JOAN SCHWEIGHARDT

Even before my first novel was published, someone knocked on my door to say he had recently survived a harrowing ordeal in a foreign country and needed a professional to ghostwrite his story. I explained that I wrote press releases for a PR company and short pieces for a local newspaper. Surprisingly, that worked for him, so I took him on, and I so enjoyed getting into the head of someone completely unlike myself—and I had a knack for it too—that I continued to promote myself as a ghostwriter and I got more work. And I expanded my roster of more ordinary services as well, so that soon I was writing/editing for book publishers, book packagers, magazines, corporations, manufacturers, and more.

 

I had managed to turn a hodgepodge of freelance jobs into a career of sorts, and on rare days I even had time to work on my own book projects. When my first three novels were published, one after the other by the Permanent Press in the mid to late ’90s, I began to imagine that I knew enough about the industry to be able to publish myself, and I started GreyCore Press. Among GreyCore’s successes were a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” title (A Month of Sundays, Julie Mars), a Borders “Top Six Read to Me” title (When I Wished I Was Alone, Dave Cutler), a Foreword Magazine “best fiction title of the year” (The Basket Maker, Kate Niles). One of my authors, Paul Martin, a man who became a triathlete after losing a leg in an accident (his brilliant memoir is called One Man’s Leg), was featured on/in CNN Headline News, Fox’s The Best Damn Sports Show Period, People Magazine, Muscle Media Magazine, Writer’s Digest, Writer’s Journal, Pages, Popular Mechanics, Playgirl, USA Today, and The Los Angeles Times! Had it not been for my then distributor going out of business while owing me—and other client publishers—a significant amount of money, I might still be publishing today.

 

Though I had to close GreyCore’s doors and return to freelance work, I never lost my love for collaboration. In addition to various paying projects, my pro bono work over the years included interviewing authors, film makers and artists for Occhi Magazine, overseeing my own column, entitled “Bloomers Blazing,” to showcase “over 50s” out to change the world for Bloom Magazine, and interviewing authors and reviewing books for the Five Directions Press newsletter on a regular basis. The first thing I did upon retiring a few years back was collaborate on a humorous novel with a close friend. The second was entice my lifelong colleague and fellow “pen for hire” Faye Rapoport DesPres to work with me to put together an anthology—which ultimately came to feature the work of 38 essayists and poets—on the subject of touch for the University of Georgia Press.

 

Of my own books, my favorites include the IPPY and Foreword award-winning* The Last Wife of Attila the Hun, a tale based on the intersection of the true history of the Roman Empire during the reign of Attila and the same Germanic legends that inspired Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Last Wife was my first attempt to write fiction that was at least somewhat historical, and I found I loved the process—not a surprise since deep research is not unlike collaboration with other people; both require alternative perspectives. More recently I wrote Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead, and River Aria, a trilogy of historical novels based on the South American rubber boom in Brazil in the early 20th century.

 

Because I was still working for clients when I wrote the trilogy, it took me some ten years to complete them, but they were probably the best ten years of my writing life. I made two trips to South American as part of my research, one to stay with an indigenous tribe in the middle of the rainforest, and one to visit Manaus, Brazil, the hub of the rubber boom and the site of some incredible architecture—including the opera house made famous by Werner Herzog in his film Fitzcarraldo. I also traveled the Amazon and Rio Negro in a small riverboat to see rubber trees and to learn as much about the jungle as possible from “Carlos the Jaguar,” my incredibly knowledgeable and fearless guide. As American Artist Robert Henri says in his book The Art Spirit, “The object of all art is intense living, fulfillment and great happiness in creation.” With that belief in heart and mind, I set out more recently to see if I could find yet one more historical moment that would excite me as much as finding the historical Attila in the midst of Germanic lays about Sigurd the dragon-slayer, or learning about the rise and fall of Brazil’s rubber industry. And then it happened; I came upon a four-minute animated video about the amazing achievements of Maria Sibylla Merian and her youngest daughter and I knew I had my next big project.

 

I am thrilled to have the opportunity to join the Regal House family to launch In the Wonder, a story my Booklife Prize reviewer describes as “… blend(ing) history with the supernatural, resulting in a thoroughly engaging, evocative novel.”