Writing
Merging personal memory, research, and dream scenarios, Jane’s stories follow an ensemble of characters as they traverse the shifting boundaries between natural and man-made worlds. Most recently published in the New Farmer’s Almanac Vol. 7, more short stories from the shared universe are forthcoming in Spring 2026.
The New Farmer’s Almanac, Volume 7: PREMONITION
Featured in…
Published by Greenhorns, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting, recruiting, and supporting the next generation of farmers through grassroots media production.
Pond Dream, published in the New Farmer’s Almanac Vol. 7 in September 2025, is a short story that follows a cast of characters traversing urban and rural landscapes, contending with their contributions to a larger community, and isolation and connectivity in their everyday lives.
“Printed in full color for the first time, this Almanac challenges us to share our premonitions and respond to narratives of inevitability: what transmissions we are receiving from the living world?”
Excerpted from Pond Dream, published in the New Farmer’s Almanac Vol. 7: Premonition, September 2025
It was dark when Sally and Matt pulled in. After three hours in the car, an evening hush of insects and breeze brought with it a little rush of wellbeing as they turned into the driveway. The house, however, slumped awkwardly in their headlights, a shrine to the failed experiment of living there full time.
After silently unloading the car and re-making the damp bed upstairs, they read by lamplight until Matt fell asleep. Sally sat and stewed in the details of the room. The unevenness of the walls. Cobwebs wafting at the corners of the ceiling. The house was a hundred years of paint and weather and appliances, meals cooked and eaten and cleaned up after, and tired people coming back inside to rest after working all day. Sally was embarrassed she hadn’t worked harder at living when they lived here. Hadn't extended herself. Never met the neighbors, or lingered to chat at the grocery store.
The pond offered a beautiful little nest of reeds to sit in, to write or meditate, and she had visited it only twice, and only under perfect conditions. She had never gotten dirt on her hands, or pruned anything.
Early the next morning, Sally slipped out of bed, avoiding the loudest floorboards, to brush her teeth and gargle freely at the downstairs sink. The pond undulated through the warped glass of the kitchen window. All that beauty, but the grind of anxiety was still there, coiled up under her ribs. Slipping onto the porch, she took in new, humid air and let the morning sounds calm her down. The finches were getting a little bolder, darting in and out of the shrubs at the driveway.
Sally padded across the driveway and through the grass, approaching the pond in a search for the right spot to sit. Little rhythmic plunks bounced off the water as frogs hopped to safety. Clean ripples marched across the surface.
Bird calls curled out in big arcs and large billowy clouds roiled slowly around, muddling the light. A warm breeze off the field brought sweet, clean air to mix with the sulphury breath of the pond…
Coming soon…