JCWatson was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, into the heart of a struggling family of seven children.  She embraced her mother’s fiery Catholicism entering as a young child into a world of saints and mysticism.  At thirteen, she left home for an aspirancy, a convent school for girls wishing to become nuns.  Part of the pain of leaving home was the rending of the maternal bond she had with her three young sisters.  Loss then, and spirituality have formed the tapestry into which she threads her stories.

JC’s childhood mysticism was not her only escape.  She began quite young to write snippets, that later in the convent school, she recognized as poetry.  Encouraged by some national awards, she thought she might have found something she could do well.  Poetry swiftly became the center of her life.  But she also became interested in playwriting and fiction—those genres, for JC, always character driven. 

Not knowing quite what to do with herself after she left the convent in the wake of the curse flung by her Superior, “You are turning your back on God; you’ll never be happy a day in your life!,” JC married at nineteen and promptly gave birth to a house and two children in the far away sprawl of Chicago.  She studied there with Elizabeth Ann Hull and Lisel Mueller.            

A move to California for absolutely no good reason nearly brought her writing life to an abrupt end, but eventually she recovered, received her B.A. in Psychology, then her M.A. in English from San Francisco State where she had gone to study with Frances Mayes.  The Foothill College Writing Conference brought wonderful teachers to her yearly: Jon Logan, Robert Hass, Nancy Packer, William Dickey, William Stafford, Lucille Clifton, Mary Jane Moffett, and Sharon Olds.

These years brought her many awards and publications for her poetry, but her voices, as JC calls them, became more and more insistent.  First it was her own voice from childhood that resulted in a fictionalized memoir titled You Can’t Get There From Here, about a very young girl infatuated with God.  Then JC felt compelled to yield to a woman’s voice, and wrote a novella, The Princess of Golden, a chronicle of an elderly woman who finds herself destitute after her husband dies suddenly.  Voices from short stories called as well, the produce manager of the Flying Horse, the youthful caretaker of a laundromat in Life at the Double Bubble, a man who builds his own airplane while his wife builds a new life in Always a Happy Man, a spinster school teacher who takes off with a doubtful, but lovely young man in Reckless.  Reckless and The Flying Horse have been published.  Her novel Current Wisdom was completed in 2000 and will be published in August, 2005.  Her newest effort, Saint Emmy, completed in 2004 is the story of an adolescent obsessed with Sainthood.  She wonders where she gets her ideas.