A writing career, in one way or another, always loomed in Joseph Allen Boone’s future. Born in Virginia and raised in North Carolina, nine-year-old Joseph began his writing career by penning (and illustrating) a children’s mystery series—featuring the intrepid sibling sleuths, Kate and Tim Lane—whose 10-15 page “volumes” he passed out to his third-grade classmates. A year later, he completed his first “full-length” novel,The Secret Room, and the sixth grade found him writing wildly adventurous historical fictions that combined, however incongruously, elements of James Fenimore Cooper and Louisa May Alcott. The coming of adolescence prompted his first romance, A Summer to Remember, whose teenaged lovers owed equally to Mary Stewart’s The Moon Spinners and Disney feature film movie based on that novel.
As an undergraduate at Duke University, Joseph pursued his love of literature while taking creative writing classes with Reynolds Price and Helen Bevington, and upon graduating summa cum laude with degrees in English and History, he deferred going to graduate school for a year in hopes of writing the great American novel . . . or, if not that, at least a few publishable short stories. Neither happened, largely because his job as a waiter at the Williamsburg Inn entailed more time spent turning tables and collecting tips than producing pages of manuscript.
And so he found himself in the PhD program in English at the University of Wisconsin, where his love of literary analysis blossomed. Only in his last year of the program did he allow himself the luxury of returning to his first love, writing a story, “Take Back the Night,” that placed second in the university’s creative writing competition and gave him hope that his creative spark wasn’t yet extinguished, but lay dormant, awaiting the right moment to reemerge.
by