J.A. Jance Presentation at the Main Library

9:38 PM

Tonight I went downtown to the main library to attend a presentation by author J.A. Jance. My first thought when she walked out on the stage at the front of the auditorium was, I didn't know she was so big. She said later that she was sux feet tall by the time she reached 7th grade. And, she looked older that her photos on the bookjacket, but of course, that would be retouched. Looking over her bio on her website, I figured out that she's actually about 3-4 years younger than I am.She talked about her personal life, and how it got incorporated into her novels. I tried to record her remarks, but after taking a few photos and less than 15 minutes into her talk, my recorder ran out of memory! Usually, I usually carry an extra memory card and an extra battery, but tonight I traveled light. So, I'll have to remember as much of it as I can. If I forget anything, you probably can find it on her website, since I noticed that her bio contains much of the same information as her talk.

She talked about her first husband, who was an alcoholic who also fancied himself a writer, but in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, with a lot of drinking and little writing. She described an early experience of gender discriminaton when she tried to enroll in the creative writing program at the University of Arizona, only to be refused entrance by the professor, because women were teachers and nurses, not writers. Only men were writers. So she made the mistake of marrying a man who had been admitted to the creative writing program, but who never had anything published. When he was passed out in his recliner, she wrote poetry, and hid the scraps of paper in the strongbox, along with the birthcertificates and other important documents. She found them years later, after she had divorced him, after his death, when she went to look for those important documents of identification.

This was beginning to sound familiar. I was sure I had read it in one of her novels, and a short time later, she revealed that she had written it in Hour of the Hunter, a revised version of her first, unpublished novel, and she made the evil English professor who had refused her admission to the creative writing program into the villain, the serial killer. It was also interesting to know that the story was based on something that actually happened on the Tohono O’Odham reservation in 1970, that had touched her and her husband's lives. They found out that he had been given a ride home by the serial killer just 20 minutes after he had committed one of his murders, and later, that he was captured on July 20, just before he had planned to kill her and her husband on the 22nd, since he always committed his murders on the 22nd of the month. When she wrote all this in a fictionalized version and tried to submit it for publication, the editors who turned it down said that the parts that were real were totally unbelievable, and the parts that were fiction were fine. Eventually, after she had written nine J.P. Beaumont mysteries and wanted to move on to something else, she cut 600 pages out of the manuscript and it got published. Other of her experiences on the rez, working as the school librarian, are included in Kiss of the Bees, and I recognized them as she talked.

The reason she uses her initials instead of her name, Judith Ann, which is the way it's listed in the library catalog, is that editors didn't believe a woman could write police procedurals, so she had to disquise her gender. Even now, after she has her photo on the book jacket, there are some who are sure that they are written by a retired cop, and she's just fronting for him.

That's about all I remember, except that she said that when she heard Janis Ian's song, "Seventeen," she though that she and Janis were kindred spirits, because they had both been rejected by the popular kids when they were in school. Until she found out that Janis is 4'11", compared to her 6 feet, that Janis is a Democrat and she's a Republican, and a few other discordant details. However, she got to meet her at a recent writers' convention and now they are friends. Ms. Jance closed out her presentation, after one of her hearing aids ceased to function because of a dead battery, by singing that song, "Seventeen."

10:46 PM