My Maiden Voyage Using Zoom with Author Amy Joy

Just ask. That is what I told myself after reading the description of Amy Joy’s new book on Facebook. One of the groups I am signed up for is all about promoting new books from new and unknown authors. Hell, I have advertised my own books in the group.

Does it help? I really don’t know. But I can say I tried. What is advantageous about receiving messages from the group is the ability to contact other writers. For the longest time I didn’t care about other people’s writing, nor did I want to help them. Selfishness and self-seeking behavior flowed thick as blood in my young system.

I was trying, at the time, to have my own writing come out well and good, real and gritty. Reading another’s work frustrated me, but things have changed.

Now, I really, really want to help others in their journey to be the type of writer they might desire to be. There is enough negative, unnecessary words spilt-out, shouted out, written down, and televised.

Contacting Amy Joy about interviewing her on her new book, Him, Me, and V, published January 11th of this year, before I even read the book, was not a compulsive act. To the contrary, I had been searching for a good author – an author writing about an important subject.

With Ms. Joy, I found said subject.

After swapping some emails, the two of us agreed to speak, at 10 a.m., Feb. 1 in a Zoom meeting.

I was nervous. My notebook had some questions written in it, however, this article – this column – is not so much an interview piece now, is it?

This is a writer, talking to another writer, about a book…a life and vocation.

What a good way to spend a morning.

Tara, my wife, helped me set up the Zoom account. Terrible technology. It is horrible, yet understandably, an essential to living the modern life. And I am no good with it. I have had cell phones tossed out of car windows to smash on the highway and dropped in restaurant deep fryers. I shot a laptop with a 12 gauge shotgun, and thrown another one into a country pond.

No. Me and technology, like gas and a fire extinguisher, do not fare well together. However, I cannot deny technology has been good to me. This meeting, for example, proves it.

9:59 a.m. came. My nerves were strung as a bow string from one end to another from a long body of thoughts.

WILL I ASK THE QUESTIONS NEEDED TO BE ASKED?

WILL WE GET ALONG?

WHAT ARE THE CHANCES I WILL SOMEHOW FUCK UP THE WHOLE MEETING PROCESS BY NOT KNOWING HOW TO WORK THE COMPUTER CORRECTLY?

As soon as Ms. Joy’s face was on the screen, I felt fine. There was an ease and welcoming glow – a glow that even came through a computer screen. A glow and positive cadence making me feel comfortable.

This wonderful woman – a descendant of Mr. Daniel Boone himself – seemed happy to speak with me, confessing she enjoyed doing interviews.

As a public speaker on human trafficking and damage and cruelty it inflicts, I ask her how she felt about public speaking. “I performed for crowds in plays and church cantatas,” she said.

It was in her stars – in her adventure against the horrors of human trafficking – she relit her own personal nightmares and demons.

Not long after her speeches, public engagements, as well as starting a nonprofit organization, organizing fundraisers, constructing presentations, her memories, nightmares, and visions she did not understand began to plague her daily life.

What is she to do? Like the grounded, thoughtful woman that she is, she contacted a therapist.

At first, V, her therapist, had a full caseload. Ms. Amy Joy kept her feet grounded. She liked the look of V. Ms. Joy had a feeling about her which proved accurate. She would not go to anyone else. This made me smile. As I read those words on the page, it was like looking in a mirror at myself. It was V, or no therapy at all. No compromises. MY WAY, or no way.

God bless it, V found an opening in her schedule. Soon, Ms. Joy was going to therapy regularly.

Hence, a book was born from the work V and Amy Joy were doing. Starting with a daily journal, Joy began a journey into her past, her family, her nightmares. And there were nightmares. Beatings. Terrible things you can imagine, not wanting to imagine them… just as Ms. Joy did, burying and hiding the terror so deep she spent years not remembering them.

She remembers them now.

In speaking with her, I was amazed. After reading the horrendous, yet wonderful book, her healing and demeanor was so beautiful.

I learned, once again, that, as Arthur Rimbaud once wrote: “The only unbearable thing is that nothing is unbearable.”

As a species, we endure. We endure enough and create something through the tragedies. That is history and poetry and painting and constructing all things from both darknesses, as well as the flashes of glowing light.