BIO
Joseph Allen Boone.
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.
First, though, years of writing scholarly books formed his main outlet. Fresh out of graduate school, Joseph found himself hired as a professor of English, first at Harvard University, then the eight years later at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Those were heady years in which he produced a number of well-regarded scholarly books and essay collections in the fields of the novel as genre, gender and queer studies, modernist fiction, and postcolonial studies. Along the way he was the recipient of numerous academic awards, including the Guggenheim, two ACLS fellowships, an NEH grant, and residencies at the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Rockefeller-Bellagio Center.
But the love of creative writing never disappeared. When his academic books were held up at the Italian border (on suspicions of being contraband!) on his way to take up a month-long residency at Bellagio, so he used the opportunity to begin a creative project that he’d conceived as a junior in college—namely, turning Melville’s darkly satiric riverboat novel The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, into a musical drama every bit as subversive of the genre of the musical as Melville’s tale was of the form of the novel. In a rush of inspiration, he produced a draft of the libretto and lyrics in the month; on another residency, this time at Valparaiso, Spain, he and his composer-brother Benjamin Boone completed the project, and in 2003, working with dramaturg Robert Vorlicky and director Stephen Pickover of the Riverside Opera Ensemble, CONMAN: A Musical Apocalypse enjoyed a three-night staged reading at the Tisch School of Drama. In 2010 it was staged by David Schweitzer, with the redoubtable John Fleck playing the chameleon lead, in Los Angeles as part of USC’s Voices and Visions program.
Joseph’s creative bug was now awakened for good. Once he finished a stint chairing his department, he vowed he was finally going to return to his original love of writing fiction. Ergo Furnace Creek, published in 2022. The story of the inspiration for this debut novel is relayed in the “A Bit About Me and the Inspiration for Furnace Creek” feature located on the first page of this site. Its execution took a decade: simultaneously Joseph was researching and writing The Homoerotics of Orientalism. Whenever he achieved a major goal in its composition, he’d allow himself—as a reward—a few weeks, perhaps a month, to work on the novel. The more real it became, the more exciting the leap into its imagined world.
While writing his nonfiction books has been deeply satisfying, Joseph avers, writing fiction has proved an unsurpassed thrill. Since completing the manuscript of Furnace Creek, Joseph has completed a collection of short stories, Conditions of Precarity, forthcoming from Black Springs Press. Working in this medium provided a new thrill, allowing him to experiment in a range of voices, perspectives, and styles. More novels, Joseph promises, are in the future—he is currently outlining a multi-generational novel in which local community theater and summer stock play central roles, connecting three time periods.
To learn more about the inspiration for Furnace Creek,
Contact Information
Speaking Invitations/Book Events
Contact Joseph Boone at
josephbo@usc.edu
PUBLICIST
Contact Steve Rohr, Lexicon Public Relations:
steve@lexiconpublicrelations.com
ALL OTHER INQUIRIES
Please email info@josephallenboone.com
Inspiration for FC
To learn more about the inspiration for Furnace Creek from the author’s point of view, CLICK HERE