Lisa Harvey
Lisa was born in Massachusetts and moved to south Florida when she was seven. She graduated from University of Florida in 2001 with degrees in English and sociology. In 2003, she graduated with a Masters in Social Work from Tulane University. Casting all career ambition aside, she committed to a life of international travel and work outside the scope of her education. In the past ten years, Lisa has had the pleasure of calling Massachusetts, New Orleans, Florida, Venezuela, Kenya, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong home. With each move, she declares that she’ll never move again. At the same time, she maintains a lengthy list of places she’d like to live. She is married to a decidedly tolerant man and is the lucky mother of four-year-old Estelah and six-year-old Dylan. One of these days she’ll go back to being a social worker, but in the meantime she’s going to be as mouthy as possible about her disdain for bad books and her love of the metaphor. Lisa regularly finds herself chewing her paws with frustration at the domestic, stay-at-home life she should be grateful for. Creating Trifecta became necessary when she realized that none of the other mommies at play group wanted to talk about semicolons.
Joules Freiboth
Joules must be from somewhere, but she’s not quite sure where that may be. She’s lived in twelve states (thirteen if you count depression), including Texafornia, New York and now Oregon. She has a psych degree from the New School, which qualified her to do, well, nothing. So obviously she was hired to a position in child welfare where she realized she had better earn her Masters in Social Work at NYU tout de suite and become a therapist. Then she chucked it all for a life of domesticity, minus the picket fence. She has a red-headed tempest of a son and a husband who is sleepier (and sillier) than most. And now she’s trying (at 43) (probably) to figure out what to do when she grows up (which will likely be never). Joules blogs at LucidLotusLife, if you call spouting ridiculous urban speak, answering random survey questions and posting YouTube videos of kickass music blogging.
Joules won two Trifecta challenges early on and has given up the dream of the trifecta of Trifecta wins. But she really, really wants to see you do it.
Assistant Editor:
Laura Alonso
Laura calls most women ‘bird’. Not because she’s being mean, but because she likes you. And men are blokes, because she hails from the UK. She grew up in Hunstanton, a small Victorian seaside town where she spent her youth playing all kinds of sports, camping, writing and reading. She studied English Literature and Language at The University of Liverpool, where she discovered the wonder of grammar, syntax, sociolinguistics and that word choice can causes all sorts of havoc (wars included). She then did a Masters in Literary Linguistics at The University of Birmingham where she learnt just how sexist, linguistically speaking, advertisers were in the 1950’s.
Laura has always had itchy feet and has traveled widely in her 33 years on this planet. Her philosophy on the road is “Do it while you’re there” so she decided to do many cool (and sometimes stupid) things on her travels: bungee-jumping; eating road kill; white water rafting; getting drunk on rice wine with Chinese businessmen; letting a truck (with all her belongings) leave the country while she stood there with just the clothes on her back and her passport; climbing volcanoes and tepuis; playing football in the Amazon against Brazilian women (they are good); riding elephants; falling in love and more besides.
Laura is an English teacher by trade and writes by desire. Her first novel will be finished this year. She has lived and worked in Brazil and Argentina, the latter of which she called home for at least four years. There she fell in love with a gorgeous, smart and kind man, who she is now luckily married to. After two years in London, they recently moved to Luxembourg. Laura has discovered that Luxembourg, while small, is full of surprises. If you’re passing through, stop by. She also likes to run, ski, make soup and read National Geographic in the bath.
Laura is chuffed to bits to be part of the Trifecta team, having discovered Trifecta this summer while she should have been looking for a place to live. Turns out not doing what you’re supposed to has its rewards. Good luck! Suerte!
Social Media Manager:
Emilie
Emilie—who prefers to be known as Draug—is an introverted but extremely welcoming open-minded weirdo. If you had to describe her using three nouns, they would be: reader, writer, and geek, in interchangeable order. She was raised by books, video games, and the geek and otaku cultures, and they continue to support her and her imagination to this day, leading to stories mostly of the fantasy/dark fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres with some general fiction sprinkled here and there. A Pennsylvanian all her life, she broke into writing in sixth grade through poetry. Rhymes about long hair and pretzels gave way to prose by seventh grade where she took it upon herself to fill as many composition notebooks as possible with her stories.
Draug spent a long time polishing her writing skills by publishing fanfiction online. She gained a very loyal following of decent size over the course of nearly ten years until she realized one day that her skills had reached a plateau, and that the only way to grow would be to give up fanfiction and return to the original writing of her youth. While scrounging for writing competitions online, she came across a random retweet in her Twitter feed that introduced her to the Trifecta Writing Challenge. And the rest, as the cliché goes, is history.
Draug would like nothing more than to write something good enough to be published. She writes and types away in her apartment with the company of only her two cats and hermit crab, dreaming of the day when she can afford a house with enough room for a study and a flower garden.
You can find Draug at I Write Stories and Things.
Guest Editors:
Christine Hanolsy
Christine is an on-again, off-again writer who rediscovered her passion for language and the written word just a few years ago, right after Son #2 was born. She rather naively thought that having children would reinvigorate a dormant creative streak. Trifecta has played a large part in keeping her leaning towards the on-again side of writing via her blog Trudging Through Fog. Most weeks she manages to power through, take advantage of small moments of peace, and come up with something that satisfies her. For her, writing is less a catharsis and more a lifting of spirit. She believes that every word should be chosen and placed deliberately, not diluting the inherent passion of the words, but instead refining and focusing them more precisely. In practice this means it usually takes her three days to write 33 words.
Christine is a native New Englander, but spent several years studying abroad (Denmark and Russia). She now lives in Portland, OR with her partner of 18 years, their two small boys, and two young cats. Christine would love to give up her day job to spend all her time writing, but knows she lacks the discipline to make it work. Other than her children, current distractions include books, bicycles, and tabletop RPGs.
Jessie Powell
Jessie Powell has an Aspergian daughter and Obnoxious son, a long suffering husband, and a serious alcohol deficiency. She’s buying her son’s mental health one Lego kit at a time, watching her daughter morph into a tween with true horror, and hoping her dog learns how to herd children before she pulls all her hair out by the roots. Once upon a time, she got some Master’s Degrees, and one of them allows her to teach college English online in between therapy appointments. Her first book Divorce: A Love Story is available from Throwaway Lines on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Her second book The Marriage at the Rue Morgue is forthcoming in hardcover, paperback, and electronic formats from Five Star, an Imprint of Gale, part of Cengage Publishing.