Jan Walker, a retired community college teacher, grew up on the Kitsap Peninsula, the sinuous land mass that sits in the center of Puget Sound, with Seattle and the Cascade Mountains to the east, Hood Canal and the Olympics to the west. Characters living, surviving and thriving on land that meets the sea is a recurring theme in her writing.
Her settings range from McNeil Island in South Puget Sound, home of the correctional center where she taught male offenders, to Mango Island in the South Pacific Kingdom of Tonga, the only sovereign monarchy in the island nations of the Pacific Ocean.
McNeil is featured in her prison teacher’s memoir, Dancing to the Concertina’s Tune, and her young adult novel, An Inmate’s Daughter. Both were named Washington Reads books by the state librarian in 2008.
Mango Island and the Tongan culture become support characters in A Farm in the South Pacific Sea, (September 2010) a fictionalized account of an American woman’s adventures establishing a spiny lobster nursery in a tropical island lagoon in the late 1960s.
Vignettes from one of Jan’s current writing projects, In the Woods and On the Sea: a history of family and place, appear in Stories on this website.
Jan lives in Gig Harbor, Washington on the lower Kitsap Peninsula. She is the founder and editorial director of Plicata Press, a small press featuring authors from the area.