Litz, Joyce 1928-

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Litz, Joyce 1928-

PERSONAL:

Born May 9, 1928, in Lewistown, MT; daughter of Richard E. (a small business owner) and Vallie (a homemaker) Hazen; married Leon E. Litz, December 27, 1947 (divorced, 1972); children: Cheryl Litz Hartman, Sandra, Craig. Ethnicity: "Anglo." Education: George Mason University, B.A., 1975. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Travel, history.

ADDRESSES:

Home and office—Albuquerque, NM. E-mail—joycelitz@comcast.net.

CAREER:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, Washington, DC, staff member, 1976-90, political action coordinator, 1990-95.

MEMBER:

Women Writing the West, Southwest Writers.

WRITINGS:

The Montana Frontier: One Woman's West (biography), University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 2004.

Contributor to the annual Old Farmer's Almanac, 2005. Contributor to periodicals, including Writer and Antique Week.

SIDELIGHTS:

Joyce Litz told CA: "I lived with my grandmother, the subject of my biography. She read and wrote all the time; thus, I grew up in a household where reading was recreation. When she died, I inherited all her writings such as diaries, articles, and unpublished fiction. In these I saw the story of a woman that needed to be told, so I wrote it. I was trying to tell the truth about a Victorian marriage, a nineteenth-century woman's frustrations and ways of dealing with life's adversities. Now, writing is a way to ‘speak my mind.’ If it gets published, so much the better. Then maybe I'm speaking a truth that someone else can use.

"I like to read fiction and biography: Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Atwood, David McCullough's Truman, and, especially, Nancy Milford's Zelda."