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Hi! We are Joy Marie Dunlap and Jennaya Dunlap, a mother-and-daughter writing team, creating together our popular Roses for Christian Girls magazine for girls ages 8 to 18. Joy Marie (Mama) writes the spiritual focus articles, creates the beginner and intermediate drawing lessons, and shares some of her original poetry in Roses. She also contributes chapters of her novel, Katie's Journey about a young girl going west on a wagon train. |
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Jennaya, now age 16, creates the advanced drawing lessons, and provides our creative card-making workshop, and recipes. She also shares chapters of her novel, Against All Odds, about two Polish girls and their families in Nazi-occupied Poland. Jennaya and Joy Marie take turns writing some of our features such as our craft articles, acrostics, word search and crossword puzzles, Mystery Bible Woman poems, and card-making articles. |
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Jennaya 15 |
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We also take turns writing our chapters about the life of Amy Carmichael and we write the Kara stories together as a mother and daughter team. We really love doing this, because our Kara stories are mainly about a warm, close mother and daughter relationship, as Kara tries hard to learn how to be a good helper to her Mama. Kara doesn't always succeed, and there are many humorous-and sobering-lessons along the way. In a way, we are sharing our relationship through our Kara stories, although they are fiction. I (Joy Marie, Jennaya's Mama) wrote for The Teaching Home magazine for 10 years. Before that, I was involved with children through tutoring, teaching Sunday School, Junior Church and Vacation Bible School, running a girl's Bible club of my own, and being a team leader in the Awana program in the local church. Jennaya was born when I was 28 years old. By the time she was born, I was in a wheelchair. I had 3 boys, and was already home |
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schooling them, though not officially. Babies aren't supposed to know what they are seeing when they are first born, but Jennaya did. She looked steadily into my eyes for the whole first hour after she was born. She spent her first few months in a reclining high |
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chair at the table where I was home schooling her older brothers. When she learned to crawl, we made a play pen for her that had lots of space. We gave her a walker, and she would chase her brothers around the house from 4 months old, calling after them, "Bruh! Bruh!" She later began referring to them as "Brothers." (She has 4 brothers.) |
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By age one-and-a-half, she liked to sit at the little desk we made for her and scribble inside stencils. (She remembers feeling really proud of using two pencils at once.) By that time, I had begun writing |
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Top: Jennaya at one month old watching a butterfly mobile made by Joy Marie Above: Jennaya at 2 months old between two sock dolls made by Joy Marie Below: "Two-Pencil-Jennaya," using stencils at 18 months in a roomy playpen we made for her, using a children's construction toy set. for The Teaching Home magazine. Sometimes when the kids would get too noisy for me to write, I would exclaim, "Quiet! I need to write!" At 2 Jennaya, pencils in hand, would mimic me, declaring, "I need to write. I HAVE to write!" And write she has. She has been writing and drawing from a very early age, and has shown the same drive to draw and write that I had in my girlhood. She has also been a talker since the age of 4 months (when she used half a dozen words meaningfully). Oh, what memories we share of being together through all her girlhood years! She talked and talked. I still remember as if it was yesterday, pulling her wiggly little body into my lap with her soft curly hair under my chin, a little fluffy hairband keeping her hair out of her eyes, going through book after book, with her chattering even faster than I read aloud. Going out was such a big treat to her. She was so full of enthusiasm about so many things, (and still is!) I made her matching dresses and bloomers, which she called "I boomah!" As a hint that maybe we should go to the park, she would declare, "I putting I dock and I doo on! I wanna go out!" In the garden, at age 3, she would tell me all about what she was going to do for me when she was grown. She said she would take me to the park and to the zoo and to see some fireworks, and that she would bring me a chair to sit on to watch the fireworks. She had big plans for us together. At age 11, she began writing for magazines, for other families and for our own, when we started Family Discipleship Magazine, for which I am the editor. She contributed articles on crafts and celebrations, as well as a children's story for each of our first 5 issues of Family Discipleship. Just before she turned 12, she asked me to pray about whether it might be God's will for her to start her own magazine for girls. I immediately felt good about the idea, but my husband and I gave it a few months in prayer. During that time, I sat down at the computer and asked her to list out what kinds of features she wanted in her girls' magazine, and added a few more, and that's how Roses In God's Garden was born! We are still best friends, chatting as much as ever together every day. She is 16 now, old enough and smart enough to be my best woman friend, but still bubbling with enthusiasm over all the little things that make up our lives together. We sing together, read news together, and talk about everything together. It's wonderful for both of us to have someone to talk with every day about things that only another writer would understand. (She is also in a professional writer's forum, as part of our home school.) Our relationship isn't perfect, and as a mother there are still times when I have to correct Jennaya, but we are still each other's very best friend in the whole world, and it would be impossible for us to tell you just how precious it is to be writing and drawing together and creating our magazines together as a mother and daughter team! Order a subscription to Roses for Christian Girls e-zine (12 e-zine issues in color for $15) |
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Joy Marie and Jennaya Dunlap, co-authors of |
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in ministry together |
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Left: Jennaya at age 15 2005 Right: Joy Marie at age 15 (decades ago) |
