Jane Hammons's Blog
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Nov.28.2012
If you have not yet heard about Bloom, let me introduce you to the new literary site devoted to writing of authors "whose first major work was published when they were age 40 or older." Founding Editor, Sonya Chung--author of the novel Long for This World, faculty at Columbia University...
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May.25.2011
Other than the chapter of The Snowman that is available on Jo Nesbø’s Facebook page, I haven’t read Jo Nesbø. That will soon change. Nesbø is a wonderful storyteller—quick on his feet and very funny—so if you get a chance to see him on this book tour for The Snowman, don’t miss him. Instead of...
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Apr.23.2011
When I saw that Lydia Davis would be reading in San Francisco, I immediately bought a ticket. I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that the event was sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation. I was just excited about seeing Lydia Davis. As a friend and I drove over the Bay Bridge to...
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Dec.30.2010
For the past few years my New Year’s Resolution(s) have all been pretty much the same. Get back into routine at the gym: ✓
That one is easy. I like going to the gym, and that routine, like most others, gets disrupted around the holidays, which coincide with the end of my teaching semester.
Finish...
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Nov.28.2010
I owe a lot to Kate Atkinson. She wasn’t by any means the first crime writer I read, not even the one who has most influenced me. As a child my bookshelves were filled with Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden mysteries. I would grow into my grandparents’ shelves, which were lined with Agatha...
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Nov.18.2010
Dewey Dell: a woman a place a womanplace. Seventeen years old and pregnant. Seventeen years old and burdened with a baby she doesn’t want and brothers she’ll have to take care of as she inherits her mother’s place in the family. Dewey Dell Bundren. It’s one of the most organic names in fiction....
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Nov.06.2010
Hint, micro, flash and sudden: all ways to describe a very short piece of writing. This short form appeals to me a lot: always has. Years ago, when I’d write a story of 1000 or so words, people often responded with dismay at how short it was. Didn’t I want to develop it? Maybe it was really...
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Oct.22.2010
If you had asked me a couple of years ago what Bouchercon was, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but if you ask me now, I’ll tell you much more than you really want to know. I immersed myself in four days of panels, interviews and book signings and had a lot of fun doing it. And I have...
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Oct.18.2010
You might have heard: Nicholas Carr is worried that Google is making us stupid. I’m sure there are reasons to worry about my brain, but Google isn’t one of them. I don’t write historical fiction, per se, but if a story has historical elements in it, I want them to be accurate. I also want to make...
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May.07.2010
If you come from a family of storytellers as I do, accessing family history—or at least one person’s version of it—is pretty easy. And I use a lot of it in both my fiction and nonfiction. My grandmother and her sister, my great-aunt, were both big talkers who liked to relive their childhood in...
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Jan.14.2010
Incredulous, I literally gasped when I saw the topic "favorite poem." Favorite poem, you have to be kidding. Just one?
But the whole time I was sputtering and spinning the rolodex of my mind filled with lines and titles, I heard only one voice.
Walt Whitman's.
I read "Song of...
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Nov.11.2009
Mrs. Reed, my high school English teacher, sang in the choir of the First Methodist Church with my grandmother, so when she caught me reading Max Dimont's Jews, God and History instead of the assigned novel, The Vicar of Wakefield, during silent reading period and demanded to know, "Does your...
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Oct.30.2009
When I was growing up in rural New Mexico, the carnival at my school, East Grand Plains Elementary, was a huge community event. Along with parents and teachers, we spent hours creating ring toss booths, baking cakes for the cakewalk--everyone vying for my Auntie's famous German Chocolate Cake--and...
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Sep.26.2009
Until September 24, 2009, I hadn't put on an armband since the spring of 1970 when I was a junior in high school. On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia, and on May 4 Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder-four students at Kent...
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Aug.13.2009
I don't like the word hero. I seldom use it because it is often misused and it is certainly overused in the media. But right now I can hear Chris Nunn Garcia saying in her gravelly booming voice: "Do you want to write the damn blog or not? If you do, get over it." Even in death her voice...
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About Jane
I grew up in Roswell, New Mexico-more accurately on a farm about 10 miles south of town. My mother was a true believer in the Roswell Incident, so I spent a lot of my childhood chasing after bright lights and taking pictures of things in the night sky that my...
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Jane’s Favorite Books
The Dubliners; The Beggar Maid; Coming Through Slaughter; Glass, Irony and God; Moving On; The Monkeywrench Gang; One Hundred Years of Solitude; A Flag for...