Meet the Author
About Jan
Jan’s worked at a multitude of jobs, including screenwriter, waitress, transcriptionist for doctors and for documentary filmmakers, secretary, middle-school teacher, scuba diving travel writer, a, journalist, and teacher in Kenya and the Yucatan. Jan also served as translator for American doctors in Mexico. Her greatest nightmare is that she may have inadvertently translated “brain tumor” as “toothache.”
Jan’s path to novel writing began with her love of books and movies, which led to screenwriting. She optioned several projects and taught screenwriting classes at San Francisco State University and the University of California-Berkeley for several years before deciding that screenplays are written to be seen, whereas she wanted to write something to be read.
From the film world, Jan took to novel writing a strong sense of scene and dialogue. She’s workshopped her novels at the Tin House, Squaw Valley, San Francisco, and Jackson Hole conferences and has studied with Dorothy Alison, Karen Jay Fowler, and David Corbett. Wally Lamb blurbed her first, self-published novel, Edgewise, which has sold over 10,000 copies. Lake Union published Jan’s second novel, Reading the Sweet Oak. This October, Mumblers Press will bring out her new novel, Becoming Felicity.
Jan lives with her husband in Northern California.