Jane Gilgun

I like to laugh. I like witty people. I'm a professor who writes articles, books, and children's stories on a variety of topics, like violence, shame, resilience, compassion, mindfulness, and spirituality. Besides reading and writing, I enjoy horses, photography, gardening, cooking, boating, nature, and Ireland. I seek to promote fairness and care in relationships and in society. Those values are behind just about everything I write.

Many of my short reads are free. I price cheaply because I want my books and articles to be affordable. See one of my latest book on Girls' Aggression & Complex Trauma: Compassion and Relational Responses. It's free on Smashwords and 99 cents on Amazon.

I'm working on three projects when I'm not with my horses, working in my garden, or doing things at my church. The projects are writing articles and books on violence where I will show that perpetrators think that violence brings about good for themselves, but they don't take the next step and think about what violence means for the people they hurt. This is mindlessness, and the logical response to mindlessness is mindfulness. I hope to show that many of us are mindless, too, because we don't want to know how terrible violence is. We turn away. When we turn away and don't do anything, however small, to push back against violence, we, too, are mindless. We don't think we are mindless. Perpetrators don't either. So, we who want to stop violence must look violence in the eye, read stories about what violence means, and then do something, anything. Stay tuned. I will be writing about this a lot.

My other project is about how children with risks for violent behaviours grow up to be peaceful adults. I have had this project for ten years and have some powerful stories to tell. Stay tuned. I will write about factors that promote children's well-being when they have experienced complex trauma.

My third project is an oral history of St John's where I am interviewing people to understand what St. John's means to parishioners. It's home, it's a place to live and affirm values of love and social justice, it's support in times of stress and loss, a place to develop and express skills and leadership, and a village in which to raise children. St. John's is a progressive Episcopal (Anglican) Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Oral histories are stories people tell in their own way about events in their lives. We don't know what Christian churches will be like in 50 to 100 years. I am compiling a record that historians may find helps them understand how a progressive church developed during the past 60 or so years when church membership was otherwise dropping away.