Author | Hermit
Mountain Stories | Animal Stories | Memoir of Solitude
Colorado
BIO BY JA
NE WODENING
I was brought up in a prudish little suburb of Chicago until I was eleven then my parents and my brother and I moved to Fraser, Colorado which was at that time a copper-mining town sinking into oblivion. The change was startling to me and I found friendships easier with dogs than with people. They seemed to understand me better than people did. There were a few years of annual travels within Colorado and finally we made a house out of our summer cabin outside of Boulder and I went to Boulder High School.
I tried college but when my brother wanted a ride to New York City, I dropped out and spent a few months getting an education of sorts in New York City.
A couple of years later, I married film artist Stan Brakhage and we traveled back and forth across America for seven years then settled in Lump Gulch at nine thousand feet altitude where we lived for twenty-three years with five children and a yard full of animals, my sanity and my delight.
When he left me, my five children were grown and on their own. I sold my house and the animals and drove back and forth across America for nearly three years, looking for a life, finding that the world is big, finally settling in a tiny cabin with no amenities at ten thousand feet altitude where I lived alone for ten years. During this time I played and thought and hiked, enjoyed amateur radio, chopped wood and carried water, wrote a book which seems to be unpublishable, and pulled together and published seven books of short stories.
Now, in a little house at the edge of Denver, I’m going on writing. Having run out of things I’ve written, I’m searching among the scientists on the web to see if I can understand the history of the earth, wanting to understand it . I find the history full of astonishing adventures, and it’s a joy to write, although translating their jargon is as hard as clarifying the story as it goes.
– Jane Wodening