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Carolyn Jourdan Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Carolyn Jourdan

Carolyn Jourdan

How to pronounce Carolyn Jourdan: CARE-ol-lin jour-din (as in journey)

Carolyn Jourdan Biography

Carolyn Jourdan is a former U.S. Senate Counsel to the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on Governmental Affairs (now Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs). She has degrees from the University of Tennessee in Biomedical Engineering and Law. She lives on the family farm in East Knox County, Tennessee, and has seven stray animals (four dogs and three cats). Heart In The Right Place takes place over the course of a year in the early 1990s when her life changed dramatically when her mother, Elise Jourdan, had a heart attack and had to be hospitalized, and Carolyn returned to East Tennessee to help her father, Dr Paul Jourdan, in his Strawberry Plains medical practice.

According to theKnoxville News Sentinel, Jourdan wrote Heart In The Right Place as a gift for her dad. As children, Carolyn and her brother David spent a lot of time in their father's office but it took coming home as an adult for her to realize the choice her father had made in serving the rural community of Strawberry Plains. DrPaul was a true general practitioner, whatever the injury or illness he dealt with it himself, and often for free and, being the only doctor for miles around, he was also on call day and night.

"I got the idea to do public service from Momma and Daddy, but I thought they did it their way, and I was going to do it a lot bigger. So I went to Washington ... You get to dress real good, eat real good and live real good, but you don't actually see any people. It's public service from 500 miles away. The thing about Washington is you think you're a public servant, but you're not sure. But here, you know that you did something. There's a reward because there is an actual human being there. In the end, that's what I was most proud of doing."

Carolyn was prompted to begin collecting the funny stories about patients she'd heard all her life after reading All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot in 1972. She says, "I laughed and laughed until I was sick. And I thought, 'This is like Daddy's office except we have people instead of animals.' And I wished so bad that I could write something like that one day that could make other people laugh like I did."

When she began working with her father she started to jot down stories on the back of napkins in her lunch breaks.

The medical office closed in 2001 after 40 years of service to the Strawberry Plains area. Carolyn's mother, Elise, now spends much of her time working on genealogy projects and has written more than 30 books about Colonial American families. Paul still sees occasional patients, mostly the menagerie of animals on the Jourdans' East Knox County farm.

Carolyn now works as a writer and webmaster for the Great Smoky Mountains Association, a nonprofit education and publications partner of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. She chose to stay in East Tennessee to be with her parents and because she felt her "glitzy" life in Washington, D.C., didn't fit her anymore.

Herresume also lists her as the Founder and Director of the Nuclear Waste Documentary Project, a nonprofit scientific organization that produces educational materials on nuclear waste issues for public television, museums, and schools.

Carolyn Jourdan's website

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Interview

Carolyn Jourdan discusses her first book, Heart in the Right Place, in which she vividly portrays the people of the Smokey Mountains who her father served as doctor for many decades. She also discusses Hollywood's interest in creating a series based on the book and her current writing projects.

What inspired you to tell your story?

I love my little community - the culture and the dialect - and I wanted to preserve a picture of what Smoky Mountain culture was like before it was overrun by new people moving to the area and by the effect of the increasingly pervasive presence of national media in our lives. I also wanted to preserve a picture of what family medicine was like at its best - before the business people got in charge of health care and when the doctor not only knew his patient but also knew four generations of the patient's family and all his cousins too.


You portray people and events so vividly. How were you able to accomplish this?

I like to jot down things I hear people say, just a remark or a snippet of dialogue. That's what truly interests me, the way real people talk. Most of the book originated on fast food drive-thru napkins and Post-its where I'd make notes to myself of things I'd heard. I used to be ashamed of that, that I didn't write by sitting at a desk and having deep thoughts but was inspired by listening to anybody and everybody around me talking about the most mundane aspects of their lives. Then recently I learned that most of the great country music ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Carolyn Jourdan at BookBrowse
Heart in the Right Place jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Carolyn Jourdan but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Rick Bragg

    Rick Bragg

    Rick Bragg (b. 1959) is the author of seven books, including the best-selling Ava's Man and All Over but the Shoutin'. He is also a regular contributor to Garden & Gun Magazine. He lives in Alabama. (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Heart in the Right Place

    Try:
    Ava's Man
    by Rick Bragg

  • Linda Scott DeRosier

    Linda Scott DeRosier

    Linda Scott DeRosier has published two memoirs of her life growing up in Appalachia, Creeker and Songs of Life and Grace. She received the Appalachian Writers Association Awared for non-ficition and the Thomas D. Clark Award... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Heart in the Right Place

    Try:
    Creeker
    by Linda Scott DeRosier

We recommend 5 similar authors

View all 5 Read-Alikes

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