was given to me to unlock.
The name Dittrich is German for skeleton key.
This is not a small thing in our family. My father, Gaines Dittrich, was once asked at a funeral home what his name meant, and he answered without thinking — “It means skeleton key. We open what looks permanently shut.” The stranger he was talking to nodded and walked away. My father turned to me and said, “I have been telling people that for forty years. I never knew if it was true. But every time I say it out loud, it becomes more true.”
Our family has lived that name. My parents have been married fifty-one years. They built a ministry from a kitchen table. They have walked through losses and restorations that would have ended weaker stories. My brother and I, the two bear cubs, drifted in different directions for years and found our way back to each other in our forties. There are doors in our family that should have stayed shut, and they did not — because the One Key is God. He is the only one who can truly unlock the doors. One key. One God.
“Every family has a story. The same Key opens every door.”
I started writing the family story by accident. My parents were getting older, and I realized one morning, with a kind of grief, that the things they knew were going to leave when they did. So I bought a recorder. I sat down with them at their kitchen table in Candler, North Carolina. I asked them to talk.
Seventy-two recorded sessions later, I had their whole life on my hard drive. And I had a book on my hands. The book became three books — a trilogy I am still finishing — and somewhere in the middle of writing them, I realized something I cannot un-realize.
Every author I know carries the same kind of stories. And almost none of them will ever be brought into the world.
Why I Built Surrendered Heart Publishing
I built this company because the publishing world is too crowded with companies that treat books like products and authors like commodities. I wanted to build something different — a small, careful, family-feel publishing house where every book is treated as a sacred trust.
With reverence for the author
Every author who works with us is treated with the kind of reverence I would want for my own family. Nothing goes into a book that the author is not at peace with. Nothing.
With reverence for the keepsake
Every book we make is built to outlive its first reader. The bindings, the paper, the typography, the photographs, the layout — all of it is shaped to be picked up by a granddaughter forty years from now and held without falling apart.
With reverence for the calling
I believe books are how we hand the truth forward. When someone trusts me with theirs, I treat it like the inheritance it is.
If you have a book in you —
let’s talk about how to get it out.
The first conversation is always free. Thirty minutes. No pressure. Just two people sitting down to see if there is a book here — and if Surrendered Heart Publishing is the right home for it.