Hello! Welcome to my website, where you can find information on my books and plays, and current teaching projects. First though, let me introduce myself.
Growing up in Canada, the United States, Spain, England, the Czech Republic and Cuba has given me an engaging window on world affairs. Educational stints in a French Lycee in Madrid and a Dickensian British boarding with holidays behind the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War, have equipped me to write about the conflicts between love and power, truth and justice, image and identity. The facts that both my novels have been award finalists, and that one of my plays was banned and then published and studied in India encourage me.
You can meet Vanessa, the main character is my novel The Oak Island Affair, and see some photos further down this page. For more book information go to my Books & Plays Page.
I have taught creative writing at the Haliburton School of the Arts, at Trent University and other venues. As an Ontario Arts Council Artist in Education I took a creative writing/drama project into farflung Ontario schools, including Ministik School in Moose Factory.
For information on myCreative Writingcourses, scroll down this page.
Creativity in Writing Course Is your creative energy flagging in the wake of winter obligations? My Creativity in Writing course runs July 2-6 at the Haliburton School of the Arts this year. Marrying creative access/self awareness techniques with the nuts and bolts of writing, this course will re-awaken and kickstart your creativity. Come and explore colour, sound, smell, touch in the school's stunning natural environment. Trigger and then write the stories that come out of your unique relationship with the world. Character, plot, setting and word explorations will help you shape your work into a project well on its way by the end of the Friday session.
Creative Writing Course If you are spending summer time further north and want to concentrate on your writing, join me in Huntsville where the Haliburton School of the Arts now offers Creative Writing July 16 - 20 at the new Summit Centre. This course covers character development, plot construction, the power of words and theme and setting -- all the techniques you need to bring energy and life to your writing.
Both of these courses, suitable for beginning and experienced writers of fiction, creative non-fiction or memoir, include one-on-one sessions with me. They offer you a chance to learn, explore and then share the results in a safe, supportive, constructive environment. To find out more about my publishing history and student reviews of my many years of teaching please visit www.janebow.com. For more information contact me at jane (at) janebow.com. You can register at www.hsta.ca or by telephone at (705) 457-1680 or toll free at 1-866-353-6464.
2008 Indie Book Award finalist
HELP CHILDREN LEARN TO READ
My novel, The Oak Island Affair, a finalist in both the General Fiction and Action Adventure categories of the 2008 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, is helping to raise money for Network for Africa's learning centre in Rwanda, where 35 - 50 genocide orphans and homeless youths go six days a week to learn how to read and write English so they can use the internet to create a new future. The novel uses the real 213-year old, multi-million dollar treasure hunt on Canada's Oak Island as a metaphor for its main character's search for the essence of love. The Rwandan centre, a project of love, is a real treasure.
Click on the book's cover to go to the Books and Plays page, where you can order The Oak Island Affair.
WEBSITE: AAGH! Something's pushing! My cyber-skin's splitting--! A hand! A head--!
VANESSA: Phew! (Looks around) Hello.
WEBSITE: What? Who are you?
VANESSA: Don't you recognize me? I'm Vanessa, from Jane's new novel, The Oak Island Affair, and I thought why stay cooped up in a book--?
WEB: Not Vanessa Holt, the main character?
VAN: That's right, and look, I've brought pictures.
WEB: Suffering syntax! Capering keyboards!
VAN: This is Oak Island from the air. That's Joudrey's cove in the upper left corner.
WEB: It looks like a pretty scrubby place--
VAN (laughs): You got that right. Those white buildings in the middle are where the treasure shafts have been sunk--
WEB: For 213 years, by so many different treasure hunting groups.
VAN: That's Smith Cove to the right, where they found the remains of an ancient coffer dam and the opening of a flood tunnel to the main shaft. This picture was taken in winter. This next shot is of the bay at Chester, where my Gran lived.
VAN: And this is our boat, Dancer, on the way to Oak Island. See, there's Joudrey's Cove dead ahead.
And there below is the Joudrey's Cove beach--
WEB (excited): Where you and Brigit landed, and you found--
VAN: Shsh, Web! Don't give anything away. Look, here's the original treasure shaft.
Fall in there and you'd be lost forever.
WEB: Who'd know more about that than you!
VAN: Web please! This last one shows the inside of that white building, where the latest shaft is. It's called Borehole 10X. See the top of the shaft, and the steel casing they sank to try to keep the walls of the shaft from caving in? Not that it worked.
WEB: Think of how many lives have been sunk down that hole. And now a new Michigan consortium is sinking even more money into Oak Island.
VAN: "And still the little island guards her secret," to put it in Jane's words.
WEB: Right. So let's hope they read the book! Did you know people are staying up until 2 am reading it?
VAN: I better get back. Now it's got a gold sticker on the cover. I wonder what that's going to mean for me?
Vanessa's gone back into The Oak Island Affair, but you can reach her by clicking on my Contact Me page. You should know that she is a magazine writer who grew up in Spain and was fleeing an unravelling relationship when she discovered a 400-year old diary written by a failed Spanish Dominican monk in the attic of her grandmother's house in Chester, Nova Scotia. This rekindled her obsession with a mystery that has brought treasure hunters, and investors such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, to Oak Island from Canada, the United States and Europe for the last 200 years.
Vanessa arrived at a new solution to the Oak Island mystery by learning to see beyond the barriers of reason. This plunged her into underworld depths from which "there was no turning back, where the rules of the surface world do not apply."
Click on my Books & Plays page to read the first chapter of The Oak Island Affair.
To see reviews of my work and what students are saying about my creative writing classes, click on the Reviews page. To talk to me, click on Contact Me.
Thanks for your visit, Jane, Web, Vanessa, and all the others
