https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/chicagojane This month all my books are on sale 50% off
Sale at Smashwords, 50% off
New Work Online
A small piece of about 100 words is now online at Instant Noodles. Peeper Pond is from my time spent in Eugene, Oregon which even then felt temporal. Somehow I knew I wasn't staying and that living was serendipitous, a way of receiving life events as amazing, new, to be savored. Because tomorrow I may... Continue Reading →
New Work Up
Recently I’ve had a spat of acceptances. I’m happy to announce, you can read my work, a creative nonfiction piece excerpted from my longer cnf project about cycling through the UK from top to bottom, John O’Groats in Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall. This piece is called Life in the Midden about the mess... Continue Reading →
New Work Up
I have a new piece up at Random Sample Review. These latest acceptances have been vital to keeping me writing--since the break up with my agent and rejection of my nonfiction manuscript. Rejection--how it feels, these days. Anyway! I'll live n the moment with Starting Over https://randomsamplereview.com/2022/07/28/starting-over/ https://randomsamplereview.com/2022/07/28/starting-over/ Photo by Eileen Pan
Books As Signposts in Our Life
My essay, "Books As Signposts in Our Life," has been published in Still Point Arts Quarterly for a special themed issue on books and book lovers! The digital edition is FREE. The print edition is full of beautiful illustrations--the price for a PRINT issue is $14.50 plus $3.95 shipping. Go here to download: https://indd.adobe.com/view/675e0ae9-707b-46a1-aadd-ecd1384592d7 “The... Continue Reading →
Follow Your Joy
I’ve had an amazing acceptance of a small flash memoir piece I’ve called Starting Over which will appear in the next issue of Random Sample Review for an issue themed “Follow Your Joy”—yes, it does involve a bicycle! More importantly, it was selected by a poet Debra Stone. This is significant in that my agent is... Continue Reading →
I’m a NY Times author (sort of)
I contributed to an article written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta of the NY Times. She is a gender writer and has tackled some big topics in Women's news lately--notably the restriction of abortion rights in many states. The genesis of my contribution was a call for submissions from the National Women's History Museum looking for "journals" or... Continue Reading →
Year of the Returning Cicada
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/03/09/cicadas-broodx-environment/ Names Brood X, the last time they appeared in hordes was in 2004. In a few months these monstrous looking bugs will burrow out of their 17-year hiatus and attach themselves to Everything. They will be everywhere, leaving exoskeletons and nesting in trees. If you miss seeing them—don’t worry—you will hear them as the... Continue Reading →
The “Foreignness” of Cloud of Witnesses
(Adapted from a talk I gave at the 2019 Illinois Reading Council Conference for teachers and librarians.) After writing and publishing my middle-grade novel, Cloud of Witnesses (Golden Alley Press), I discovered that it is but one of a handful of books currently being published that represents rural life. Most books coming out today for youth is... Continue Reading →
Hillbilly Elegy
a review I sort of hate it when movies, books, media reduce complex issues down into easily digested bites. That’s the trouble with Hillbilly Elegy, the movie now playing on Netflix: distilled into the Hatfield and McCoys. In fact that piece of mountain myth is referenced in the first 15 minutes of the film. My... Continue Reading →
Back filling the data: Athens, Ohio during Covid-19
Frontline podcast https://tinyurl.com/vucolbt a journalist goes to the rural area of Athens, County where my story Cloud of Witnesses takes place--to discover that when the schools shut down in southeast Ohio because of the coronavirus it left children at risk of going hungry. The population was always at risk of poor health outcomes and at... Continue Reading →
Happy New Year, Nowruz
This past weekend was Nowruz, the New Year according to the lunar calendar that Iran follows. In my book, Cloud of Witnesses, Hassan explains the idea of Nowruz to Roland who likens it to spring cleaning, a time to clear away the old and prepare for the new. “According to the Muslim calendar this is... Continue Reading →
Jane Hertenstein 