Searching for the House of Joy

Turning fifty takes Dorie Clark into personal territory she hadn't anticipated. That territory includes therapy, accidentally quitting her job, and taking a journey with completely unexpected results.

As Dorie Clark turns fifty she is struck by the realization that life is a once-around-the-block affair, and she has a lot of unresolved situations to confront. A lifelong struggle to understand a seemingly unknowable mother, an uncertainty about her effectiveness as a mother, her general unhappiness about her somewhat haphazard career - and an understanding that her second marriage, while happy, could somehow be in jeopardy - propel Dorie into therapy for the first time in her life. As a series of unfortunate events unfold and she struggles to meet the challenges, she also comes to realize she has the capacity to make more of her life, to connect to the people in her life in a more positive way, and to find her own "house of joy".

Ruth Calia Stives is a native of New Jersey, who now resides in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania. She studied communications , photography, and journalism in college, graduating with a degree in media studies. Her "career" has been anything but a straight path, zig-zagging from secretarial duties to customer service representation, to medical transcription in a hospital pathology lab, to newspaper staff writing. Along the way she also devoted a portion of her life to being a stay-at-home mom to a now-adult son. Creative writing has always been the continuous thread ; a compulsion to describe people and events in ways that spark the imagination. All the "what if"s and "just suppose"s provide endless ideas for fictional exploration. And, whatever the prevailing mood, writing is a grounding force, a way to keep the mind in forward motion and to communicate ideas to the world.