Joan Leegant
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
(Official bio below. Please scroll down.)
I’m a native New Yorker (Westbury, L.I.) but I’ve spent most of my adult life in Massachusetts with a few notable detours. There were three years in Jerusalem in my late twenties. A year in Portland, Oregon, when my kids were small. A recent stint in California. And, lately, half the year in Tel Aviv while teaching at Bar-Ilan University in their terrific writing program.
I started to write fiction shortly before I turned 40. It wasn’t a mid-life crisis type of situation (mid?); I’d always been writing - poetry, songs, essays - but I was occupied with other things. Being a lawyer, for instance. Starting a family. But when I began to write fiction in earnest, it was like falling in love. Not with my writing but with the sheer exhilaration of making things up. Of inventing a situation and following a character around until something happened to him (and usually it was a him; for a long time women were too close for me to write about), and then being surprised at what had happened. Who knew writing could be this way? I was hooked.
I’m a night person, and my best hours for writing are between midnight and 5 am. To make progress on my novel, WHEREVER YOU GO, I went to artist colonies for stays of 4 or 6 weeks - MacDowell, Yaddo - often in deep winter, the better for hibernating. During the final revisions I was in Tel Aviv, and though I had a perfectly nice rental apartment with my husband, I holed up alone in friends’ empty flats for days at a time. I once heard Toni Morrison call herself “a binge writer,” meaning she would work for long stretches without stopping, sometimes in a hotel room. Joan Didion reported sleeping with her manuscript during the later stages of a book. I rent an office that’s a ten-minute drive, fifteen minute walk, from my (usual) home outside Boston, and I often sleep there, to stay connected to the work.
The stories that make up AN HOUR IN PARADISE, my first book, were written over a 3-4 year period shortly before its publication, but their genesis was in those three years in Jerusalem decades earlier. Likewise with my novel, WHEREVER YOU GO. Some say the subject matter chooses the writer, not the other way around, and that certainly feels true for me. After my story collection was published, I tried not to write about Israel or things Jewish, but it kept tugging at me. The story, it seemed, was insisting.
The bare facts
Undergraduate degree from Harvard, law degree Boston University, MFA Vermont College.
Taught writing for eight years at Harvard.
Visiting Writer at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv 2007-2010.
Guest lecturer of U.S. State Department in Israel on American literature, writing and teacher training, 2008-2010.
Winner of the Winship/PEN New England Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Series.
Practiced law for 10 years, give or take.
Literary pedigree: Allen Ginsberg was my father’s cousin, though I met him only once, in 1967, over a pastrami sandwich.
Married, two sons, a filmmaker and a boat builder.
The Official Bio.
Joan Leegant is the author of WHEREVER YOU GO, and AN HOUR IN PARADISE, which won the Winship PEN/New England Book Award and the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was a Selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Formerly an attorney, she taught at Harvard University for eight years. Since 2007, she has lived half the year in Tel Aviv where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University and lectures for the U.S. State Department. When not in Israel she lives in Newton, Massachusetts. For more about Joan Leegant and her work, visit: www.joanleegant.com.
Click here for interviews and some short essays about writing and the writing life.
