Joan Cannon, novelist, and senior woman

When it comes to helping newbies and wannabes, no one is better than Glenda. She has introduced me to the most important contacts I have--out of pure friendliness and generosity. Thank you, Glenda, always!      ...Joan Cannon, author  https://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/author/joan-cannon/

Joan Cannon was an author who was widowed and lived alone in western North Carolina, but not in the NCWN-West region. She was in her late sixties or seventies when she emailed me many years ago. She wanted to be a member of Netwest, but she did not live in our region. She did not receive our emails, but she followed us on our blog at https://netwestwriters.blogspot.com/. She sent me one of her novels, and it was a good story. Michelle Keller read it and enjoyed it. Joan said her publisher did not do anything to help her sell books, and she wanted my advice.

Well, the first thing I realized was that she had no platform on which to promote her books. 
And as an older woman, she faced ageism, which was flagrant in the literary world at the time. Also, as an older person, she didn't feel safe traveling alone to distant venues to read, meet others interested in writing, or attend groups that met at night. If you are an older person who fits this description, you understand Joan's problems.

I researched places where an older writer, a good writer, might get published. I researched https://www.Seniorwomen.com and found that they invite older women to submit to their online publication.  I knew Joan would be perfect for them. I suggested she read the work there and see if she might want to submit an article or an opinion. It was not long before she emailed me to say she had been published on the Senior Women site. Just as I thought, her work was perfect for the online magazine.

The next time I heard from Joan, she had been asked to be a regular writer for Seniorwomen.com. If you are a retired woman or a woman of any age, you will find interesting information and thoughts by women you can relate to.

For a number of years, I read Senior Women and always enjoyed Joan Cannon's writing.  Finally, Joan's health began to fail, and she could no longer manage to live in her house all alone. She moved back up north to be near her children. She said it was a hard decision and she didn't want to leave North 
Carolina, but she knew she must go. 

It seems the most stressful experiences happen in our senior adult years. We lose our partner, and then we must move from a house steeped in memories of those later years when we had time to really talk, to know each other better, to share deep feelings we had held inside. It seems that we begin to prepare for death when our beloved is gone. Our own health suffers from the loss, grief, and heartache. We must move to some place where we can be best cared for, whether we want to go or not. Stress hangs over our every minute. Age becomes something we think about more often, and illnesses, aches, and pains that won't go away fuel our nightmares. 

Joan only wrote to me a few times after moving up north. But one day, I realized it had been a long time since I heard from her. I emailed Joan, and her daughter answered. Joan had died.

I think of her often. Tonight, I decided to see if any of her writing was still on www.seniorwomen.com, and I was so very happy to see that she is still listed as an author and that her essays and articles are available on the website. I am not sure if the website is still active, but I enjoyed reading that Joan Cannon, my friend whom I have never met in person, still has her writing on the site for anyone who visits and clicks on her name.

Saying Goodbye to a friend I never met, but who inspired me

I am saddened over the  passing of a dear friend I  never met in person. Joan Cannon and I have been friends since 2007 when I became Program Coordinator for Netwest (NCWN-West) the first time. In the fall of that year, I attended the North Carolina Writers' Network Fall Conference. At that conference, I was fortunate to hear three bloggers tell about how they created free blogs through Blogger.com and how those blog sites changed their writing lives.

I came home and created www.netwestwriters.blogspot.com so that our mountain writers could connect to each other online and to the world beyond the mountains.

Joan  L. Cannon, author who inspired me

Joan Cannon, a writer who lived in Morganton, NC saw that blog and wrote to me. She wanted to  know if  she lived in the region of NCWN-West. I hated to tell her she did not.
She was a member of NCWN, but was looking for writers near her. She had written a book and, being older and living in a retirement area, she had difficulty finding and  meeting other writers. In other words, she was looking for connections.

I put Joan on my email list and she received most of the information I sent to our local members. She subscribed to our blog and read it regularly. She left comments and felt she knew our members from reading about them online.

I bought her novel, Settling, and shared it with my friends. We agreed Joan was a very good writer. I had found a website edited and written by writers of a  certain age. The site is www.SeniorWomen.com The women who founded this site deliberately set it up for older women writers and women readers. They publish thoughtful and insightful articles on many subjects and the writing is top-notch.

I suggested to Joan Cannon that she contact the editors and apply for a  job writing for them. They were delighted to have her intelligent well-written essays. Soon the woman who felt isolated in Morganton, NC was being read around the world. She never stopped thanking me for recommending she contact them.


I wrote to the editors of Senior Women:

Dear Editor,
I really enjoyed Joan Cannon's article, Relativity. I am pleased because I sent the Senior Women site to Joan and now she is here. Great. Your site is just the best and the writing you present is outstanding. The writers and the writing is more relevant to me than anything I read — print or online.

Thank you so much for having this site for older women. Here we are not ever invisible.
Glenda in North Carolina

When my husband, Barry, died in 2009, I resigned my job as PC for NCWN-West, but continued administering the blog. I also continued my friendship with Joan.  We often said we wished we could meet one day, but we never did. Joan lost her husband after a long marriage and she grieved as I did. She wrote a touching and lovely book of poetry, My Mind  is Made of Crumbs, that I treasure.

We both became active on Facebook and instead of emails, we kept up with each other there. On April 10, 2008, Joan began her blog, Hilltop Notes. Overtime, some of  our Netwest writers and others left comments. Nancy Simpson and Shirley Uphouse visited Hilltop Notes. Maureen Ryan Griffin and Tipper Pressley also commented as Joan reached out with questions about publishing as she approached eighty years of age.

I don't think blogging was her favorite thing to do, but I found her posts interesting. She was honest and open and that is important for a blogger. She could not believe that anyone read her posts so she felt it was a futile effort, but I assured her that when she submitted her short stories or manuscripts, editors googled her name and found she had an online presence.

On her author page on Amazon.com we can go to Joan's blog post after five years of absence. She had her problems with technology and gave up blogging for a long time. However, she did not give up writing. We can also see her books on her author page and order them from Amazon. I was inspired by Joan and admired her determination to write and publish her work when most people her age would likely not have the energy to  persevere.

After a few years, Joan let us know that she would be moving away from North Carolina where she had lived for more than a decade. She moved to Connecticut to  be close to  her family. Although we never met person to person, Joan and I were friends who knew each other in ways some friends I see often don't know me.  Her granddaughter Taylor told me that Joan was diagnosed with cancer.

This is what Taylor wrote: My grandmother passed away peacefully on October 11, 2017. As you may already know, she had been suffering from cancer and enduring chemo for about a year, but when the treatments began making her ill and generally miserable, she opted to stop them. She stopped eating and drinking at the beginning of October and was moved into the hospice ward at Noble Horizons in Salisbury, CT. I came home to Connecticut to see her just days before she passed, and she seemed relatively comfortable and quite at peace with her situation. It was such a gift to be able to say goodbye to her.

I am not surprised to learn that Joan decided what she wanted for her end of life. She chose to stop chemo and she chose to die with dignity. Good for her.

The following is from the Senior Women website:

Joan L. Cannon liked to use her middle initial because so few of her maiden namesakes are left anywhere (Huguenot LaPrades). She was retired teacher, retail manager and author of three novels in paperback, Settling and Maiden Run, a collection of short stories called Peripheral Vision and her latest, a collection of poetry, My Mind Is Made of Crumbs, all available from Amazon and on order from independent booksellers.

Joan's most recent novel is Second Growth and can be purchased through Amazon. From childhood, there have been toss-ups for her avocations among reading, riding horses, painting, local flora and fauna and writing.
Editor's note: We were gifted by Joan's vibrant, inspired, writing for the website and plan to revisit her essays often.

Joan Cannon tells it like it is

I like the latest post by Joan Cannon, http://hilltopnotes.blogspot.com/
Check out her blog and leave a comment. This savvy lady writes some great posts.

Do we have too many people writing today? Has published writing been watered down by all the online places that take anything sent to them?
What is your opinion?