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VOL. 16 NO. 2 FEBRUARY/MARCH 2016
Seattleite and Bestselling Author J.A. Jance
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at the University of Arizona in those days thought girls ‘ought to be teachers or nurses’ rather than writers. After he refused me admission to the program, I did the next best thing: I married a man who was allowed in the program that was closed to me.” Jance graduated in 1966 with a degree in English and Secondary Education. She later received a Masters Degree in Library Science, taught high school English for two years and then became a K-12 librarian at the Indian Oasis School District for five years. She didn’t pursue her interest in writing, even on the side, because her Born in South Dakota and brought husband admonished her that there up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with would be only one writer in the family, her husband and their two dachshunds and he was it. “My husband made that in Seattle and Tucson, Arizona. statement in 1968 after I had received a “Being a snowbird is complicated. favorable letter from an editor in New Something always goes wrong at the York who was interested in publishing ‘other’ house within days of our leaving a children’s story I had written. Because it. But you can’t beat the weather,” she I was a newlywed who was interested told Northwest Prime Time in a recent in staying married, I put my writing interview. ambitions on hold. Other than writing “I first arrived in Seattle in July of poetry in the dark of night when my 1981 as a refugee from a bad marriage husband was asleep, I did nothing more and a worse divorce,” said Jance. “I about writing fiction until eleven years moved in with my sister in a condo in later.” the Denny Regrade and supported my When her Dale Carnegie classmate kids by working in the life insurance said those fateful words on a Thursday industry.” night, the thought In 1981, hoping that went through to improve her sales her head was, career, she enrolled “I’m divorced. in a Dale Carnegie What have I got course. When she to lose? So Sunday told the group a afternoon of that true-life story about week, I sat down a series of murders to write. My first that had happened three books were in Tucson, one of written between her classmates said, 4 and 7am. At “Someone should seven, I would write a book about wake my children that.” and send them off That statement to school. After really struck home that, I would get for Jance. “I had myself ready to go wanted to be a sell life insurance.” writer from second J.A. Jance’s Ali Reynolds thriller, Clawback, J.A. Jance’s grade on,” she said. goes on sale March 8 first book was “As a second-grader about the series in Mrs. Spangler’s Greenway School of murders in Tucson, the same story class, I was introduced to Frank Baum’s she had told to her Dale Carnegie Wizard of Oz series. I read the first one classmates. But the book was never and was hooked.” She knew, from that published. “My agent finally sat me moment on, that she wanted to be a down and told me that she thought I writer. “When I graduated from Bisbee was a better writer of fiction than I was High School in 1962, I received an of non-fiction. Why, she suggested, academic scholarship that made me the didn’t I try my hand at a novel?” first person in my family to attend a four The result of that conversation was year college.” the first Detective Beaumont book, But her ambitions to become a Until Proven Guilty. writer were frustrated. “First because the And while that first book never professor who taught creative writing sold, “I’ve sold more than fifty other
ith more than 20 million copies of her books in print, J.A. Jance is the perennially bestselling author of the J.P. Beaumont series (set in Seattle), the Ali Reynolds series, the Joanna Brady series and more.
Best-selling author J.A. Jance lives a snowbird’s life between Seattle and Arizona
books,” she declared as an impressive statement of fact. Her husband played another role in her writing career – first by thwarting it and then by helping when she was the beneficiary of a life insurance policy. “When my former husband died, I invested $5000 of the proceeds in a computer – a dual floppy Eagle and a Daisy Wheel printer. That computer had 128 K of memory, so when my word processor, a program called Spellbinder, was loaded into the computer, there was only 15K left in the work space.” She credits her first three books’ short, punchy chapters to the fact that the curser would freeze up when her computer’s memory reached its maximum. It was while she was writing the third book, Trial by Fury, that she met and married her second husband, an electronics engineer. “He took my computer apart and added more memory with the result that the chapters were able to be a little longer and a lot more graceful.” She met her husband at a retreat for people who had lost their spouse. “The week before Until Proven Guilty was published, I did a poetry reading at a retreat sponsored by a group called WICS (Widowed Information Consultation Services) of King County. By June of 1985, it was five years after my divorce and two years after my former husband’s death. I went to the retreat feeling as though I didn’t deserve to be there. At the retreat I met a man whose wife had
died of breast cancer two years to the day and within a matter of minutes of the time my husband died. We struck up a conversation based on that coincidence. Six months later, to the dismay of our five children, we told the kids they weren’t the Brady Bunch, but they’d do, and we got married. We now have four new in-laws as well as six grandchildren.” Several of their children make their home in the Northwest. “When my second husband and I first married, he supported all of us – his kids and mine. It was a long time before my income from writing was anything more than fun money. Eventually, however, the worm turned. My husband was able to retire at age 54 and took up golf and oil painting.” Although she was born in Arizona and spends the winter there, J.A. Jance said, “Seattle will always be my creative home.” And she provided this special note to Northwest Prime Time readers: “Many of my older fans are either hardback or paperback readers, and I’m thrilled to have them, but readers who discover that the print in inkon-paper books is suddenly too small might benefit from taking a look at electronic books because it’s possible to adjust the font size to something more comfortable.” And a note about her fans: “A wonderful part of being a writer is hearing from fans. I learned on the reservation that the ancient, sacred continued on page 18