One Writer's Life -- Barbara Mountjoy

Since my early childhood,I’ve written my way through life.

Writing was one of the few constants in my life, since my parents divorced when I was young, and I spent my younger years with my mother, and then moved in with my father when I was 9. By the time I was 14, he was divorced, and I had the primary emotional burden of raising my two sisters.

The experience was not that of most girls of that era. A single father with three girls was an oddity in the early 1970s, and carrying a large share of family responsibility was something I took for granted. It made me a stronger person, and also pushed me to escape into my fantasy world, creating characters and living a different life.

After college, I got married, worked as a newspaper reporter for awhile, had a family, and ended up divorced myself. I found being a reporter allowed me to shine the light on things that were wrong, but not to really fix them; that was something that would require the power of a legal degree. I tentatively took the entrance exams and did well, applied and was accepted at the University of Miami School of Law, with financial aid, school for my kindergartener and a preschool on campus for my three-year-old. It seemed to be fate.

After law school, I returned to the newspaper as an editor for awhile, but in 1987, opened my own practice, working exclusively in family law. I’d seen the issues from all sides - as a child, a mother, a wife - and I felt a certain empathy with people going through what must be one of the worst times in their life. The practice became one of the greatest missions of my life to help people through what could be a very technical, dry procession of legal paperwork if only their heads and hearts were not involved. In furthering that goal, I have also worked as the Solicitor for a child support collection and enforcement agency, impacting the lives of custodial parents and kids who need help. (Also where I got the nickname, "The Hammer," which follows me to this day.)

Since then I’ve worked with Northwestern Legal Services as an attorney and coordinator of The Blossom Project, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Justice to provide civil legal assistance to victims of domestic violence, and also returned to private practice.

Now I’ve been able to take my first love of writing and combine it with my career’s passion and produce books which I hope will reach out to many people and give them courage to persist and stand up for their rights.

I'm currently celebrating twelve years of marriage to an absent-minded computer geek; together we have nine computers, seven children and a full house in Northwestern Pennsylvania.