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| Love of writing leads to two published books |
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| Written by Maddy Houk / Patterson Irrigator / | |
| Friday, 25 April 2008 | |
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For Patterson native Jill Jepson, writing is more than a career — it is a spiritual path. Jepson, a 1968 Patterson High School graduate, will publish two books in the coming year, one of which deals with writing itself. “Writing As a Sacred Path: A Proactive Guide to Writing with Passion and Purpose” will be published in December by Berkeley-based Ten Speed Press. “I learned to realize that writing was more than a career,” Jepson said Wednesday during a visit with Patterson High classmate Kris Santos. “What it really was, was a spiritual path for me.” She explored how writers feel about their work by talking with other writers she knows and by reading authors’ memoirs and biographies.  Chitchat: Patterson High School graduate Jill Jepson has coffee with classmate Kris Santos on Wednesday. Jepson will have two books published in the coming year. Photo by Maddy Houk All of this came into focus years after Jepson set out on her own spiritual quest. “I was trying to find a form of spirituality that really spoke to me,” Jepson said. That mission took the Patterson native all over the world. She left Patterson at age 17 for college, and after she graduated, she traveled for many years — spending two years in Japan, three in India and seven months in China and making various trips to the Middle East, Central America and Europe. Jepson stayed at the Dalai Lama Center for Tibetan Buddhism in India and at a Buddhist monastery in Japan and took a long excursion into the Himalayas. “I spent all day standing in line, 10 hours, high in the Himalayas on a mountain path, to enter a cave where there’s a shrine to a Hindu goddess,” Jepson said. “When I started to realize writing was a spiritual practice for me and other writers, it was because I saw they spoke about writing the same way people spoke of these various faiths.” After her travel years, Jepson returned to Patterson for a decade before leaving again in 2001. “When she lived here in Patterson, we shared our writing in a writing group,” Santos said. “In that sense, I shared her effort and her heart and soul that went into her work. I know that others who read her work will only benefit like I did.” Jepson’s second book, which will be published in 2009 by Peter Lang Publishing Group, is titled “Women’s Concerns: 30 Women Entrepreneurs from 1700 to 1900.” Long before 20th-century feminism made it socially acceptable, she found, women had made a place for themselves in the business world. “There’s a misconception that women never worked outside the home before 1970, but they had a lot of them,” Jepson said. “With this book, I discovered women who ran large corporations in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as women who ran smaller businesses like shops, dressmaking businesses, bakeries.” Jepson now lives in Minnesota, where she is a professor of writing and linguistics at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul. She and her husband, John Beyer, were married 2½ years ago. Her father, former Patterson resident Clifford Jepson, also moved to Minnesota to be closer to his daughter. At the moment, Jepson is on sabbatical from her teaching job. She is using the time to write and to set up a business, Writing the Whirlwind, which promotes her coaching and workshops for writers via her Web site www.writingthewhirlwind.org. Jepson continues to write articles for magazines including Writers’ Journal and Arizona Highways. She has also penned two unpublished novels. To reach Maddy Houk at the Irrigator, call 892-6187 or e-mail her at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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