Position Title
Lecturer
Biography:
Dr. Jane Beal is a Continuing Lecturer in the University Writing Program at UC Davis. She received her BA, MA, and PhD in English and her MFA in Creative Nonfiction. She also holds a Certificate in Midwifery from Mercy in Action College of Midwifery and a graduate Certificate in Narrative Medicine from Bay Path University. She has taught at private liberal arts colleges in Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles, as well as UC Davis, and served as a midwife in the U.S., Uganda, and the Philippines.
Her current research focuses on how to use narrative medicine to bring healing from trauma to healthcare providers and their patients, with a special focus on the lives of midwives and childbearing women and their infants. She has published over forty articles on the history and practice of midwifery in Midwifery Today. She uses her education, training, and experience in writing and midwifery to teach “Writing in the Health Professions,” in which she has helped to prepare hundreds of UC Davis students for their future careers as doctors, nurses, midwives, psychologists, physical therapists, dentists, veterinarians, forensic pathologists, and public health administrators.
She is also a nature and environmental writer. Her multimodal graduate thesis project, Enter the Beauty: Reflections on Nature, combines lyrical prose with haiku and the artwork of Vincent Van Gogh. Her recently published creative nonfiction essays on nature include “The Scent of Lavender” (GreenPrints), “Walking in the Arboretum” (Litro), “How to See a Monarch Butterfly,” “Two Visits from an American Goldfinch,” and “Light through the Clouds” (all in The Right Words), “A Charm of Hummingbirds” (Fireflies’ Light), and “Wildfire in the Santa Cruz Mountains” (Impermanent Earth). In addition to lyric essays, she enjoys writing about nature using traditional Japanese poetic forms. Her haiku micro-chaps from Origami Poems include Wetlands, Wilderness, Songs of Water, In the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Garden, among others.
As an avid birdwatcher and amateur naturalist, she has written about her wildlife experiences in California and around the world in her poetry books Tidepools (haiga), Wild Birdsong (haibun), and Haiku Birding (haiku). These experiences are also reflected in her poetry-and-music recording project, “The Jazz Bird,” co-created with her brother, the saxophonist and composer Andrew Beal. The album is available from Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify. She shares more of her observations of nature, culture, and the arts in her Birdwatcher’s Diary (https://birdwatchersdiary.wordpress.com) and in her essays on avifauna in literature:
- “Revelation and Transformation: Avian Imagery in Gerard Manly Hopkins’ ‘Pied Beauty,’ ‘The Windover,’ and ‘God’s Grandeur,’” Integrité: A Journal of Faith and Learning 17:2 (Fall 2018), 25-38. https://www.mobap.edu/about-mbu/publications/integrite/
- “Sam’s Song in the Tower: The Significance of “Merry Finches” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings,” Journal of Tolkien Research Vol. 17, Iss. 2 “Tolkien’s Animals,” Art. 4 (Nov 2023).https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol17/iss2/4/
- “Where the Red Fern Grows: An Ecocritical Reading of the Ozarks in Wilson Rawls’ Children’s Novel,” in Cached in the Hills: Critical Essays on Ozarks Literature, ed. John Han and Phillip Howerton (Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, forthcoming).
She enjoys bringing together her love of writing and nature in her instructional design of “Environmental Writing.”
She has designed and taught courses in “Advanced Composition,” “Business Writing,” and “Writing in Education” as well as first-year seminars on J.R.R. Tolkien, which focus on his major creative works, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings. She developed her seminars out of her passion for medieval literature, especially the dream-vision poem called Pearl (which both she and Tolkien have translated). She loves to teach, and at all times, she loves to see her students learn, grow, and succeed.
Per ardua ad astra!
Education:
- BA in English (Sonoma State University)
- MA in English (Sonoma State University)
- PhD in English (University of California, Davis)
- MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing (Bay Path University)