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Where Jill Will Talk Like She Writes
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The White House Project
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JMZ
Jill grew up outside New Haven, Connecticut and dreamed of being a philanthropist until she realized she was at least $5 million short. She settled for studying Chinese at Georgetown University’s School of Language and Linguistics. Jill changed direction yet again when she witnessed her sociology professor, who was a Dominican priest, throw his collar on the ground like a gauntlet before G-d, stomp on it and cigarette-squish it into the linoleum. This demonstration of how a symbol can be significant and insignificant at the same time convinced Jill to study sociology. After Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences admitted her as a transfer student, she continued on and earned a double major in government and sociology.
Being a Jew at a Catholic institution created many opportunities for epiphanies, including one which persuaded Jill to forgo a post-college job in favor of a year in Israel. Her survival on a moshav, also known as a farming community, in a development town and on a kibbutz required that she endure comments both cruel and incomprehensible, like when a young boy asked her why she spoke Hebrew like a retarded person. Jill likes to point out that the speaker was one of several naked trilingual three-year-olds whom she had to bathe daily as part of her work in the nursery.
Jill’s subsequent travels alone through Europe weakened her back but toughened her belief that the world is an ever-shrinking community. She returned to New Haven and found work at the Yale University Office of Development. As she moved quickly from the union ranks to management, she became the first development office staff person to receive and spend departmental money on and actually use a Macintosh computer.
Although Jill loved burying herself in graphic displays of the country’s top ten foundations’ programming priorities, she eventually decided to move to Cleveland, Ohio to pursue a joint degree in law and social work at Case Western Reserve University. She squandered much of her four years trying to convince her colleagues that a dual degree in law and social work had merit, which, to her, seemed obvious.
As Jill grew into her identity as a legal eagle and compassionate clinician, a fellow law school student found her blend of intelligence and empathy to be irresistible. In quick time, he rescued Jill from the not nearly as loving arms of another man and married her post haste.
Back in the world of non-traditional law students, Jill managed to get a nice dinner from the one law firm that interested her, but, like most traditional legal employers, the partners proclaimed that they didn’t know what to do with her. Luckily, Bellefaire JCB, a private nonprofit mental health agency for families and children, created the position of Ombudsman just as Jill completed her studies in 1992. Jill began her eight-year affiliation with Bellefaire shortly after she took and later passed both the Ohio bar and Ohio’s exam for a social worker license.
Over the years, Jill’s figure expanded and contracted with three children before she decided to leave Bellefaire, but not before she became their first Director of Risk Management and later a telecommuting independent consultant. The third child proved to be the kid that broke the mother’s will to keep going to an office outside the house and Jill felt compelled to cease her extra-domestic work.
For about three weeks.
Then, Jill met the woman who would email her the words, “If you ever want to try freelance writing, let me know and we’ll go for coffee.” Within a year after that coffee date, Jill landed her first paid piece (an op-ed in The Plain Dealer), a couple of awards and a nonfiction manuscript that led to four magazine articles.
Over the six years since then, as Jill’s worked to balance the multidisciplinary beast within, her family has shown support in a variety of ways, but mostly by looking through unfolded clothes in baskets of clean laundry, eating off of paper plates even when they’re not having a cookout and letting her take time to write when she’s near a deadline.
If you want to see a more formal version of Jill’s experience and education, please check her portfolio (to be updated). She loves to receive and send mail, so if you still have questions or comments, let her know. Although it might not provide the tactile experience of wood pulp, it delivers the sentiments just as well.
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