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Monty Joynes, A Brief Literary Biography

Monty Joynes began his literary career with George Garrett at the University of Virginia where he met and drank coffee with William Faulkner and other significant literary personalities. On to Europe after graduation, Monty wrote and directed a television feature film for KRW, a Swedish production company. While in basic training as a draftee in the U. S. Army during the Vietnam War era, he was advised that the film had won a film festival award. 

In the late 1960s Monty was writing short fiction and wrote and directed his second film, The Graz Experience, shot in Austria. By 1970 he had founded Metro Hampton Roads Magazine. Within four years the slick magazine was in color and averaging over 100 pages a month. From Metro, Monty went to Holiday Magazine, the original national travel magazine published by The Curtis Publishing Company. By that time he had authored over 200 magazine features for publication.

In the late 1970s Monty founded the Insiders’ Guide travel series and co-authored and edited its first five titles. His Insiders’ Guide to New Orleans became a best seller, and Monty moved to New Orleans to become the city’s restaurant critic and a part-time radio talk show host. By 1982 he had completed three novels.

In 1985 Monty and wife Pat moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina with the objective that Monty would focus on his literary career. He did find time, however, to become the founding president of the Blowing Rock Stage Company, an Equity summer-stock theater that is now into its 22nd successful season. 

In 1995 Monty found a publisher for Naked Into the Night, a novel that appeared in 1997. Encouraged to write sequels, he produced Lost in Las Vegas (1998), Save the Good Seed (1999), and Dead Water Rites (2000). Critics acknowledged that he was one of the most important authors in a new literary genre—Visionary Fiction—with the publication of these four novels  in the Booker Series.

Monty works full time as a literary artist, and he completed his 18th novel in 2004 just prior to going on the set of The Celestine Prophecy to write a making-of-the-movie book with best-selling author James Redfield. 

With the encouragement of his new friends in the movie business, Monty has written screenplay adaptations for Naked Into the Night, Lost in Las Vegas, and Grid,  a yet-to-be published novel. Another Joynes novel, Pass In Review, has been adapted for film by screenwriter Paul Brody.

In 2005 Monty wrote War Journal  for film producer Terry Collis. War Journal is an adaptation of the non-fiction book, The War Journal of Major Damon “Rocky” Gause, the firsthand account of one of the greatest escapes of World War II.

In 2005 Monty also began a long two-subject biography—Journey For The One: The Biography of Jeanne White Eagle and John Pehrson.  The book documents the couple’s worldwide peace mission to end separation between conflicting cultures.

Monty went on the set of the film Conversations with God  in November, 2005 to write and photo edit his second making-of-the-movie book. The Conversations with God series by Neale Donald Walsch was a huge best seller.  The book was published in 2006.

In 2007 composer and concert pianist Edmund Barton Bullock, an American who has lived mostly in France since 1978, contacted Monty as someone who appreciated his literature. Their friendship resulted in a collaboration to write and compose a classical music oratorio. Monty completed the libretto for the oratorio The Awakening of Humanity in 2007.

Meanwhile, Monty was completing Journey For The One, which was then published in September 2008. He also completed his seventh feature-length screenplay and consulted on script development on two other film projects.

In the summer of 2007, Monty began painting again in a home studio. In the mid 1960s, Monty was identified with the Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationist art movement and enjoyed professional success as a young artist. Now, forty years after his last one-man show, he has produced over sixty works of art in two years. A catalog of his new work was completed in the fall of 2008 and pieces then began to be offered for sale.

As the book marketplace experienced an e-book revolution, Monty reviewed his novel inventory and published two orphaned novels, GRID and FLESH, as Amazon Kindle books in 2011. In support of the movement to electronic publishing, Monty also developed a BLOG  to showcase his books and his experiences as a career writer. Additional novels are scheduled for future e-book publication, and a series of promotional videos are going into production. Monty completed his 21st novel, Portrait of the Artist's Ghost, in March 2012.

Monty works every day in one creative medium or the other.  He moves easily from his writing table to the art studio.  And if his oratorio gets commissioned, he dreams about writing the libretto for an opera!