Jane Ganahl has been a journalist, author, event producer, teacher, animal activist and more in the Bay Area for decades. In 1999 she co-founded, with Jack Boulware, the legendary Litquake literary festival, now the largest of its kind on the West Coast. After 23 years, she is beginning the process of retiring! She figures at 70, it’s about damn time.
Jane was a journalist for almost four decades (still is, as she continues to freelance occasionally), most of that time with Hearst newspapers, covering everything from City Hall to rock music to pop culture. During her final five years at the San Francisco Chronicle she penned the “Single Minded” Sunday column about the unmarried life. It served as the backdrop for her memoir, Naked on the Page: the Misadventures of My Unmarried Midlife (Viking), which was developed (unsuccessfully) for a TBS TV series. Of her book, Elle magazine wrote: “Ganahl’s dating escapades are daring and delicious, but also emotionally profound.” Speaking on single life, Jane chaired panels at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, at writers’ conferences, and at marketing seminars, and appeared on numerous TV programs, including “The Today Show,” and innumerable radio shows, from Sirius network to NPR. She is, no surprise, still single.
She is also the editor of the acclaimed 2005 anthology, Single Woman of a Certain Age: 28 Women Writers on the Unmarried Midlife, which was re-released by New World Library in 2009. Her freelance writing has appeared in Spirituality & Health, on Match.com, SecondAct.com and Huffington Post; she has also contributed to VanityFair.com, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, Harp, Parenting, Book, Salon.com and RollingStone.com. She has also contributed essays to four anthologies, which can be found on the books page.
Wearing all these hats has landed her many plum on-stage interviews. She has done Q&As at the Throckmorton Theater, the Commonwealth Club, the Sausalito Women’s Club, the Jewish Community Centers in Palo Alto and San Francisco, the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. Some of her favorite live interviews have been with Chelsea Handler, Pat Monahan of Train, Molly Ringwald, Warren Hellman, Nora Ephron, Amy Tan and more.
She stumbled into teaching (personal essay and women’s memoir) a decade or so ago and discovered she really enjoyed it! She has done classes at the SF Writers Grotto, Book Passage, San Jose State, and Rancho la Puerta. In 2023 she will teach her first class at OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute).
About ten years ago Jane stumbled (she does a lot of stumbling) into rescue work after discovering a colony of cats living under a nearby bridge. In the time since then she has founded a nonprofit (Coastside Feral Care), and rescued close to a hundred homeless cats, finding homes for many of them. This work is the backbone of the middle-grade children’s novel she’s been working on for several years, The Human Kitten and the Colony Under the Bridge, which will make a great Pixar film someday. (Hint hint.) She is finishing what is hopefully the final draft. Her blog is all about the rescue life.
The other earthshaking thing that happened to her in the last decade is that she finally became a grandmother in 2017, when her daughter (a California Deputy Attorney General) finally got off the dime and provided her with one perfect granddaughter—a redhead no less. In her semi-retirement she plans to spend as much time as possible with the little monster, until she starts to annoy her with all the adulation and baking exercises.
