Writing and Publishing

I’ve been writing since I was a kid. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and scribbling poems in crayon on scraps of paper so I wouldn’t forget them by morning. I still don’t have the proper respect or mind set to be a serious writer; I was editing the book in the photo on the porch when the wind blew my tea cup over and the manuscript need to be dried on the line. I dred the pages and continued editing.

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, my next door neighbor brought me a few Harlequin romances to read. I analyzed them for story progression, vocabulary, chapter length, and word count. I even tried to write one but was bored within a few chapters.

After our second daughter was born, we began raising sheep and I finally had something interesting to write about. Minnesota Monthly picked up several of my sheep stories and I was encouraged to write an entire book that was non-fiction but read like a story book. Purdue University Press published Shepherdess: Notes from the Field in 1996, mainly because the editor who first read it was just moving to a farm.

My next book, The Faces of Change , grew out of a photo documentary project at our library. I did 45 minute interviews of new immigrants who were settled in Pelican Rapids and the people in who befriended those immigrants . As I was editing the interviews, the director of the Otter Tail County Historical Society museum, who had a lot of expertise creating exhibits, informed me that people would only stand still to read about 300 words. What was I going to do with all the rest of those words that I had recorded and transcribed? The Historical Society published that book in 2007.

In the intervening years, I had met lots of people who worked with wool, using the final product of the sheep on our farm. They created such wonderful things, from finely crocheted shawls, to felted vests, soft woven blankets for premies, knit animal mittens and hats for kids, that I was moved to celebrate their creativity in From Sheep to Shawl: stories and patterns for fiber lovers. A dear friend had just begun publishing books and so that book was edited and published by the Wandering Minstrel Press.

I began writing kids picture books in 2011 for my first grandson’s birthday, and then yearly for about ten years I wrote birthday books for each of our four grandsons. Some were silly, some were pretty boring, some were illustrated by family or friends, all were handmade and I had a wonderful time creating them.

I really love fiction, especially pieces written in first person with a lot of humor. Raising sheep has brought a lot of humor into my life, some subtle, some laugh out loud. It seemed quite natural to continue writing sheep stories, but to explore the shepherdess’ inner emotions and the joys and sorrows of her life. The protagonist in Tangled Web: a novel, is not me, her husband isn’t Dave, and her children are not mine. However, her emotions might be. I was not writing the right kind of story to find a publisher in 2014, so I learned how to publish it myself and Victor Lundeen’s in Fergus Falls printed it for me.

The construction of a library in Pelican Rapids, a real community project in which my entire family took part, gave me the courage and the story to write The Year (I donated my mom to the library) which I again self published in 2018. I had learned that I could spend 10 years writing and editing a book, but could not tolerate sending off book queries to every publisher who might possibly be willing to take a chance on my book and waiting for month after month, year after year for negative responses.

In 2015, Dianne Kimm had been working with refugees to Pelican Rapids for over twenty years. She had such a wealth of experience and of friends that we decided to write a book together. Dianne set up appointments with her friends and we both did the interviews. My job was to turn our 45 minute interviews into a chapter and then build the history around the subject so that each person’s story sat within a context. Dianne died before the book was finished but one of the editors suggested that we lighten the book with art done by students attending the Pelican Rapids High School. This book was not a story of new refugees, but a recital of how people had learned to cope with their new lives in America - their success and failures. The question we asked was “Have you found refuge?” Refuge, a collaboration appeared as a blog beginning in 2020 and was published in 2022 with 28 collaborators and 24 artists.

In 2002 I enrolled in an Emergency Medical Technician class to give myself a new set of stories to tell and then worked as an EMT Basic in Pelican Rapids for two years. I took notes on class work, comments by class mates, and more importantly, my emotional responses to the experiences. The book is fiction, but the incidents are real. It took me over ten years to build a fictional story about my experiences without invading the privacy of the people I served as an EMT. Suicide was self published as a blog beginning in 2020. It has yet to become an actual physical book.

Over the years, walking the dog first thing in the morning has been my job and my joy. Sometimes on those walks I recite lists of things I need to accomplish. Sometimes I worry about life, the universe, and everything. Sometimes I write haiku about the fields, the woods and the sheep. Season by season, I created a story told in haiku about my life on the farm, seen not through my emotions, but through my eyes - focused on the world close around me. I eventually submitted the manuscript to an Emily Dickenson poetry contest. I should have known better. Then I submitted it to the Red Dragonfly Press, a small independent poetry press in Red Wing Minnesota. They picked up To Farm is to Hope: Haiku for the Heartland and published it this last winter.

I’ve probably been writing (fiction, nonfiction, newspaper and magazine articles) for over 60 years and I can’t seem to stop. I love to find the right words, to arrange them in the best way and then to set them loose for people to read. Finally, gathered here are all my published books on Joanie’s bookshop..