Featured Interview With Joyce A. Connelley
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born and raised in the Los Angeles area and later moved the Bay Area where I lived for over 30 years. In 2005 my husband and I relocated to the DFW area where we now live. We acquired a long-established organic gardening store in Fort Worth called Marshall Grain Company, founded in 1946. Since then, we have expanded into landscape design and installation and developed it into the leading organic garden center in the DFW area. Under my leadership as Vice President of Marketing, Marshall Grain Co. has been ranked nationally as a Top 100 independent garden center and is one of the largest independent organic garden centers in Texas. I have been personally honored by a number of civic organizations, including the Daughters of the American Revolution, for my advocacy in the fields of environmental awareness, conservation, and sustainability, as well as a proponent of animal welfare causes. In addition to the 3 cats we have at home, we have 3 that live in our retail store and are often featured in our advertising and on our social media pages.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I started secretly writing fiction in the middle of the night when I was about 8 or 10. By the time I was a sophomore in high school I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I worked on my high school paper and landed a job at 16 with the Whittier Daily News. Eventually I moved into technical writing for technology companies, and ultimately gravitated toward marketing writing. For over 20 years I supported myself as a freelance writer until we moved to Texas and acquired Marshall Grain. During my years as a freelancer, I published two books, both non-fiction. The first was a technology book called Bar Code and the IBM PC, co-written by myself and Russ Adams and published by Helmers Publishing in 1986. The other was one of a series of classroom history books written for those with reading difficulties published by David S. Lake.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My favorite fiction genre is espionage, and of course, the master of that genre is John le Carre. Most of my reading, however, is in non-fiction categories: history, archaeology, and other sciences. I love American classics such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
One of my favorite authors is Edgar Allen Poe. I also love the humor of James Thurber and Emma Bombeck.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“Reunion in Stringtown:Finding Faith, Family, and Healing” is the summation of more than 25 years of searching for my birth family and a lifetime of wondering who gave me up and why. I hope my story will help shatter the myths about adoption that it is somehow a “blessing” that you were unwanted and that your adopters are heroic saviors. In truth most adoptees are traumatized once by their original abandonment and abused again by the parents who supposedly “saved” them. My work attempts to show how we can become whole only by first acknowledging the truth and then by walking through the fire of recovery.
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