 A native Floridian several generations over, Jan grew up in Evinston, a small community near the university town of Gainesville. The rural landscape, community traditions (including the annual Evinston Thanksgiving dinner in the park that has been taking place for nearly fifty years), and lifelong relationships fostered a rich sense of place, imagination, and ritual that continue to shape Jan's life. Jan received bachelor's degrees in Religion and Creative Writing from Florida State University and a Master of Divinity degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. She was ordained as a United Methodist minister in 1991. In 1993 she returned to Florida to become the associate pastor of St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Orlando. After four years of congregational ministry, Jan received an appointment to a specialized ministry as the Artist-in-Residence at the San Pedro Center, a retreat and conference center of the Catholic Diocese of Orlando. Her appointment to San Pedro provided Jan with the freedom to piece together a creative ministry that includes leading retreats and workshops around the country, working as an artist and writer, and journeying one-to-one with folks as a spiritual director. Jan's first book, Sacred Journeys: A Woman's Book of Daily Prayer, appeared in 1995. Growing out of her hunger for a contemplative book that both resonated with and challenged her experience as a woman, and drawing on the lives and writings of more than a hundred women around the world and throughout the centuries, Sacred Journeys became a unique contribution to the landscape of women's spiritual writing. During the writing of Sacred Journeys, Jan had begun to discover the artist layer of her soul, and her next two books incorporated her artwork along with her writing. Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas was published in 1998, followed by In Wisdom's Path: Discovering the Sacred in Every Season. In many ways Jan's journey has hinged on books, the reading of them as much as the writing of them. Roger Wieck's book Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art, picked up while browsing through a bookshop in Washington, DC, seized Jan's imagination with its depictions of these remarkable books that incorporated text and images for the purpose of prayer and contemplation. The enchanting influence of these books began to appear in Jan's work, first with her series The Advent Hours and more recently in the series The Hours of Mary Magdalene. Her encounter years ago with Malachi McCormick's edition of Deer's Cry, published by his small press Stone Street Press, planted an idea that, more than a dozen years later, resulted in the founding of her own small press. Through Wanton Gospeller Press, Jan publishes handcrafted books that wed her elegant charcoal artwork with her writing. Jan is the director of The Wellspring Studio, LLC, a company that incorporates her vocation as an artist, writer, retreat and workshop leader, and spiritual director. She serves as Visiting Artist at First United Methodist Church of Winter Park, Florida, where she and her sweetheart, the singer-songwriter Garrison Doles, lead The Wellsprings Service, a contemplative worship service that takes place on the second Thursday of each month at 7 PM. Jan is on the faculty of the Grünewald Guild in Leavenworth, Washington, and is an oblate of St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery, a Methodist-Benedictine community based in St. Joseph, Minnesota. |