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Jane Hammons Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Jane Hammons
Jane Hammons
Berkeley, California
Member since: Jan, 2009
Last login: 11/12/2009
Last update : 11/15/2009
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About Me

  • 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 mother was sure were UFOs. With my little Brownie camera I snapped a lot of pictures of Venus that never developed into anything more than snapshots of darkness. While I've lived in California for most of my life now, my experiences in New Mexico fuel my imagination and inspire a lot of my writing.

Jane's Blog

  • In Support of Myself

    November 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 grandmother know you are reading that?" she assumed my grandmother would disapprove. What Mrs. ...
  • La Llorona y Los Algodones

    October 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, of course, building a haunted house. We didn't always go trick-or-treating because houses were ...
  • Mr. Yudof's Cemetery

    September 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 State-were shot and killed by members of the Ohio National Guard. In their memory and ...
  • Perfectly Imperfect

    August 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 is loud and clear. And ever present.I'm over it.Chris Nunn Garcia was Chris Jones when I met her the ...
  • dirt heat sandstone blood

    August 6, 2009

    • conquistador penitente cowboycoyote cattle rattlesnake horseadobe trailer pickup truckApache Pueblo Navajo Zunicactus cotton chile corn tumbleweed mesquiteditch canyon arroyo mesadirt heat sandstone bloodNew Mexico 

My Favorite Authors

Comments I've Written

  • Indeed I did!

    Indeed I did!
  • Thanks, Catherine, for your

    Thanks, Catherine, for your comment on my Halloween post. There was a time when I was embarrassed about my country childhood, and now I really treasure the memories and the way they feed my writing.
  • Thanks for your comment on

    Thanks for your comment on my poem, La Llorona, Lisa. Your piece on Dia De Los Muertos is rich and beautiful. It makes me homesick! Do you know the writer Luis Alberto Urrea?
  • Hellboy on Acid

    Love it! I'm doing NaNo, too. On that site I'm PatriciaJaneH if you want a NaNo "writing buddy." Good luck!
  • One of my favorite books!

    One of my favorite books! Thanks for the wonderful description of the house and its connection to the book--and to your life and writing as well. I have a kind of obsession with place in fiction.

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