Joy Jordan Lake
Born in Washington, D.C., Joy Jordan Lake grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee outside Chattanooga. Much to her sweet mother's bafflement, Joy always preferred dogs, horses and the woods to dolls and playhouses. A shy kid who was sick a lot, she learned to love reading and creating her own stories--and avoiding wearing shoes at all costs. Living all over the country as an adult, including in New England for years, she still avoids footwear whenever possible.
After earning a masters from a theological seminary and then a masters and a Ph.D. in English lit., she loved getting to teach classes at a number of universities but longed to write full time. Two biological and one adopted child later, in addition to millions of diapers changed and gazillions of essays graded, she finally gets to do that--and never forgets to be grateful.
Joy's upcoming historical mystery, A Bend of Light, set in post-WW2 coastal Maine, releases in fall. Her recent books include the bestselling novel A Tangled Mercy, a dual timeline story set in Charleston, South Carolina, Under a Gilded Moon, a historical mystery set at the Biltmore Estate during the Gilded Age. Her eight earlier books include, Blue Hole Back Home, winner of the 2009 Christy Award for Best First Novel and the Common Book selection for several universities, as well as nonfiction and two children’s picture books, A Crazy-Much Love and Sir Drake the Brave.
In all her writing, Joy tends to be drawn to little-known historical events, to humor as well as tragedy, and to social issues and those big existential questions: the human capacity for brutality and bigotry, for example, as well as for remarkable courage and forgiveness. She and her husband (who also moonlights as her trusted Head Research Assistant) live just south of Nashville, where one teenager still lives at home full time and the other young adult kids pass through regularly. A ferocious 10-pound Maltipoo rules the house.
Instagram: @JoyJordanLake_Books
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What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
I’ll need to borrow here from a children’s book author I admire tremendously, Kate DiCamillo. Once when I heard her speak, she commented that she dislikes being called an Author, because it connotes someone who has “arrived” in terms of craft. By contrast, she likes the title Writer, since it connotes someone who simply sits down and writes every day.
I couldn’t agree more. With every book, I feel like I’m a beginner all over again. Like raising kids and discovering that each child needs to be raised a bit differently for that particular personality and temperament, each book demands different skills, and one makes—or at least I make—different mistakes and have to grow in different ways.
Honestly, I find this freeing, though, being able to say I’m a writer, and so is anyone who sits down and writes on a regular basis and tries to learn something new each time.
It’s not about having “arrived” at a certain point, but instead wanting to learn from other writers and editors and your own readers. It’s about always wanting to improve and being gut-deep grateful for every day you get to do so.
Vacation druthers… City or Rural destination? Why?
I’m going to have to say… villages. I find big cities exciting but my Fear of Missing Out kicks in hard and I feel utterly overwhelmed—because how can you possibly miss any of the best theater in the world or the best Thai place in this neighborhood or these art galleries or that architecture in…. It’s like my brain goes into overdrive and I can’t listen to the stories that are brewing all around because the noise is so loud in my own head.
Rural is nice when I’m there to hike, but too much rural and I miss the interaction of different sorts of people together.
A village or small city to me sparks all sorts of things in my imagination—enough human beings interacting that I begin to create backstories of passion and disappointments and betrayal and mystery. Just big enough but not too big so that I’m intrigued to start digging down deep, not feeling pulled wide.
Come to think of it, my novels reflect this: Echoes of Us features the small community on St. Simons Island, Georgia, in present day and WW2; A Bend of Light is set in a village on the Maine coast; Under a Gilded Moon is set at the Biltmore Estate and the surrounding town that was small at the time, Asheville, North Carolina; A Tangled Mercy is set in 1822 Charleston, South Carolina; Blue Hole Back Home is set in a fictional small town, Pisgah Ridge, in the North Carolina mountains; and this novel I’m currently working on is set in present day at a villa and in a village on Lake Como, Italy.
What brings you great joy?
So many things, and maybe that’s part of being a writer, always looking for the extraordinary in the ordinary, which makes life endlessly intriguing…and, okay, sometimes also startling and distressing, but mostly joyful. But I’ll go with two things bringing me joy that live in tension with each other: travel and my family, a category for me that also includes very close friends who’ve become family.
The joyful thing about travel, whether it’s exploring a tiny town forty-five minutes away from where I live or trekking around on the other side of the ocean, is imagining what it would be like to live and work and love there, what the people in that place find valuable and beautiful, what they would fight to keep unchanged or fight to change. I keep finding through the years that the more my own world expands, whether it’s traveling through reading or traveling with my little teal suitcase rolling behind me, the more delightful and brightly colored and fascinating life becomes.
The contradiction to this sense of joy in travel means being away from home, away from the people I treasure most in the world, so that’s a constant pull—but one that’s a great gift to get to navigate.
Do you have another artistic outlet in addition to your writing? Do you sew? Paint? Draw? Knit? Dance?
I’m a bit of a floundering painter, with most of my work mediocre or worse, and I keep intending to take classes one day. One ongoing and growing artistic interest is photography. I love the challenge of seeing things from a different angle, getting down on the ground to view the sea grass and dunes or getting high to look down on the hotel lobby or blurring the background so that the strange, flawed beauty of one central flower pops—and it’s fabulous. I’m a novice, honestly, and at this point don’t even have a separate camera besides my iPhone, but I keep learning from people online and it’s amazing what you “see” when you’re just willing to shift position and see from a different angle.
Honestly, that’s one of my favorite parts of writing, too, getting to shift points of view to another character and see events from a different angle… Details pop out and everything changes.
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
Music is incredibly influential when I’m writing—not that I necessarily have it on while my fingers are on the keyboard, but when I’m driving or weeding the garden or doing laundry all during the couple of years I’m working on a particular book. The music will be either the era the novel is set in or the music the characters are listening to at that time.
So for my most recent dual timeline novel Echoes of Us, the World War II characters dance to and hear in the distance and think about lines from all those amazing songs like “I’ll Be Seeing You,” lyrics that just tear your heart out, or “It’s Been a Long, Long Time,” where the brass section is just so incredibly seductive. The present-day characters are listening to the same songs as they try and figure out what happened to connect three very different men, a Tennessee farm boy, a Jewish Cambridge student and a German POW, and one extraordinary female aviator during the war—and what secrets tore them apart. As one of the present-day characters says of that WW2-era music, I have no idea how people kept their clothes on while listening to it.
In my novel Blue Hole Back Home, a coming-of-age story that won the Christy Award and got picked up by several colleges and universities as the Common Read, a group of teenagers is trying to figure out friendship and belonging and betrayal and race and courage and fairness. The time period is actually 1979, but the music they’re listening to during this one, unforgettable summer is actually songs on old eight-track tapes that are from the R&B hits of a decade earlier. So I got to listen to lots of “Stand By Me” and “Dancing in the Street” while dancing around the house with the vacuum and stopping to jot down story ideas!
