Jourdan, Carolyn 1955–

PERSONAL:

Born 1955; daughter of Paul (a physician) and Elise Jourdan. Education: University of Tennessee, B.S., J.D.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Knoxville, TN. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, memoirist, attorney, and webmaster. Worked as U.S. Senate Counsel to the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on Governmental Affairs (now Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs). Great Smoky Mountains Association (a nonprofit educational and publications organization with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park), writer and webmaster; Nuclear Waste Documentary Project (a nonprofit educational organization), founder and director.

WRITINGS:

Heart in the Right Place (memoir), Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and memoirist Carolyn Jourdan is an attorney with degrees in biomedical engineering and law from the University of Tennessee. She is involved in educational and publications organizations for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the Nuclear Waste Documentary Project, two nonprofit organizations that produce educational materials on their respective subjects. Jourdan served as U.S. Senate Counsel to the Committee on Environment and Public Works and the Committee on Governmental Affairs (now Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs). After several years in the high-power life of Washington, DC, Jourdan found herself back in rural Tennessee, where she had grown up. Her mother, Elise, had suffered a heart attack and was no longer able to assist her father, Paul, in his rural medical practice in the small town of Strawberry Plains. Intending to come back only for a few days to help her father, Jourdan soon discovered a deep dedication to the rural community in which she lived, and where her father served as the only doctor for miles around. In her debut memoir, Heart in the Right Place Jourdan tells the story of her life in Washington, the choices she made in leaving a position of money and power, and the intense satisfaction she has experienced after returning to a small, close-knit community where her keen sense of public service is reflected in the faces of each individual she helps care for.

Jourdan originally chose to pursue law and a career in Washington as an adjunct to her parents' own tangible pursuit of public service. Jourdan, however, planned to do things bigger and more broadly than her parents, she told a biographer on BookBrowse.com. In her government career, she was able to pursue her goals and ideals, but the public service she was involved in seemed empty and distant. In Washington, ‘you don't actually see any people. It's public service from 500 miles away,’ she told the BookBrowse.com biographer. ‘The thing about Washington is you think you're a public servant, but you're not sure. But here, you know that you did something. There's a reward because there is an actual human being there."

Her desire to bring her public service down to a personal level found immediate expression in her father's practice. In his seventies, Paul Jourdan was extremely busy providing medical care to the farmers, alcoholics, and backcountry residents of Strawberry Plains. Jourdan herself tried to keep her Washington job going via phone even as she spent her time greeting patients, keeping medical records, and doing her best to keep the medical office and damaged patients together. Soon, however, she realized that she could not maintain her contact with Washington and still work effectively in her father's office. She let her Senate job go and dedicated herself to the medical practice, and in the process began to see her former friends and neighbors, and the vanishing rural lifestyle, in a newly sympathetic, but dignified light.

"Jourdan's dispatches from the reception desk make for a stirring, beautiful memoir that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking, and ultimately a triumph,’ commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. TBO.com critic Andrea Brunais called the book ‘a wondrous glimpse of a dying mountain culture and the dying art of the family practitioner-surgeon.’ Carol Haggas, writing in Boooklist, concluded that Jourdan ‘offers a zestfully compassionate portrait of a poor community rich in the ways of true humanity."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Heart in the Right Place (memoir), Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC), 2007.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 15, 2007, Carol Haggas, review of Heart in the Right Place, p. 19.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2007, review of Heart in the Right Place.

Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2007, review of Heart in the Right Place, p. 43.

Tennessee Bar Journal, August, 2007, Andree Sophia Blumstein, review of Heart in the Right Place, p. 23.

ONLINE

BookBrowse.com,http://www.bookbrowse.com/ (November 5, 2007), biography of Carolyn Jourdan.

Carolyn Jourdan Home Page,http://www.carolynjourdan.com (November 5, 2007).

TBO.com,http://www.tbo.com/ (August 12, 2007), Andrea Brunais, ‘Right Place for Her Heart Is at Home in Tennessee,’ review of Heart in the Right Place.