If you’re someone who loves and lives by words—whether an author or reader, songwriter or screenwriter, teacher or preacher or poet or just plain a fan of any story well told—a special WELCOME to you. The longer I live and the longer I write, the more I’m astonished—okay, appalled—at how little I know about this thing that I’m—we’re— trying to do: Tell stories. Craft words. Keep from crumpling up right now in despair. And I’m every day also more grateful for chances to learn from the people around me. Which is why we lovers of stories and words need each other. To share ideas, favorite books and movies and plays, to pass along interviews with creative souls we admire. To encourage, enlighten, instruct. To hold onto hope. So check out the blog topics at right, and JOIN THE CONVERSATION!

BLUE HOLE BACK HOME Chosen as Common Book, Classroom Text, Book Club Selection and Summer Reading

Blue Hole Back Home is being used in universities, high schools and community settings to spur discussions on American culture, history and diversity. The novel was selected, for example, as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University's first-year students, who met in small groups to consider issues of courage, reconciliation and social transformation.
Want to know more about how Blue Hole Back Home might function in your academic, book club or community setting? On this site, you can SEE A TV INTERVIEW about how one high school is using the novel, watch a brief TRAILER with audio from the first chapter, and read more information under the Books-Fiction pull down menu above. You'll also find entries related to Blue Hole--including hearing the music behind the book-- on Joy's blog at bottom right of this page.

Colleges, high schools, book clubs and community groups, we welcome you to contact the author about a possible visit--in-person, if possible, or Skype.

And WATCH FOR REGULAR GIVEAWAYS of Blue Hole, as well as Joy's other books, through the blog attached to this site.

TANGLED MERCY-a sequel to BLUE HOLE BACK HOME-and the first novel in the Charleston series

Before Jami Riggs learns—the day of her mother’s funeral—that she is inheriting a collapsing 19th-century inn at the southernmost tip of Charleston, South Carolina, she’d never intended to live outside the Appalachian mountains or to speak to her long-estranged father ever again. Knowing nothing of inn-keeping or of This Old House renovations and still in the midst of graduate studies in history, Jami sees no point in accepting the gift—which, it quickly appears, comes with all sorts of secrets and strings attached. But when old family friend Shelby Lenoir Maynard, back briefly on Pisgah Ridge for the funeral, offers to travel down to the Carolina Low Country with her, Jami surprises herself at how quickly she falls for Charleston’s charm and its quirky, colorful people. As she struggles to bring the inn—and her own life—back from rot and neglect, Jami stumbles on a series of disturbing discoveries, including a possible murder. When more “accidents” begin to occur, including the disappearance of an African-American toddler in whom a wealthy white matriarch has taken a peculiar interest, Jami suspects she has at her history-savvy fingertips old stories with new clues to the truth. If only she can sort out the bad guys from the good.

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