I found Joleene Naylor while searching for a cover designer for the POD version of my short story collection, The Year of the Elm. As I’ve said many times, the best thing about the internet is that it’s possible for anyone to connect with anyone no matter where they are. Despite this insight, however, I still tend to assume that 99.724% of all people on the interwebs are curled up in an overstuffed chair at an urban coffee shop, wirelessly transacting their way to hipster happiness.
You can imagine, then, that the following line in Joleene’s bio caught my eye:
She grew up in southwest Iowa surrounded by corn and very little entertainment — so she made her own.
As regular readers know, I grew up in Iowa myself. As regular readers also know, The Year of the Elm is about a boy growing up in a small town in Iowa where there isn’t a lot of entertainment, so as often as not he has to make his own. [ Read more ]