|
Place your ad here for only $15.00! Reach thousands of writers and visitors! CLICK HERE
|
|
|
Joelie Key-Tissot grew up as the child of a migrant working single mother of two. Home schooled (by correspondance) she graduated at 16 and went straight to college. However, the vices of "sex, drugs and rock-n-roll" were too much a temptation--she dropped out after a year. She spent the next few years traveling from one live-in boyfriend to the next, drugs and alcohol still more powerful than any urge to slow down.
When she finally figured it was time to straigten up, she found out she was pregnant--knowledge that threw her back into the transient life she thought she had put forever behind her. After months of torturous consideration, she decided to put the child up for adoption at birth.
Four weeks after the birth, she returned to college (the same one). For a few years, things seemed to be calming down. However, the old life was too much a part of her to deny. She quit school and began a new path of self-destruction.
Luckily, this episode was short-lived. Less than two years later, she re-enrolled in college (a new one for a change of scenery) and though her old life called to her (and at times, she listened) within a year, she had finally sworn off hating herself.
A year later, she went to France to fulfill her life-long dream. But France wasn't the Neverland she had always imagined. Old habits do die hard... When the despondancy was too much to bear, she found herself staring out over the Mediterranean, contemplating suicide (for not the first time, but definitely the most serious). Putting the option in her back pocket, she instead took all her money and traveled around France, not letting dangerous situations (and dangerous people) deter her from her search for a French identity--earned through finally learning the language fluently.
She found a job teaching English and met a French man who professed his undying love. She lived with him for a year but the constant disappointment of France and the call of her own country brought her to the point of agoraphobia. She left France for the States in order to finish her degree.
During that last year, a mentor encouraged her to try grad school. Her fiance back in France agreed to follow her as she followed that new dream. They married a few weeks after her undergrad commencement and moved to the Northeast.
Again, the dream was not what it had promised. However, the disappointment she felt was soon replaced by a new love...a baby.
Her husband got a job in the Gulf Costal South. Since the job promised to cover their expenses, she finally decided to write down her experiences as she had always dreamed.
She finished her first book, a memoir of that first year in France, in November 2005, the revision of which should be finished this summer (2006).
She also succeeded at writing a 50,000-word novel (a Young Adult novel set in France) in November 2005 as a part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).
Currently, she is writing advertorials for a local magazine, working part time as a library assistant, attending classes on-line for a Master's in Library Science and has recently had another baby.
|
|
|
MY FAVORITE LINKS:
|
|
MY RESIDENCE INFO:
City: Missouri City
State/Country: Texas
|
|
