Featured Interview With Kirsten Joy
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am a foodie and have been ever since I formed my first loaf of mud bread in the backyard at age seven. I wrote my first novel shortly thereafter, a shameless copy Anne of Green Gables. With time, I abandoned the mud and plagiarism and learned to work with real dough and original ideas.
I dream of running an island inn someday, complete with a vintage library, crumpets and cocoa on the veranda, and fragrant linens on all the beds. In the meantime, I am happily landlocked in Kansas with my husband and four sons, all of whom are required to tea party with me. I do enough laundry to compete with any island inn and enjoy writing and baking in my precious moments of free time.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t write. When I didn’t know how to do it myself, my mom wrote journal entries for me, writing down as I dictated to her.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I love the classics. It’s nearly impossible to match their beauty and depth. In contemporary fiction, I recently enjoyed Kate Atkinson and Helen Simonson. I also like nonfiction, particularly history and psychology.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
It’s a Chic Lit, foodie novel about Adrian Duggs, a girl whose had it with the humiliation of home: the belching van, the sadistic rooster, and her father’s endless exhibition of sweat pants and blazers. She has dreams of becoming a pastry chef, but her family can hardly afford to send her to community college, let alone culinary school.
Away at school, she finds that leaving home isn’t a cure-all; there are new relationships that torment and change her. There are themes of mental illness, based on a good friend of mine who has transformed before my eyes in recent years and has finally been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
I am a full-time mom and only a nap-time writer, so it was a long process to get the story finished. Five years and nearly fifteen drafts later, my book is finally published and I’m very happy with the outcome. I wouldn’t care if it took my fifteen years, I was not willing to publish until I was proud of it.
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