Dr. Jane Beal is a Continuing Lecturer 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 (Mercy in Action College of Midwifery) and a graduate Certificate in Narrative Medicine (Bay Path University). She has taught at private liberal arts colleges in Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles and served as a midwife in the U.S., Uganda, and the Philippines. At UC Davis, she has taught in English, the University Writing Program, and the First-Year Seminar Program as well as Comparative Literature, Religious Studies, and the UC Washington Center Program in Washington, D.C.. Now she is delighted to be a part of the team working together in the University Writing Center in the College of Undergraduate Education.

Her 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,” through 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 essay collection, Enter the Beauty: Reflections on Nature (in progress), 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, especially haiku, haiga, and haibun. 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 (2009), Wild Birdsong (2011), and Haiku Birding (2020), all published in partnership with the Lulu Company. She celebrates birdwatching in nature 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 is now bringing together her love of nature and writing in her instructional design of new courses for UC Davis students.

In addition to designing courses in her areas of specialization, including "Writing in the Health Professions" and "Environmental Writing," she has designed and taught other upper-division writing courses, such as “Advanced Composition,” “Business Writing,” and “Writing in Education.” She also teaches first-year seminars on "The Mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien" focused Tolkien's novels, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She loves to teach, and at all times, she loves to see her students learn, grow, and succeed.

Dr. Beal (ella/she) is a DEI ally who comes from a multicultural, multilingual family herself. She understands from experience the complexities of intersectional identity, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, class, neurodiversity, and dis/Ability as well as faith. She believes in love, peace, joy, hope, and justice, and so she has become an advocate for patients, students, and other people with trauma and invisible disabilities. Per ardua ad astra!

https://janebeal.wordpress.com

• 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)