It's been a long and adventurous life, and Joyce Marcel is just getting started.
She was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1942.
Her undergraduate and graduate training was in theatrical costume design. In 1965 she married scenic designer Jerry Marcel and moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where he spent three years doing a Master of Fine Arts degree at Stanford University. Throughout their time in the Bay Area, the couple designed costumes and scenery for opera companies, Shakespearean productions, and the San Francisco Mime Troupe. When Joyce was not working in the theater, she worked as a topless dancer.
After a year in Europe, the couple returned to New York and worked together in the Off-Off Broadway theater.
In 1974, the couple separated and Joyce spent the next seven years living on the road, mostly in South America. Then she spent four years in Panama, teaching English as a Second Language to Panamanians, Chileans and Japanese. She also ran marathons, set a mid-range triathlon record for her age group, and raced dugout canoes down the Panama Canal.
During all her adventures, she took copious notes.
When Joyce returned to the United States, in 1987, she completed a Masters degree at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Then, in 1988, she began a journalism career as a stringer for the Brattleboro Reformer. She started writing a music column for the Reformer in 1989 and was its full-time municipal reporter from 1990 to 1994.
From 1993 to 1999, Joyce was also a freelance music critic for the Springfield (Mass.) Union-News and Sunday Republican. She was known for her insightful concert reviews and lively interviews with celebrities as diverse as Milton Berle, B.B. King, Pete Seeger, Julio Iglesias, Willie Nelson, Ani DiFranco and Marilyn Manson. For over a year, her opinion column, "Culture Shock," led the arts section of the Sunday Republican.
In 1990, Joyce also began to write about tourism, politics and economics for Vermont Business Magazine. She won the American Association of Business Publications Gold Award for Best Reporter in 2000. She still writes for the magazine, specializing in profiles of Vermont's business leaders.
In 1997, Joyce's opinion column began running every Thursday on-line at The American Reporter. In 2000, it also started appearing every Thursday on the editorial page of the Reformer. It now appears as well on Common Dreams and occasionally in publications like The Progressive Populist and The Arab News.
Also in 1997, Joyce began covering Vermont and western Massachusetts for The Boston Globe. In 1999, her story on the pleasures of liquidation shopping ran in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and was turned into a segment on WCVB-TV Boston's magazine show, "Chronicle." She became a frequent contributor to the magazine.
Her travel pieces have appeared in the Globe, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the New York Post, the Orlando Sentinel, Newsday, and The Providence (R.I.) Journal. She also writes for Vermont Life Magazine.
Joyce is married to Randolph T. Holhut, who has been a reporter, photographer and editor in New England for more than 25 years. He is currently the night and editorial page editor of the Reformer. He won the Vermont Press Association's first prize for editorial writing in 2005. He is the editor of "The George Seldes Reader," (Barricade Books, 1994).
The couple live on a hillside in Dummerston, Vermont with their cat, Agatha Kitty.