Announcements
Writer's Corner Featuring Joy Jordan-Lake
West End United Methodist Church’s second “Writer’s Corner at West End” will be held the evening of Friday, March 4 and Saturday morning, March 5, featuring Nashville author and professor Joy Jordan-Lake. This is a Writer’s Corner for those who love to read and/or write, and have an interest in spiritual dialogue, delicious locally-grown, nutritious meals, and cutting edge discussion!
Joy will join Rev. Dr. Michael Williams, senior pastor at West End and writer/reader in his own right, for dinner, dialogue and a reading Friday evening from 6 to 9 p.m. From 9 a.m. to noon Saturday morning, the author will lead participants in spiritual exercises and discussion centered on her book, “Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel.”
Joy Jordan-Lake’s varied–and admittedly odd–professional experience has included working as a college professor, author, waitress, journalist, director of a program for homeless families, university chaplain, and –the job title that remains her personal favorite–head sailing instructor.
After earning a bachelors degree from Furman University and a masters from a theological seminary, Joy re-located to the Boston, Massachusetts, area where she earned a masters and a Ph.D. in English Literature from Tufts University, and specialized in the role of race and religion in 19-century American fiction.
While in New England, she founded a food pantry targeting low-income and homeless families, served on the staff of a multi-ethnic church in Cambridge, worked as a free-lance journalist, and became a Baptist chaplain at Harvard. Her first book, Grit and Grace: Portraits of a Woman’s Life (Wheaton Literary Series)(Harold Shaw Publishers, 1997), was a collection of stories, poems and essays which The Chicago Tribune described this way: “Written with much heart and wit, this little gem of a book touches on the ordinary and profound experiences that make up a woman’s life . . . a poignant and satisfying collection . . . funny and sad, inspiring and awfully surprising.”
Joy’s second book, Whitewashing Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Nineteenth-Century Women Novelists Respond to Stowe (Vanderbilt University Press, 2005) continued her doctoral dissertation work, exploring the inter-weavings of literature, theology, and race in American culture.
During this period, life for Joy and her husband, Todd Lake, was becoming increasingly chaotic with two careers, numerous re-locations for Todd’s work, two young biological children and the adoption of a baby girl from China. Joy’s nearly-manic need to ask everyone around her about how they managed–or not–to balance kids and career led to her third book, Working Families: Navigating the Demands and Delights of Marriage, Parenting, and Career (WaterBrook/ Random House, 2007). Publishers Weekly called the book, “refreshing for its social conscience,” and written with “sharp humor and snappy prose.”
In its review of Joy’s fourth book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous: Ten Alarming Words of Faith (Paraclete Press, 2007), Publishers Weekly again praised the author: “A professor at Belmont University and a former Baptist chaplain at Harvard University, the author mines her personal history…to illumine and interpret ideas such as…hope. Sometimes wry, occasionally stern, Jordan-Lake, with a touch of Southern gothic sensibility…has a gift for welcoming, lucid and insightful prose….”
Joy’s first novel, Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel, won the 2009 national Christy Award for first novel, and was selected as the 2009 Common Book for Baylor University. Inspired by actual events from her own teenage years, explores the tensions and eventual violence that erupt in a small, all-white Appalachian town when a Sri Lankan family moves in. Ultimately, Blue Hole Back Home is a story not only of the devastating effects of racial hatred and cowardice, but more centrally, a celebration of courage, confrontation and healing. Blue Hole Back Home is increasingly being chosen as classroom and summer reading at various public and private high school, middle schools, colleges and universities.
West End UMC plans a series of Writer’s Corner events using the Friday evening- Saturday morning format. The cost is $10 for dinner Friday evening, catered by Martha Stamps; Saturday participation is by donation only. Writer’s Corner events are made possible by the generous donation of participants and the Marion and Bishop Roy C. Clark Lectureship Endowment. Registration is necessary as space is limited, and can be done online by clicking here, or by calling Rev. Julie Halstead at 615.983.8836. If you’d like to be on the mailing list, please email Rev. Halstead at jhalstead@westendumc.org. Future authors include Amy Lyles Wilson, Rev. Dr. Fred Craddock, and poet Blas Falconer.