Jane first heard about WICE from a friend in the summer of 2010, and reluctantly agreed to take a creative writing course with her that fall.  She said, “I remember saying to her, I will only be auditing this course, definitely not doing any homework.”

“Gretel Furner was my teacher and from the first hour, I was hooked.”  Jane had been an English Lit major at Finch College, class of '70, but had never taken a creative writing class.  She said “I loved to criticize other people's writing, mind you, but for me even writing a ten-page paper was torture.  I could never imagine a book, however, I loved Gretel's class so much that I left sunny Palm Beach, Florida, to return to Paris in January 2011 so that I could have another six weeks at WICE.”

Her first book, Below Sea Level, was published in 2013, when she was 65 years old, and it won the Illumination Book Award's Bronze medal.  This was followed by Sliding which won the Eric Hoffer Gold Medal Finalist Award for novels published in 2015.  Boulevard Beausejour, which was co-authored with Anne Yelland, was published in 2017 and won the Book Excellence Award.  

“My life has been greatly enriched by writing, and I owe it all to WICE and the wonderful Gretel Furner.  Because of these books, I received a lifetime achievement award from my college.  It meant a great deal to me to have my children there to hear the officials say I had graduated cum laude – I don't think they had ever believed me.  My stock with them has gone up considerably, and that is, again, thanks to WICE.”  

Jane’s most recent novel, Careless, was released in May 2019.