about
Janice grew up in rural Victoria on a sheep farm. Miles away from friends during weekends and holidays, she spent a lot of time imagining other worlds through the many books she found on the shelves at home and in the shire library, housed in a silent and dusty hall. Perhaps this early life is best described by a passage from her travel memoir, Let Sleeping Dogs Lie. 'I feel a stab of homesickness when I see the sprawling red gums that inhabit the land of my childhood, the place where I learnt how to cook, garden, harvest, preserve, look after animals, read, make things, explore, ride a bike, find solace in my own company'.
Her first crime novel 'Murder in Mt Martha', published by Hybrid Publishers, is available fromthe author.
'A Body of Work', published in 2018 by Hybrid Publishers is available in all good bookstores and from the author.
There are a few copies of 'Let Sleeping Dogs Lie' still available for purchase from the author.
Janice has won awards for her work, and has been published in a range of magazines. You can find some examples here.
She has a PhD in creative practice where her research sought to do two things: firstly explore how, through creative practice using various forms of nonfiction, stories about the place and the identity of adoptees are told; and secondly, enrich our understanding of the fragmentary history of adoption in Australia when the adoption of children was conducted and sanctioned by both the church and the state. She responded to the research question: “How might experimentation with forms of the lyric essay enable the creation of stories about adoptees' relationships with place and identity?” To this end she developed ways of writing stories that embrace her own experience with that of others, in this instance the life-changing event of infant adoption and the adoptees’ memories attached to that event. This writing traverses terrain between the personal and the political, the sociological and the social, the literary and the familiar, the narrator and the subject. By making things – physical things such as maps and containers and paintings and books – she developed further ways in which a lyric essay can be structured and subsequently read.
An academic article published in TEXT Journal reflecting on the influence Christian text has on writing can be located here.
Janice is a former national convenor of Sisters in Crime, a not-for-profit organisation promoting women crime writers and readers.