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A Meeting of Minds by Elizabeth Turner Calloway

Janie Miller Sterne, a young Dallas woman, survives an abusive husband and a near-kidnapping of her son while building a career in her family's meetings and convention business.

About the book

During her quest for independence, a young Dallas woman survives an abusive husband, her young son's near-kidnapping, and treachery from someone she once trusted. Her story resonates with soul-wrenching drama as she evolves both personally and professionally while working in the world of meetings and conventions.

A Meeting of Minds' protagonist, Janie Miller Sterne, must face the challenges of single parenthood, working in a family-owned convention business, and dealing with a scheming lover before she achieves success. Although Janie desperately wants to support herself and her son, she knows she must depend on her mother -- at least for a while.

Successful Matney Miller, Janie's mother, also a victim of a disappointing relationship, tries to balance her maternal instincts to rescue a needy grown daughter against her own deep desires for hard-found independence. As much as she loves her daughter and grandson, She nonetheless resents their intrusion into her private world.

As Janie faces an agonizing choice between the financial independence she so deeply desires and her own strong principles, she discovers herself, as well. She matures as a professional, and, in doing so, she allows herself to love, for the first time, a kind and decent man.

About the author

In the '70's Elizabeth Turner Calloway opened a company called Kaleidoscope in a tiny Dallas office with a staff of two, she being one of the two. By the '90's she had developed that company into three offices throughout Texas with a full-time staff of 35 and a part-time staff of 150. Kaleidoscope provided a wide range of services for such prestigious accounts as the Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations, two Republican National Conventions, the 1996 Summer Olympics, the NCAA Final Four, and a client list of almost every Fortune 500 Company in the world. She was one of a handful of people in the nation who started a new type of convention service company, later deemed a destination management company (DMC) by the meetings/convention industry. She helped revolutionize that industry.

To Calloway, the challenges of owning a small business arrived in full force during the early days of Kaleidoscope. Having no business education or training, she soon realized that the services her company provided visitors, although highly praised, hardly paid the overhead. She held two degrees from SMU but had never enrolled in a business class. The bachelor's degree in journalism, the brief career as a newspaper reporter, the master's degree in English literature with a thesis on William Faulkner, and teaching writing at El Centro college did not prepare her for the financial matters crucial to anyone owning and managing a business.

But her communicational, organizational, and social skills proved to be strong plusses and Kaleidoscope flourished. After 18 years as a successful business pioneer, Calloway sold her company in 1994 to a national conglomerate. She worked for the new company, PGI, for four more years as Kaleidoscope's president and PGI regional vice president before deciding to take advantage of her rich bedrock of business experience and pursue the career she had planned in the first place, that of an author.

Today Calloway still lives in Dallas, busy pursuing her lifetime dream of writing fiction. A Meeting of Minds is the first of many novels to follow which feature the industry in which she has spent most of her adult life. When she is not writing, she enjoys spending time with her grown children, grandchildren, and many friends. She is a power-walker, fitness devotee, lover of books, classical music, gardening, antiques, dancing, and traveling to exotic places.

Archived from the Harris Literary Agency website. The agency's listing is reproduced as published, with contact details removed.

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