Episode 120 Joe Van Rhyn

Joe Van Rhyn is a writer, who currently has four books available on Amazon.com with another due out in mid-2020. Joe was born and grew up in Wisconsin. In high school and college, he did a lot of theatre carrying the leads in over a dozen plays and musicals, including the Prince in Cinderella, Pish Tosh in The Mikado, and the villain, Cassius Carstairs in An Old-fashioned Melodrama. Joe always thought that he would one day write a Broadway play. It seemed business and raising children always took priority. The play never got written but he’s been happily married for 59 years, has three children, six grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Joe has had a successful business career. He’s a commercial artist, owned a silk-screening company in Wisconsin and established an advertising specialty distributorship when he moved to Las Vegas in 1978. Joe retired in 2014 at the spry age of 74 with the idea of writing “a book.” Without thinking too much of what that might entail, or unsure if he could actually sit down and do it, Joe embarked on this life-changing journey. Writing and producing these four books have been the most satisfying thing Joe’s ever accomplished in his life.  He’s become an author and has joined the ranks of that select group. Joe doesn’t profess to be in the same league as the greats, like Hemingway or Austin, but the thirst and struggle to write a compelling story is the same. When he set out to write that first book, Joe had two things in mind. It had to be set in a small Wisconsin resort town like the one where he grew up, and the characters would be similar to, or composites of, actual people he grew up with. Joe thought if he could capture that small-town flavour, he’d have a book people would enjoy reading. To learn more about Joe Van Rhyn and his work, please visit joevanrhyn.com.