Janis Harper - Jonas And The Mountain

Janis Harper is a writer, singer-songwriter, actor, and former adjunct English professor turned expressive arts therapist. Her writing can be found in literary journals and anthologies, including two creative nonfiction anthologies that she conceived and edited: Body Breakdowns: Tales of Illness and Recovery and Emails From India: Women Write Home. She has presented her work in Canada, the US, and India, and lives in British Columbia.

A mystic with a philosophical bent, at 14 years Janis was chanting for an hour a day in front of her Buddhist shrine; at 17 she was reading the Seth material and experimenting with channeling; at college she took all the religious studies courses available. As an adventurous young adult, she traveled a lot and lived in other countries. Later, as an academic in Rhetoric and Composition, she explored how language creates reality and taught writing for many years at college and university in Vancouver, BC. She has also enjoyed a long though intermittent career as a performing singer-songwriter and stage actor. (Her CD Better This Way is available online). In midlife Janis shed academia and became an expressive arts therapist, helping others to access their own creative resources for healing, transformation, and self-discovery. She has always been in love with India, but didn’t make it there until later in life. On one of her many long visits, she found an enlightened teacher at the foot of Arunachala.

Janis’s lifelong passions for the creative arts, metaphysics, spirituality, and philosophy come together in Jonas and the Mountain. Although fictional, she considers it to be the truest work she’s ever written.