Hi.  My name is Josette Belvedere.  Welcome to Josette-Stories.site.  This is my fiction portfolio and below is my true story:

I have always been interested in story-telling and writing — not in some secret diary or journal but as a way of communicating with others.  Long ago, as a teenage, high-school drop out, recently released from a juvenile detention facility, I told a state employment aptitude counselor I wanted to be a writer.  “That’s an unrealistic goal,” he said.  “You are better suited to being a file clerk or possibly, if you can bring your speed up, a typist.”

That was then.  Years later, after working my way through Loyola University and later Northwestern University Law School, teaching ballroom and disco dance classes,  I still had that interest in writing.  In my spare time,  I took fiction classes, attended workshops and spent weekends at writer’s conferences.   But, as an attorney litigating in and around Chicago courtrooms, my professional writing was mostly limited to legal documents and my story telling mainly consisted of presenting cases to jury in story form. Fortuitously, my legal career did provide inspiration for my ongoing desire to write.  Legal cases, like stories, encourage you to take a point of view and advance it in a persuasive manner.  Trials are like theatrical productions — written, cast, produced, directed (and sometimes even financed) by opposing counsel. Lawyers also are privileged to observe the very best and worst of human nature along with everything in between and there’s no shortage of dramatic scenarios and intense dialogue.   Perhaps all this explains why lawyers like Scott Turow, Lisa Scottoline & John Grisham, to name just a few, write fiction.

When I began experimenting more seriously with writing fiction, I was told: “Write what you know.”  So I looked back at my life to see what  I “knew” that I should write about.   I thought of my childhood spent starving is a series of cold-water flats sandwiched between wealthy enclaves such as Chicago’s “Gold Coast” and “Mag-Mile” and infamous as Clark & Division and Cabrini Green Housing Projects where my best friend lived and where I mostly hung out.    Surrounded by such economic and cultural disparity,  I came to know many things about life during my early years.  Those lessons stuck with me thru later life and still influence my thinking, today.  Love, marriage, motherhood, divorce all added to my arsenal  of life learning,  which continues to accrue even as I write this and will so long as I am alive.  In short, having lived, I have come to “know” life, as it exists or could exist in my mind and imagination.  So this is what I write about in my stories.

In addition to writing,   I have expressed my love of fiction and story-telling by teaching creative writing classes at Chicago-area colleges.  Recently, I participated in “Write Across Chicago,” a city-wide program aimed at encouraging  everyone from children to seniors, to express themselves through written words.    As chair of Chicago Bar Association’s Creative Writing Committee, I am proud to have also played a part in bringing about our beautiful, creative, January 2019 issue of the “CBA Record” featuring winning submissions to CBA’s recent “Flash Fiction Writing Contest.”   January 2019 CBA Record 

Now it is time for me to put myself “out there.” Ergo: Josette-stories.site.    Right now, only one full 1st draft manuscript  has been uploaded here:  “Disengaging” — a collection of short stories about love, marriage, divorce, romance, family, all things human-relationship-related and beyond.

I sincerely hope they will be enjoyed.