Lillie Author Joseph S. Bonsall
Interviewer: First of all, I want you to know that I love G.I. Joe and Lillie. It is a wonderful, and I must say, a very timely piece of work.
Joseph: Thank you so much. That means a lot to me.
Interviewer: I would like to start our interview by asking how you ever went from singing to writing?
Joseph: Well, I have never really stopped singing. As you know The Oak Ridge Boys are still maintaining a great career playing over 160 dates a year and making new music constantly. I haven't given up my day job by a long shot, however, my writing career has grown constantly over the last several years and I am very thankful for that. Writing not only provides an excellent diversion from my music career, but I love the creative process. A thought, an idea, a story, that didn’t exist yesterday is now down on paper.
Interviewer: When do you find the time to write with a schedule like that?
Joseph: You would be amazed at the down time on the road. Hotel rooms, plane flights, backstage, long tour bus rides. I wrote all of G.I. Joe and Lillie, while on the road touring with the Oaks. All it takes is few hours of down time, a laptop computer and a desire to work at it.
Interviewer: Did you always want to be a writer?
Joseph: Not really. It is something that has just grown in me over the years. As a kid, I wanted to sing. The writing actually started years ago when a country music magazine asked me to write a diary about life on the road with the Oaks.
That was in 1988. The only thing that I had written before was a published piece about growing up in Philadelphia and being a Philadelphia Phillies fan. I wrote that right after they won the World Series in 1980.
Anyhow, I wrote this little diary and it received a lot of response from our fans. Well, about eight years ago we started our website, , and I started writing tons of content. Articles, humorous pieces, diaries, inside stories, editorials. Stuff like that.
Again the response to my writing was always very favorable, and I began to develop a huge love for it. I kept writing articles for various country and gospel music publications, as well. Somewhere in the middle of all that Molly was born.
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