Author: Jean Harper

  • save the date

    save the date

    There is now a publication date: November 1, 2017.   That’s when Still Life with Horses will be launched into the world.  You can’t quite pre-order it yet, but you can click on a little link that says someday you can.  And that link is right here: LITTLE LINK So, you don’t really have to save…

  • The other real world

    Eight years ago, although it seems just like yesterday, I was in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  Two weeks of unbroken time to write.  It was wonderful.  Ha! It was brutal and miserable, to be honest.  I was trying to write about the death of my beautiful horse, Buddy, working day after…

  • Amy, Amy, Amy

    My dear poet friend Amy Pickworth wrote a lovely, lovely blurb for my book.  Here it is, as it will appear in print.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, Amy. There is a lot of heart in Still Life with Horses, but this isn’t a soft book.  It’s a love story in the fullest sense, glittering with…

  • another really very nice blurb

    The latest blurb of my book is from Barb Shoup, Executive Director of the Indiana Writers Center, and author of Looking for Jack Kerouac and An American Tune. . Still Life with Horses will make you fall in love…with the strength and silence of horses and learn to believe in the healing power of giving oneself fully to the…

  • horse language

    Yesterday, we took our paint horse Cody to the vet clinic for his routine therapeutic shoeing appointment which periodically involves x-rays to see how he’s progressing.  Cody has “ringbone” which is a horse person’s term for osteoarthritis.  In Cody’s case, as the x-rays revealed yesterday, he has both high and low ringbone, which means the…

  • another blurb

    another blurb

    One of my favorite writers just wrote a lovely blurb for my forthcoming book (Nov. 2017) Still Life with Horses.  Here it is: “I loved this luminous and searingly honest story of love, loss, life and hope; and I loved how a horse served as metaphor for all of this.  The lesson I came away with is…

  • a first blurb

    a first blurb

    The blurbs for Still Life with Horses are coming in.  Here’s the first one:  . Still Life with Horses is impossible to put down. With her razor-sharp prose and devastating honesty, Jean Harper sweeps you through her story of heartbreak and redemption while training your focus on the pain and joy you cannot help but recognize…

  • So, it’s real

    So, it’s real

    My second and next book, that is.  Coming out Fall 2017.  The lovely Howling Bird Press in Minnesota will be bringing  my nonfiction book Still Life with Horses into the world.  So happy to have these wonderful folks to work with, and that my book is going to be real. I think I feel like a…

  • Writing, life, etc.

    Writing, life, etc.

    They said I ought to have a website and so this is it.  You can find information about my writing, past and future, and upcoming writing-related events.  You can find information about me on, handily, the “About” page. More soon…