I was born in North Carolina, but my father was an officer in the Marine Corps so we were constantly on the move and on the road. I learned to read crisscrossing the country in the backseat of a station wagon—first billboards, then roadmaps, and on to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. Fiction was my most consistent reality, and imagination my companion.
I spent much of my childhood in the South and finished high school in Kansas City, then moved 35 miles west to Lawrence. The ivy-covered limestone buildings of the University of Kansas, perched on a windy hilltop overlooking the Osage Plains, provided an inspiring backdrop for studying literature and history. While earning my bachelors degree, I crossed paths with a young Frenchman earning a PhD in Cartography and married him after graduating. We spent the next 17 years living the academic life on the campuses of the University of Georgia and the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada, with sabbaticals and summers in Quebec, British Columbia, France, England, and Germany.
While completing a Master’s Degree in Edmonton, I studied novel-writing with Rudy Wiebe and completed my first novel. As part of my degree requirements, I also wrote a book-length thesis entitled The Novella As Moral Fable, which focused on works by Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Henry James.
After a two-year stint in The Netherlands, divorce ended my life as an expat and brought me back to the US, to California, where I met and married a New Englander who was eager to return to the east coast. While living in Durham, North Carolina, I had a variety of occupations: technical writer, program and services director for The North Carolina Writers Network, and paralegal. We later settled in Pinehurst, where I finished the first draft of Creekside while a Writer-in-Residence at the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities in nearby Southern Pines. I continued my association with the Weymouth Center as a volunteer, welcoming other writers into the historic Boyd House, where Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe were once frequent visitors.
Over the years, I’ve attended fiction-writing workshops through The Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Duke Continuing Education, TableRock Writer’s Workshop, and The North Carolina Writers’ Network.
JW
Janet Wheaton 