Joyce Allen was raised in Springfield, Illinois,

“… where the ghost of Abraham Lincoln prowled the streets and shared eminence with Jesus, and where more recently Barack Obama declared his candidacy.  My mother was an active free-lance writer, so a life involved with words seemed natural.

“I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t making stories—real or imagined.  I emphasized writing at Stephens College, but I got serious about myself as a writer in the 1960s, studying with author Manly Wade Wellman at the University of North Carolina.

“I found early on that it wasn't enough for me just to see something or feel something or discover something. I had to do something about it. Take it in, shape it, return it to the universe with something added of myself. It felt like breathing out after you've breathed in. I think that's a need we all have. Some of us do it with music or painting or cooking or growing things, or about a thousand other ways. For me it's been writing. That doesn't mean I've always been writing about myself or my own life-I seldom do. But life and experience are what we all have to draw on.”

For many years, she served as manager of the student program in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. This was a position that allowed her close connection with a wide variety of people—a great gift for a writer. She assures these wonderful people that she has used none of them as characters in her work.

Joyce's publications include an earlier novel, Stranger in Our Darkness, (Moore Publishing Co.) as well as short fiction and creative non-fiction. Her novel, Hannah’s House, was published by Wolf’s Pond Press in May 2008.

“For quite a lot of years I lived in a very small house in the woods of western Orange County - one of those environmentally conscious non-standard communities that sprang up around here in the seventies and early eighties. There were the remains of an old house on my land - just a couple of rotting tiers of logs, a big hearth made of large stones fitted neatly together, and a stone chimney that was mostly fallen down. From the size of a couple of trees that butted into one corner I guessed the house must have been abandoned around the late nineteenth or very early twentieth century. I was never able to find out who had lived there - although I tried - but I spent a lot of time back in there and kept trying to imagine who it might have been and what they might have been like. Eventually Hannah emerged.”

Contact Joyce Allen if you would like to be notified as soon as her latest book, Those Who Hold the Threads, is available.

Photo by Loren Brandford


Photo by Tom Redick