Jane Stallings

Jane Stallings lived her first twenty years in Indiana. Throughout her years at Riley High School High School in South Bend, and at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie Indiana, she wrote poems and short stories. Her professional life started as a teacher in Long Beach, California. She married Hal Stallings and being adventurers, they lived on a sailboat expecting to earn a living writing stories and sailing the world. The births of four children close-in-ages and a move to Palo Alto delayed story writing. With the close proximity of Stanford University Jane entered their doctoral program studying how children learn, how teachers teach, and the influence of social context. With her doctoral degree, many doors opened. She worked ten years at Stanford Research Institute, three years at Vanderbilt University, four years at University of Houston, and five years as the first woman dean at Texas A&M University. In this last appointment she learned survival skills. The World Bank hired her to consult with teacher educators in Tunisia, Morocco, Gahanna, Brazil, and India.

Retiring to Washington D.C. in 1999 she finally started writing her stories. Here the characters and plot for her first novel, Bridges to Survival, emerged. To learn more about OSS training and methodology, she researched in the CIA library. In the National Art Gallery Library she learned which pieces of art were stolen and remain unfound. Using her father's and uncle's diaries, the book took shape and unfolded.

New challenges came in 2002 with a decision to move to Northern California and grow organic almonds in the beautiful Capay Valley. During this ten-year period work on the novel continued, competing for time with farming and the Esparto School Board. The book entered its final phase in June of 2012 when she moved to Rossmoor in Walnut Creek CA. It was published by Hellgate Press October 1, 2013. A new version has been published by Create Space in August 2014.

Previously she has published research articles, book chapters, books on the effective use of time in classrooms, and studies of effective teacher education. Bridges to Survival is her first novel and gives voice to the experiences of people like her father and uncles and the circumstances in which they found themselves in World War II.