For more information on my work, go to Here is the list of writers who have received a ‘magic bean’ from Joyce. But I know if people will stay with me for as long as it takes, I can get them there. The process, when done right, takes a long time and involves a lot of rejection and encouragement. Mostly, I know my job is what it was originally: to stay with the writers and encourage them. With every student I get published, I learn a new lesson about the process, and the power of our group grows. I work with students in a variety of ways, teaching, hand-holding, advising. My groups have changed and evolved from in-person to online. As long as people want to work to earn them, I will keep giving them out. I’ve since passed the fifty mark and now I have no limits on how many magic beans I will give out. We now know that if anyone goes to Central American, they have to pick up some magic beans. Then we had to wait for someone else to go to Costa Rica and get another twenty. We used up two seedpods for the first twenty magic bean ceremonies. It’s like passing the baton of good luck. The bean recipient chooses another student who is very deserving to shake the rattle at their ceremony. Because of my personal shamanic leanings, we added a rattle to the ceremony, which evolved into a sort of bridal bouquet. That year we had a mass ceremony for the seven students already published. One of the students in the class, Sherri Winston, christened them ‘magic beans’. She planned to use the pods for an art project but when she broke one open, there were eleven perfect little seeds inside, brown with a black dot in the center. One of the students had gone to Costa Rica and brought back some lovely seed pods from the Guanacaste tree. I realized, we needed some kind of trophy or award for these people because happily, our group had found a real formula for success. By 1997, two more students in the class secured publishing contracts and by 1998, there were four more. Her book was non fiction, a memoir about her life as a game show contestant and she went on to be a successful writer of cozy mysteries under the pen name Nora Charles. In fact that was my goal: to get one student published in my lifetime.īy 1996, we had our first published student, Noreen Wald. So I thought if we brought together a group of hand chosen, talented, motivated writers and they could act as almost a support group as well as a critique group, we might get someone published. I realized from teaching five- week workshops that writers tended to lose momentum the minute the class was over. In 1994, I decided to start an ongoing writer’s workshop. Why a magic bean? I asked Joyce this very same question. With each success, she gives the author a ‘magic bean’.
To date she has been instrumental in helping over fifty writers, including me, polish their manuscripts to a level that attracted an agent or publisher.
Joyce has the reputation of helping writers become published. It’s about real life and how magical things can happen with perseverance, dedication and the help of a person named Joyce Sweeney. Actually, this has nothing to do Jack And The Beanstalk or with any kind of fairy tale.
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