With the ink still drying on her latest book, Joyce Harrison is too close to the project to be objective.
“I honestly didn’t think it was my best work, but when I sent it out for reviews it got five stars,” says the author. “I think it’s too recent. I need a break from it before I can see it clearly.”
Born and raised in Flin Flon, Harrison left the community when she began her studies at the University of Manitoba.
She got her start in the broadcasting business in radio in Flin Flon and later moved to a TV newsroom.
She has written works in many different styles over the years, with a focus on advertising pieces and the music industry.
Her latest work, a novella titled Blue Flamingo, is set in Florida. The story begins when Dylan, 24, finds a matchbook for the Blue Flamingo bar hidden among possessions left behind by his recently deceased father.
The piece of memorabilia holds more questions than answers for Dylan, who begins a search for the birth mother he never knew.
Harrison can’t pinpoint exactly where the idea for her latest work of fiction came from, although she mentions a song and a screenplay she previously wrote as starting points.
While the seed of an idea may have started the same, the creative works took on lives of their own and resulted in three unique pieces for the author.
As a writer, Harrison doesn’t follow a set pattern but does devote herself completely to one project at a time.
“If I’m working on a song, I work on that one song until it’s finished,” she said.
“The trouble with books is that they are never finished. There comes a time when you’ve lost perspective, you’ve made the revisions and at a certain point you can’t look at it again. Like a painter, you don’t want to do one brushstroke too many.”
Harrison wrote her first book as a personal challenge after her daughter suggested she’d written everything else, so why not a book?
“I started out to prove to myself that I could do it,” she said.
Her first book, Slag, was set in 1955 Flin Flon and proved to be a success. From there she wrote a second book, Long Plastic Hallway, based on the California music business.
Now, following the recent release of her third book, Harrison knows she has what it takes to write a book from start to finish.
“You have to be very committed to it,” she said. “It may take months. You devote all your time to it and everything else gets pushed aside.”
Harrison continues to write from her home in Nashville, Tennessee.
“When I’m writing I find it takes on a life of its own,” she said. “I just go with it and the characters will often do things as I go that I may not have thought about originally.”
