| |
Long Bio
I was never one of those writers who always knew she wanted to write, or for that
matter, always wrote. At St. Thomas elementary school, "writing" was known as
"penmanship." In high school, I served a brief stint as editor of the school newspaper
before the advisor cut off funding to keep me from printing another word. After
graduation I spent one year at Skidmore College studying art before dropping out
to study life. Eventually, after a bit of zigzagging across the country, in which
not so much as a postcard was written, I ended up in Gloucester, Massachusetts with
a husband. And as is so often the case in these situations, this measure was followed
up by children.
While they were young, I worked on an undergraduate degree at Harvard Extension,
mostly to escape the children a couple of nights a week, but also because I knew I
could not nag them about the value of education if I didn't have one myself. My major
was social sciences, and this being the 80's and early 90's, I wrote dozens of academic
papers on postmodern deconstructionist gender roles. It was the only serious writing I
had ever done up to that point and it was completely unintelligible to anyone without
a working knowledge of Derrida and Lacan. To insure that its students did not enter
the world believing that that's what writing was, Harvard Extension required degree
candidates to take two expository writing courses.
So I grit my teeth — I had survived the math requirement, I would survive writing.
To be on the safe side though, I took the most basic course they offered: Word Choice,
where I learned how to use a thesaurus. Then I took Writing From Life, which was a
memoir course, although at the time I didn't even know what that meant. No matter --
with the thoughtful guidance of my teacher, Maxine Rodburg, I learned how to cannibalize
my life for the page, and in the middle of the semester, she called me into her office
and said I should be writing fiction. At first I thought she was accusing me of lying,
but it turned out she was just encouraging me to stray from the truth. So I strayed. I
strayed so much that I joined a writers group in Cambridge, and their support and
feedback kept me writing through the dark days of simply learning how. This particular
writers group hired an instructor to lead the discussions, which kept it serious and
always on-track. As I was finishing up my bachelor’s at Harvard Extension, I began to
publish in literary magazines and small journals, and with that encouragement I strayed
over to Bennington College and took an MFA in writing and literature. Soon I was writing
style articles for the Boston Globe Magazine and gave up on the coming-of-age novel I’d
been working into the ground. According to writing lore, novels are like pancakes, you
have to toss the first one out, and I did. Then I pulled out a file I’d been keeping on
an idea I had about Canada geese invading a golf club, and with the continuing help of my
writers group, now led by Marcie Hershman (author of Tales of the Master Race), I wrote
Addled over a period of two years.
It seems a roundabout way to inspire one’s children to go to college, but it was effective.
My oldest daughter is in medical school, the middle daughter is an undergraduate, and the
baby boy is looking at colleges. If nothing else, learning how to write has come in useful
for correcting their papers.
In addition to her novel, ADDLED, JoeAnn Hart has published numerous short stories and essays.
Click HERE for a complete list of her publishing credits.
|
|
